Tierra generosa

Tourneur's first Western is yet another of the director's unjustly misunderstood works. What at first appears to be vague or meandering tale is in fact an infinitely personal work with a subtle direction. Of all Tourneur pictures I have seen, "Canyon Passage" is the most endlessly fascinating. Here is a movie rich with pictorial beauty and simplicity, yet every time I watch it, I discover new things. The meaning often shifts and turns, revealing new depths, emotions, insights. You will probably not going to notice its emotional richness if you have just seen it once.

When I first saw "Canyon Passage", I was a little puzzled by it, especially the relationship between Dana Andrews' Logan and Brian Donlevy's George, but successive viewings and Chris Fujiwara's book were extremely helpful. "Canyon Passage" is far from a typical or ordinary Western, even though it concerns with theme of the affirmation of the American Myth or the cohesion of community. Most of the events occur off screen, the dialogue alludes to previous events that took place before the movie starts, the Hoagy Carmichael songs are unforgettable and become more timeless with each viewing. The three separate songs lyricize the narrative much like the timeless unifying song in Tourneur's masterful "Stars in My Crown"(1950).

Please give it another chance. It helps a bit if you revisit it from time to time to appreciate its neverending beauty and subtlety.

I was lucky enough to buy a British DVD copy of this little gem - an excellent transfer. Mostly set in the gold-mining town of Jacksonville, Oregon, it's a Technicolor western with a great story, fascinating characters, excellent acting, lovely music, beautiful art direction, costumes and fabulous outdoor scenery. Right from the opening, you get a good feeling of what it was like in Oregon, how people lived and thought; and we're quickly plunged into their lives. Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward are at their best and most beautiful, photographed by Edward Cronjager. Andrews, a scout, turned trader, is not his usual taciturn hero. There's a lightness to him. Susan Hayward's cheeky independence is very appealing, and she looks particularly fresh and beautiful. Patricia Roc, makes her USA movie debut as Dana Andrew's maidenly sweetheart, and Ward Bond is a really scary villain. His menace from his first appearance is palpable I've never seen him photographed to such unnerving effect. Brian Donlevy plays a likable banker, who has a gambling problem, and is accused of murder. Andrews helps him escape a lynch mob, but I'll give no more away. There's even time for a few songs from local minstrel, Hoagy Carmichael. This is director Jacques Tourneur's first western and it seems to me that he brings a very European eye to the production - the overall colouring is ravishing.

Canyon Passage (1946)

This is a tale with a not so subtle moral message--the man who is modest, just, and hardworking is the better man. And he'll get the sassy girl, the one who is currently attached to the gambling big spender who is the good man's friend and opposite. Dana Andrews plays the virtuous leading man perfectly--he's strong without being a tough or outrageous strong man (like John Wayne) and he's also kind, with a smile the shoots off his sombre face like a flash of light. That's he's popular with women is no surprise, but he's committed most of all to being a successful businessman, and a restless one, roving from outpost to outpost in beautiful Oregon.

His counterpart is the likable but flawed Brian Donlevy, who is really the perfect choice here because he isn't the kind of paradigm we will quite fall in love with. The woman who steals the show is Susan Hayward. And then there is Hoagy Carmichael, playing a role he often plays, the musician wise man who sees everything and understands it before anyone else. It's a great group, supported by hundreds of others (yes--an ambitious film) and directed with a subtle, fast touch by the unsung great, Jacques Tourneur.

So, in short, "Canyon Passage" was surprise and a total pleasure. I couldn't take my eyes off of the photography and the rich color, good pure Technicolor with the redoubtable Natalie Kalmus coordinating. The plot is strong, and Andrews is terrific in scene after scene. Westerns are sometimes difficult to see from the 21st Century without putting it into some history of film context, but this one works as a drama, pure and simple, a drama set out west in the late 1800s. The movie is also unique in being set in the lush mountains near Portland, Oregon. The scenery is gorgeous in the big sense, but every small scene is lush and forested and rainy--almost the opposite of that dry, open, blue sky norma in a "Western" strictly speaking. Interiors in golden lamplight lead to exteriors of dripping greens and blues, or the delicate grays of night.

