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Everybody's got somebody
Generally speaking, I feel I have less fannish instinct than most of my peers and even my family, and then I see something like Andrew Marton's The Wild North (1952). All signs pointed to the kind of rugged wilderness adventure whose attractive scenery and undemanding narrative could be appreciated with the brain switched mostly to off. By the top of the third act, I was more emotionally invested than in most straight romances of the era and the serious hurt/comfort hadn't even kicked in.
The north of the title is the historically drawn setting of the North-West Territories of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically a remote stretch of semi-settled land above the Peace River where the winters are good for mink and marten but bad for men. It is the home ground of Jules Vincent (Stewart Granger), a gregarious silver fox of a trapper who trusts wild beasts and whiteout conditions far more than laws, towns, and "ribbon clerks," especially after a fatal mishap on the river leaves him wanted for murder. Technically it's within the jurisdiction of Constable Pedley of the North-West Mounted Police (Wendell Corey), although somewhat out of the scope of his woodcraft, which doesn't stop him from setting out in the teeth of winter to bring the fugitive trapper in. Perhaps it's fool's luck that the weather holds as far as the traplines; he is warned amiably, dangerously that turning straight around to McQuarrie will take weeks instead of days. "I made it here," he answers as if the matter's settled, "we'll make it back." The rest of the film is everything that happens on the way to finding out if that's true.
With the greatest of affection for this movie, although it goes to some trouble to establish its premise before plunging full bore into the handcuffs, kittens, and PTSD, the truth is that it doesn't need a plot. Its proper genre is enemies to lovers; it needs a pair of well-matched leads and room for their combative chemistry to bloom and a sufficiency of incident to clarify their feelings toward one another, which is in fact how the screenplay by Marton and Frank Fenton is structured. It snaps almost audibly into focus the second the two men share the screen. Granger should never have been directed to play his part with a boisterous French-Canadian accent—at his most successful he recalls Laurence Olivier in 49th Parallel (1941)—but he has the joie de vivre without strain, striding tall and weather-bronzed into town after six months in the wild, as charming and amoral as a trickster. He rolls up to the saloon with a rescue kitten tucked inside his shirt as unselfconsciously as he offers a favor without strings to a Métis singer (Cyd Charisse) and takes on a drunken patron to defend her. More than one character likens him to a fox, a deer, a timber wolf. He admits modestly, "I'm almost an animal myself." Formally charged with the murder of Max Brody, he invites his arresting officer to a game of checkers and a gracious warning: "If I hadn't killed him, he'd have gotten me killed and the girl with me . . . You think you're the law in a red coat, eh? To me you're just a man come to get me killed." They drink coffee, play another game, set out by snow-swirling dawn; the first night they are alone on the trail, he tries to strangle Pedley. Viewers at this juncture may not feel terribly perturbed. The Mountie was not introduced sympathetically, repossessing a string of stolen horses from an Ojibwe village with all the casual insensitivity of legal injustice, an unattractive and incongruous figure in his paramilitary uniform which makes him look like a tin soldier dropped down among real leaves and white water. He has human substance, we see it in his stiff, civil interviews with McQuarrie's shopkeeper and the "Indian girl" he didn't expect to find making a calico-curtained home out of his quarry's cabin, his sergeant's treatment of him like a slacker when he's overdue for leave, but so long as he pursues his duty as if there's no difference between horses and men, he embodies the law at its most implacable and useless, his demonstrable intelligence locked down to the limits of his orders: "If you have reasons, there are men who'll listen to you. That's not my job." He shows no more emotion when he handcuffs Jules than when he loses to him at checkers. The night he has to fight his bound and silently laughing prisoner off his throat, we get a glimpse of a different Pedley, a frightened man with his brown hair ruffled wild, the glacial blue of his eyes calculating, uncertain. Earlier that day, Jules grinned at him as the snow whipped around them, the weather he had insisted on not waiting out: "It will break. Not before you do."
