Up River

This is a low budget Canadian rough hewn western set in the early 20th century.

Up River aims to be Jeremiah Johnson without any depth of story or subtext. Star Morgan Stevens is even made to look a lot like Robert Redford.

Steven plays Jacob Taylor, a young greenhorn who has travelled up the wilderness to stake his claim for land as a homesteader. He falls foul of a local land baron who is rounding up all the land for himself by fair means or foul.

Taylor is aided by a veteran hunter and trader Bagshaw, who also lumbers Taylor with a native woman to teach her the ways of the city. It just that Taylor falls for her and then loses her when the land baron's goons burn his dwelling down.

Taylor and Bagshaw then go looking for revenge.

Up River is very much an obscure movie. It is plain meat and potatoes with a very long introduction. It could easily had been a television movie. You might as well be better off watching Dances with Wolves, Jeremiah Johnson or The Revenant or even the Canadian western The Grey Fox.

This movie shows all the signs of a low budget and is unremarkable but for one fact: it has an early - indeed the first - cameo of Robert Drapeau. His brief, riveting performance lends a much-needed credibility to the slow plotting and bad editing throughout the rest of the movie.

...it's just very ordinary. That's the main problem with UP RIVER, a low rent western that tells a saga of love, revenge, and adventure. It has a very low rating on this site purely because it's pretty much a forgotten movie, at least until I saw it playing on an obscure TV channel in the middle of the night.

UP RIVER has almost a Jack London vibe going on in the early scenes of a prospector trying to make it big in the wilds. Unfortunately he has a run in with the boss of a criminal gang and before long is beaten up and left for dead. The guy refuses to be scared off and sets himself up in business, but more trouble is to follow.

There isn't really anything here we've not seen done elsewhere, but the thrills and spills of UP RIVER are adequate. There's a set-piece involving a burning building which is handled very well in a stark way, I thought. This is the one and only directing credit in the career of Carl Kitt, so perhaps he was out of his depth, but I was expecting worse. Star Morgan Stevens got a job on THE WALTONS out of this, and old-time actor Jeff Corey (CONAN THE DESTROYER) has a supporting role.

The government have offered folks with a pioneering spirit an opportunity to move into the Canadian wilderness and try to make a go of things. City boy "Jacob" (Morgan Stevens) decides to do just that, but saving for the timely intervention of "Bagshaw" (Jeff Corey) on the boat, he might never have made it there alive. He is most definitely not welcome - and local kingpin "Keeler" (Dale Wilson) and his thuggish henchman "Mungal" (John Curtis) make that all too painfully clear. Undaunted, and soon slightly loved-up, he takes a stand and builds a cabin. Will they be left in peace or is a showdown an inevitability? Stevens is easy enough on the eye, and Corey comes across quite well as the curmudgeonly but decent trapper, but the story itself is all a bit weak and feeble and though the cinematography and scenery are quite effective at illustrating the remoteness of this beautiful environment, the acting and writing are the stuff of a college project. Looks nice, but that's about it.