Even the music is great, especially the lighthearted and clever songs by Carmichael. (The great Frank Skinner handled the rest of the score.) Edward Cronjager is one of the dozen great cinematographers of classic Hollywood as it moved into color, and in this you can see why. It's a complex film, visually, and it never lets up. Especially the night scenes (where the lights and sets could be controlled perfectly) are vivid and have that controlled beauty of great studio (and location) Hollywood. If any of these elements sound good, I wouldn't miss this film.

A bland, generic title disguises a sublime little Western which, despite being one of a string of prestige genre pictures shot in color around the same time – like DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) and California (1946; included in Volume 2 of Universal’s “Classic Western Round-Up” series) – only in recent years did its reputation soar considerably through the championing of renowned admirers like Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Rosenbaum. It is also important in that it marked Jacques Tourneur’s first film in color and for being the first of several Westerns he would go on to helm, the most distinguished of which was the black-and-white STARS IN MY CROWN (1950) with Joel McCrea.

All the familiar Western ingredients are present (love triangles, crooked bankers, bar-room brawls, Indian attacks, impromptu court hearings turning into lynch mobs) but which are literally rendered fresh once more by impeccable handling and production values – the beautiful color photography (courtesy of color lighting expert, Edward Cronjager), skillful music accompaniment (composer Frank Skinner) and a splendid cast who rise up to the occasion of breathing life into their three dimensional characters: Dana Andrews’ restless hero, Brian Donlevy’s likable rogue, Susan Hayward’s feisty heroine, Ward Bond’s mean town-bully, Hoagy Carmichael’s balladeer-cum-cynical observer, etc. Besides providing notable roles also for Lloyd Bridges (as a hot-headed miner), Stanley Ridges (as Hayward’s lawyer father), Onslow Stevens (as a tubercular conman) and Rose Hobart (as Ridges’ enigmatic, exotic wife), screenwriter Ernest Pascal – working from material originally published by noted Western writer Ernest Haycox – adds the nice touch of introducing English émigrés (Patricia Roc and Halliwell Hobbes) into this community, which further aids the film in standing out from the crowd of similar fare.

CANYON PASSAGE is undoubtedly one of the most vivid portrayals of pioneer life in the Old West ever brought to the screen, certainly on a par with John Ford’s DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (1939) but arguably working on a greater level of sophistication: for one thing, the relationships between the characters are more complex in nature than they at first appear (practically every major character is engaged to marry someone but is truly in love with somebody else) and the fact that Tourneur boldly chooses to have some of the film’s major events take place off-screen – Donlevy’s killing of the miner whose money he has been pilfering (which leads to the trial in the bar), Ward Bond’s slaying of the Indian girl (which leads to the climactic Indian attack), Andy Devine’s death at the hands of the Indians, Donlevy’s own ‘execution’ by the villagers, etc. – also hints that we are watching is indeed something quite special.

Director Jacques Tourneur and leading man Dana Andrews went on to collaborate on two more films a decade later – the superlative occult chiller, NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957; which is apparently getting a fully-loaded release on R2 DVD later on this year) and the obscure Cold War thriller, THE FEARMAKERS (1958). One final note about CANYON PASSAGE: multi-talented Hoagy Carmichael composed and sang four songs for the film – one of which, “Ole Buttermilk Sky”, became a hit tune and was, sadly, also the film’s sole Academy Award nomination!

Colorful and vivid, Canyon Passage is crammed full of plots and subplots. It starts out looking like a family movie about pioneers in Oregon, but develops into a complex story with several key characters, the most important being Logan Stewart (Dana Andrews) a mule train outfitter whose business partner is compulsive gambler George Camrose (Brian Donlevy). Set mostly in a mining town, with settlers clearing the adjacent land for farms and wary native Americans watching their territory disappearing, it is a story that weaves together hit rich quick miners, gambling, pioneering, and a significant romance that brews between Camrose's girl Lucy Overmire (Susan Hayward) and Stewart, with Camrose piling on gambling debts and pilfering the till to pay them off. The precarious peace with the Indians is strained by the building of more and more cabins, and when it finally breaks there is a series of ruthless attacks on the settlers that are uncommonly brutal for a film made in 1946. With Ward Bond as mean and sadistic Honey Bragg, and Lloyd Bridges as gambling miner Johnny Steele, and Hoagy Carmichael as minstrel/philosopher Hi Linnet, this rather unknown western by Jacques Tournier, known more for Out of the Past and Cat People is a real departure from the Wayne/Ford/Hawks pictures of this era.