Foresight or psych-out, the remark hangs over their journey with far more intrigue than the more obvious questions of escape or betrayal as the dynamic between the two men crystallizes ironically: whatever powers of the Crown he may represent, in the cold, wild privacy of the backlands that burns off illusions as fast as body heat, Pedley has no more authority than the bracelets on his prisoner and Jules knows it as well as he does. It's never stretched as far as slapstick, but it seems self-evident that the constable is more or less bluffing his way back to civilization. The blizzard they mush into might as well drift them in tiny leaflets reading told you so. Seven miles out on the first day, he puts the dogsled through the ice of a snow-flattened lake and has to make camp to dry out long before nightfall, unwrapping his soaked moccasins and dutifully noting the incident in his logbook under his prisoner's amused, waiting eye. Teased about his nerves by the man who made a serious effort to murder him, he holds his own with a sarcasm that passes for stoicism until his second or third night lying awake with the rifle and both axes on his side of the fire, by which time he's zoning out by day and Jules has something new to razz him about. Such are the ambiguities of their relationship that we can't even tell whether Pedley really has gotten them both farblondjet in the boreal forest or whether Jules is genially gaslighting him about his grasp of the terrain. And yet The Wild North does not feel like a psychological thriller, any more than a screwball comedy just because its leads can hardly stop arguing long enough to kiss; actually, a screwball comedy would be right at home to the script's sly implication that being nettled, rattled, and partly made a fool of isn't just a lawman's deserts, but the best thing for him. Certainly in McQuarrie he showed few signs of the dry sense of humor that meets a swagger of doomsaying from Jules with self-deprecating reproach, "You shouldn't talk like that. You'll scare me to death," or slides a zinger of his own past the Code as they debate their situation: "Life? You're too full of it." Indeed, Jules has not just the physical presence to make the long-legged Mountie look like, in the useful phrase of Gemma Files, a bossy little nutter, but the absurd +10 charisma to carry off provocations like never once addressing the other man by name, referring to him with relentless nonchalance as "bébé." It's outrageous, patronizing and flirtatious, and as such strikes exactly the right note for their opening antagonism that transmutes without fanfare into an odd, barbed camaraderie. "Guess I'm the only one who cares how you feel," Jules sighs one night with theatrical commiseration, interesting himself in his catlike, obstructive way in whatever task the officer is attempting to complete. To our delight as well as the trapper's, Pedley responds with what the literature of the time might call a queer twist of a smile: "Everybody's got somebody." Their affinity does not negate the threat each poses to the other, the weird eddies of control and vulnerability throughout their interactions. If anything, it boosts the emotional density; when a pair of opportunistic strangers assess the Mountie as the disposable one of the party, the fact that we are almost confident which way Jules will jump when invited to join them doesn't make it any less brazen of Pedley to offer himself up as a dare. The trapper can still raise the stakes, reminding gracefully, "After all, I'm not taking you back, you're taking me, eh?" There's a dissertation in the deadpan of Pedley's "Don't let me forget."
As much fun as it is to watch these characters skirmish appreciatively with one another against the blue-and-white sweeps of snow and sky, The Wild North has two curveballs to pitch at its protagonists and they elevate the narrative from standard operating procedures of pulp fiction to rather vortical levels of id. The third act of this movie resembles nothing so much as a Whumptober bingo card. Even rating the proceedings as highly on the scale of mid-century male romance as I was doing already, I did not see any of it coming.
In my defense, the entire point of the bear trap is that under deep-drifted snow, no one sees it till it snaps. It is not foreshadowed by anything; Pedley is returning from a bitter facing-up—as he has been refusing to admit to Jules, holding out an ever less likely hope that he was just second-guessing himself, he's lost—when the heavy iron jaws close on his leg, bringing him down in his tracks and worse than the approach of the wolf which forces him to struggle to the limit of the chain for his rifle is the sight of Jules standing over him, clicking his tongue as if the Mountie has merely managed to embarrass himself again, not put himself totally into his prisoner's power. He can point the rifle at Jules, but Jules has merely to display his bound hands with regret. "Caught in my own handcuffs," Pedley mutters with the familiar wryness and then seriously, as he reaches at last for the key to unlock them, "It took luck, Jules. Remember that." For a moment, we have no choice but to believe that the trapper, the cuffs still glittering from one wrist as he pulls the rifle like a whiplash from his former captor's hands, really will take the sled dogs and the remaining supplies and abandon the helpless man. Some kind of blow-up has been building between them, more than a shortage of salt and coffee. After the constable's near-miss with murder, Jules boasted, "Don't worry, bébé. That's a job I'm keeping specially for myself." That morning, Pedley accused him of trying. "I could've dumped you anywhere and written in that little book of mine that you think is so funny that you made a break for it