Canyon Cop

Despite the 'creative differences' with producer Robert Redford that did not allow director Errol Morris to finish The Dark Wind, the final product did not turn out half bad. Sad that it was relegated to straight to video and did not get a theatrical release.

I liked Lou Diamond Phillips very much as Navajo Reserrvation officer Jim Chee, hero of many books by Tony Hillerman. Being part Cherokee himself, Phillips does have a very good insight into playing Indian characters as in Renegades, Young Guns I & II, and Sioux City.

Here he's the new guy on the force and hasn't made all that good an impression on his new boss, Fred Ward when he drives into a ditch while in hot pursuit of some speeders.

A lot of very strange, seemingly unconnected things are happening that Lou is asked to look into. A decaying body of an Navajo, the vandalism of a windmill, a plane crash in the middle of the reservation, some missing heroin from said crash, and the burglary of the Navajo Trading Post, yet all are connected. And Lou winds up on a suspect list as well.

Location shooting on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations really helps the story along. And there are some nice performances by Gary Farmer as a Hopi Deputy Sheriff, Gary Basaraba and Guy Boyd as a pair of DEA agents, and John Karlen as the trading post owner. Besides Lou and Farmer who are American Indians, a whole lot of the supporting players and small parts are played by same.

It's a good film, despite some filming goofs, with some very nice performances and a good story.

Hey even Alfred Hitchcock had some goofs in some of his classics.

Film adaptations of novels are a mixed bag at best, and The Dark Wind, allegedly based on Tony Hillerman's novel of the same name, isn't one of the best. The screenwriters took several unnecessary liberties with the storyline and characters, including stealing details from other Hillerman novels and dropping Captain Largo entirely in favor of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Fans of Hillerman's novels won't like the portrayal of Jim Chee as an awkward, barely-competent rookie, either.

It's hard to tell whether Lou Diamond Phillips is just failing to portray Jim Chee as he's intended to be, or whether he just didn't bother to read the book and find out. Having replaced Captain Largo's character with Fred Ward as Joe Leaphorn, the script doesn't take advantage of either character's personality, but at least they didn't turn him into one of those generic shouting police captains we see so much of in the movies.

Despite all of this, it's a fairly likeable movie. The film was shot on location in and around the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. The scenery is magnificent, and judging from the names in the cast and crew, the producers took advantage of local talent to fill in some of the smaller roles, which adds a good bit of authenticity. If you close one eye and pretend it has nothing to do with a Tony Hillerman novel, you'll probably enjoy it.

When I first saw The Dark Wind, I was impressed that local people were cast as extras and were speaking the Navajo Language. The subtitles were accurate.

When I heard Chee speak Navajo, it was broken but he's not a native speaker. I was very impressed that he took the time to actually learn to speak the words.

Plenty of films of this vintage suffer from boom mikes in frame and the top and dolly tracks visible at the bottom: this is an artifact born of failed productions. When the camera operator composed the shot, he had been told the film was being made for theatrical release, in a 1:1.85 ratio and so when the boom dipped down slightly, but not enough to make it into the "letterbox" they let it slide. Then, after the film failed on the festival circuit or preview process, etc and was dumped to video no one cared to correct the errors - they were all just trying to dump the project on the market as quickly as possible. Had the final "release print" been made, instead of a video transfer from the camera original (mivees and all) we would have been spared the spectacle of seeing mister boom mike. Most of these types of film were being dumped onto the video market before consumers cared to see letterboxed releases, so the transfer was made full frame.

Here's Agent Johnson's take on it. Something did go wrong. Erroll wasn't big on action/fight scenes, but he was very hip to Navajo humor. Some would call it dry. The producers, (over half way through), opted for an action movie but the script wasn't able to support it on that basis. Mr. Hillerman wrote a mystery. Redford brought in an action director for all the fight scenes and Erroll went to his trailer, and it became a stuntmans' movie. (If the mic is in the shot on a 1-take dangerous stunt you just go ahead and use it, I guess.)There were a slew of re-writes and plot changes for the last several scenes in order not to denigrate a particular Hopi ritual that was supposedly pre-approved. The logical resolution of the plot suffered to say the least. I really enjoyed Erroll being there, and felt bad for him in the latter part of the shoot. Lou hung in like a trooper throughout and I thought gave a nuanced and skillful performance.(I hope to get a chance to hear his version of events someday) I don't think the film solved

the mystery of filming a Tony Hillerman mystery completely but as long as Erroll was in charge it had heart. There were rumors about the lack of distribution being brought on by Carolco's overspending on The Last Action Hero and taking a huge bath. There was no money to advertise Dark Wind or so the gossip was at the time.