Pierre of the Plains

"Pierre of the Plains" is a B-movie. A B is a picture that was intended as the second and lesser film for a double-feature. And, since it was a lesser movie, they ran from about 55-65 minutes--far shorter than the A-movie. While many low-budget studios specialized in Bs (such as Monogram and Republic), even the big-name studios like Warner, Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM made Bs...and this one is from MGM, so it looks a bit better than normal.

Pierre (John Carroll) is a French-Canadianwho always seems to be getting in to one scrape after another. During the course of this film, he gets in fights, ruins a wedding (as he wants the girl for himself), assists a guy with a jail break and gambles. While there is kind of a plot...it's mostly Pierre swaggering about and being a bit of a jerk-face. In fact, this makes the movie a bit tough to take...as he's not particularly likable. Not an awful B- movie...but one with a strange story and a weird anti-hero.

Well, I just finished watching this movie, and while on the entertainment scale it's nothing but pure C-grade matinée pulp, it certainly was educational. As a Canadian kid growing up in the 1960s I spent quite a bit of time south of the border, and was always baffled by the bizarre perceptions that so many Americans had of their northern neighbours at that time. It's much less of a mystery now . . . the picture of life in contemporary Canada painted by Pierre of the Plains must truly one of the most stunning examples of Hollywood's willingness to throw any semblance of reality out the window in favor of a (perhaps) interesting story.

It's 1942 and Canada is still chock-a-block with buckskin-clad, singing French trappers ambling through the forests on horseback, American bootleggers trading furs for whiskey with the Injuns. Log cabins and clapboard shacks are still the architectural order of the day. The police are still relegated to upholding the law on plodding steeds -- though nearly everyone else seems to have graduated to the latest sedan or roadster. And the nearest bastions of culture, business and civilized society in general are yet thousands of miles away in Montreal. Mon dieu.

Much of the inspiration for the insipid Duddley Do-Right franchise seems to have derived directly from this movie . . . Many of the characters and settings could quite easily have been pulled either intact or as amalgams from Pierre of the Plains, and the Inspector Fenwick of Jay Ward's animated series appears to be virtually a straight copy of Frederick Worlock's portrayal.

This film really should have been a compulsory part of the curriculum of Canadian schools in the '60s and '70s. Even now, it would be instructive for any student of sociology, cultural anthropology or geopolitics interested in seeing firsthand how Canada's world image has come to be shaped more by external forces than internal. (While there are, of course, dozens of other very inaccurate American portrayals of Canada captured on celluloid, they all pale in comparison to this one.)

Despite its inanity, I give this movie three stars just for the pure kitsch value and for giving me and excuse to make a bowl of popcorn and curl up in front of the TV when I should have been preparing for a business meeting. Unlike commentator glen_esq, I cannot give a bonus star for John Carroll's rendition of "Saska-TCHEE-WUN" because notwithstanding the handicap of a born-and-bred Louisiana accent, it surely could not have been THAT hard for him to learn to pronounce the name of the province properly.

A curiously named movie, with no plains photographed at any time, all the movie locations are forests and mountains. "Francois of the Forest" or "Michel of the Mountains" might have been more appropriate, but whatever. Perhaps John Carroll is at least thinking of plains as he sings about his love for Saskatchewan at film's beginning and end.

The movie's complete nonsense, no surprise there really. Hollywood invents the "deputy" Mountie, a civilian lawman allowed to carry a six gun and shoot at people. This bit of hokum provides us with a heavy for the story. And then there is a fur trader who carries a six gun and tries to kill people, while making a living selling fire water to Indians. Pathetic script ideas for a movie set in 1940's Canada.

John Carroll is entertaining in the traditional American playing a French Canadian sort of way, with his "eh! babee" accent.

The movie's deserving of a one star rating, but gets a bonus star from me for providing Charles Stevens the opportunity to give us his, ahem, memorable performance as Crying Loon.

I watched this the other day on TCM and was VERY pleasantly surprised. The main character "Pierre" is a likable rouge played to perfection by John Carroll. He's tough, he's fair, and his good-natured. This was the kind of character I wish had shown up in a series of films. Yeah, as someone else pointed out, this is Hollywood's interpretation of Canada. Still who cares, you could say the same about most American Westerns too, lots of action and little fact. I was impressed by the witty dialog and quirky characters in this. And it was not always predictable either, for instance I was surprised at the way Pierre handled being cheated at cards. I loved this film and consider it a little gem. At the end I found myself feeling good and thinking, "Yep, they just don't make um like that anymore".