Corinne Calvet | Through the Shattered Lens

James Stewart is one of the great movie stars of all-time. His work with Frank Capra (MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE) and Alfred Hitchcock (REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO) is legendary. In my household, Stewart’s work with director Anthony Mann is celebrated just as much as those other classics. Mann and Stewart made five classic westerns, beginning with WINCHESTER ‘73 in 1950 and ending in 1955 with THE MAN FROM LARAMIE. I own them all on DVD and watch them quite often. It’s very cold in Arkansas today, so I decided to write about the Yukon-set THE FAR COUNTRY, from 1954.

Jeff Webster (James Stewart) and his crusty ol’ coot of a partner Ben Tatem (Walter Brennan) head North towards Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory, with a herd of cattle. The two men encounter a variety of problems along the way, with the biggest being the corrupt Judge Gannon (John McIntire) of Skagway, Alaska. When Jeff finds himself in front of the judge for killing two cowhands who tried to steal his herd, Gannon acquits him on the charges but decides to keep his herd as payment for the court fees. With their cattle taken away from them, Jeff and Ben sign up to help business lady Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman) take supplies to Dawson City, where she plans to set up shop. After their first day on the trip, Jeff and Ben double back to Skagway and re-take their herd and take off towards Dawson as fast as they can go, with Gannon and his men in hot pursuit. They’re able to make it into Canada, so Gannon and his goons turn back, determined to hang the men if they ever come back through Skagway.

So Jeff and Ben make it to Dawson City with their cattle where they sell them off for $2 per pound to Ronda. Suddenly flush with cash, the two partners buy a gold claim and proceed to find some nice golden nuggets! When they head back into town, they find that Judge Gannon has now come to Dawson City and is in partnership with Ronda. Of course, that bastard immediately starts cheating the miners out of their claims, this time with gunman Madden (Robert J. Wilke) by his side, enforcing his corrupt actions with lead. Jeff and Ben decide they’re going to sneak out of town with their loot, but Gannon finds out about it and sends his men to stop them. Ben is killed in the process and Jeff is seriously injured. Jeff has tried his best up to this point to not get involved with the mess in Dawson City, but with his best friend now dead, he decides it’s time for Judge Gannon and his thugs to be stopped.

James Stewart is just so good as Jeff Webster. The best thing about his work with Mann is how each of the movies would give him a meaty role that capitalized on his basic decency, while simultaneously making him a more complex, layered man, miles away from the likes of Mr. Smith or George Bailey. In THE FAR COUNTRY, he’s as tough as nails, but he really doesn’t want to get involved with the people around him. It takes the death of his best friend for him to finally commit to helping them stand up against the bad guys. Stewart’s work here, and in the other Mann westerns, ranks with his very best.

The remainder of the cast is uniformly excellent. Three time Oscar winner Walter Brennan is always a welcome presence in a movie I’m watching. While he’d pretty much settled into the “old coot” role that would come to personify the later part of his career, his character is a valuable conscience for Stewart a couple of times in the story. I thought that John McIntire and Ruth Roman really stood out in their respective roles as the corrupt Judge Gannon and the stubbornly, independent businesswoman Ronda Castle. Both give excellent performances. The cast is rounded out with a who’s who of character actors like Jay C. Flippen, Harry Morgan, Robert J. Wilke, Royal Dano, and Jack Elam. It’s always nice seeing these familiar faces pop up in these old westerns.

I love it when movies are filmed on location in beautiful places. THE FAR COUNTRY was filmed at the Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada, which added another interesting element to the film. The final thing I want to say about the film is that the screenplay for THE FAR COUNTRY was written by Borden Chase, who had penned RED RIVER a few years earlier. Not only would Chase write this movie, he would also write the screenplays for WINCHESTER ‘73 and BEND OF THE RIVER, both westerns that paired Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart. Chase was an excellent writer of western material, and his strong work in this group of films is crucial to their enduring success.

Overall, I confidently recommend THE FAR COUNTRY to any person who enjoys westerns or Jimmy Stewart. I might rank THE NAKED SPUR and THE MAN FROM LARAMIE slightly above this one in the Mann / Stewart westerns, but the truth is that you can’t go wrong with any of them.

I’m sharing the trailer for THE FAR COUNTRY below:

(Lisa is currently in the process of cleaning out her DVR! It’s going to take a while. She recorded this 1962 literary adaptation off of FXM on January 30th!)

Hemingway’s Adventures Of A Young Man is one of those films that you just know was made specifically to win Oscars. It’s a big prestige production, complete with a historical setting, an epic scope and big, all-star cast. That most of those stars appear in relatively small roles was undoubtedly meant to evidence of the film’s importance.

“Look!” the film seems to shout at times, “This is such an important film that even Paul Newman was willing to stop by for a day’s work!”

The film is based on ten short stories by Ernest Hemingway and, loosely, A Farewell to Arms. The stories all dealt with the early life of Nick Adams, who was a literary stand-in for Hemingway. Since the Nick Adams stories were autobiographical (and, for that matter, so was A Farewell to Arms), the film can also be viewed as biopic. Richard Beymer (who, a year earlier, had starred in West Side Story and who is currently playing Ben Horne on Twin Peaks) may be playing Nick Adams but the film leaves little doubt that he was actually meant to be playing Ernest Hemingway.

The film opens with Nick hunting with his father, Dr. Harold Adams (Arthur Kennedy). He is present when his father travels to an Indian camp and helps to deliver a baby. He respects his father but Nick wants to see the world and the film follows him as he explores America, working odd jobs and meeting colorful characters along the way. Paul Newman shows up as a punch-drunk boxer and proceeds to overact to such an extent that he reminded me of Eric Roberts appearing in a Lifetime film. Nick meets rich men, poor men, and everything in between. He works as a journalist. He works as a porter. Eventually, when World War I breaks out, Nick enlists in the Italian army and the film turns into the 100th adaptation of A Farewell to Arms.

And really, I think it would have been an enjoyable film if it had been directed by someone like Otto Preminger, George Stevens, or maybe even Elia Kazan. These are directors who would have embraced both the pulpy potential of the Nick Adams stories and the soapy melodrama of the war scenes. A showman like Preminger would have had no fear of going totally and completely over the top and that’s the approach that this material needed. Instead, Hemingway’s Adventures Of A Young Man was directed, in a painfully earnest style, by Martin Ritt. Ritt tries to imitate Hemingway’s famously understated style with his understated direction but, cinematically, it’s just not very interesting. Ritt portrays everything very seriously and very literally and, in the end, his direction is more than a little dull.

Sadly, the same can be said for Richard Beymer’s performance in the lead role. Beymer comes across as being the nice guy who everyone says you should marry because he’ll be able to get a good and stable job and he’ll probably never go to jail. Two months ago, when I watched and reviewed Twin Peaks, I really loved Beymer’s performance as Ben Horne. He just seemed to be having so much fun being bad. Unfortunately, in Hemingway’s Adventures Of A Young Man, he never seemed to be having any fun at all. No wonder he temporarily put his film career on hold so that he could fully devote himself to working as a civil rights activist.

In the end, this is a movie that’s a lot more fun to look at than to actually watch. Visually, the film is frequently quite pretty in an early 1960s prestige movie so sort of way. And there are some good performances. Eli Wallach, Ricardo Montalban, Susan Strasberg, Arthur Kennedy — there’s a whole host of performers doing memorable supporting work. Unfortunately, even with all that in mind, this well-intentioned film largely falls flat.