and got away. Then I'd have to become a man like you—or was it an animal you said you were? Before I turn into that, I'll let this country take me." Now it might: exposure, starvation, predators. It would have been easy at the start of their journey when he was nothing to Jules but a cop come to fetch him to a death sentence, even conceivable that Jules could have given him the slip and a fighting chance to survive on his own. Leaving him chained in the snowfields is an execution. Even the men who tried to kill them were offered better odds. Jules hauls the dogs to a stop, and studies Pedley pinned in the snow at his feet, and with the faintest of smiles stoops to spring him from the trap. That night marks their first real moment of intimacy, not the professional courtesy of playing checkers or even their complicated banter, but the crackle of firelight as Jules finishes bandaging his companion's leg and Pedley with the tight angles of his face as open as we have ever seen them quietly dismisses any notion of a home of his own and envies, without meanness, the haven of cat and girl that Jules has waiting for him in McQuarrie. It is not something he could have admitted even a night ago without drawing some mocking response from Jules, but the time for head games is past. It was one thing to rag the Mountie remorselessly when there were handcuffs and a service revolver between them, but now Jules has his freedom and Pedley is wounded, not critically, but disablingly, and Jules' malicious compliance in letting the less experienced man chase his own tail through the mountains has left them farther from people and shorter on provisions than the cold equations of the north woods have much tolerance for: he may have gotten Pedley killed after all. A night ago, he wouldn't have asked so diffidently, as if the other man's opinion really mattered, "You think I wanted to kill that man? You think I'm like that?" It's a sweet, definite shift, symbolized by the handcuffs given a farewell kiss by Jules and tucked back inside Pedley's coat. It is officially a shared joke that the Mountie who at this moment couldn't arm-wrestle a french fry for Canada still maintains he's bringing in his man.
In the rest of my defense, I read the normal amount of Jack London and I was not prepared for Chekhov's wolf attack. It is true that as they set out originally, Jules baited the Mountie about the possibility, and a gathering number of wolves have been pacing them ever more closely over the last few days, but the film has scarcely settled into its new status quo before the two men are shoulder to shoulder by different firelight as the dogs whine and yelp in agitated chorus and their leaner, wilder kindred prowl the circle of rocks and snow. "A pack," Jules identifies them, "like you and me. We're finally together, you and me . . . Makes it a little bit better, eh?" Gripping his rifle as tightly as a talisman as the trapper hefts his axes beside him, Pedley agrees, "Makes it better." It's brutal. The cinematography by the legendary Robert Surtees has heretofore favored wide takes in open air, but now it's all close, red, fire-fragmented work, blade-chunks and rifle-cracks and barks and snarls and suddenly a man's voice screaming, terror-shaken by the throat. When it's over, half the dog team is dead, Jules looks worn and torn, and Pedley has to be peeled like a rag of fur off the bloodstained snow. He doesn't answer to his partner's jubilant "We did it, bébé! We did it, you and me." He doesn't react to the smoke of his own flesh as Jules, careful, troubled, cauterizes the terrible wound at his collarbone. He stares a thousand yards and breathes and that's the most that can be said for him. As Jules tauntingly prophesied and can take no pleasure in now, Pedley broke. It is a bitter, shocking gut-punch, especially as the conclusion to a scene as breathless as the wolf attack. Like Jules, we were misled by the constable's stubbornness, his slowly admirable ability to forge on damn-fool despite his glaring disadvantages; he seemed so resilient, as if he could be thwarted, scared, humiliated, but not fazed. He sways in the grey bluster of snow-light, bareheaded as a corpse, too far gone even to rise to the bait of the deliberate, derisory scrawl in his logbook that Jules leaves to smolder in the ashes of their fire: Pedley blanked out and I'm bringing him home like a lost papoose – Vincent. All at once we are in a different kind of adventure, where instead of bantering with a beloved adversary as far as the fringes of civilization, Jules is shepherding a shell-shocked mess to safety as fast as he can keep them both pointed in the right direction, which will turn out to require the exquisite reversal of handcuffing the man who arrested him to the sled to keep him from wandering off in his traumatized state and freezing to death. "You want to go in like this?" the trapper shouts on the ridge above McQuarrie, trying to shake back to sanity the listless, nerveless bundle that used to be an officer of the NWMP. "You want people to talk about it the rest of their lives? How the mouse brought back the cat?" It produces no more response than his earlier, anxious tenderness or violence. There's nothing for it but to stagger down the slope and take Pedley home.
Like any number of narratives with a surface of supercharged id, The Wild North has some intelligent, not overly telegraphed things going on in its depths. Never mind if the mechanics are as macho as wolves and blizzards, the engine of the story is the act of becoming human, in Pedley's case by vulnerability, in Jules' by compassion—or becoming visible as human, to oneself as well as to others. "It was my fault," Jules explains his responsibility for the mute, strange man now sleeping in their bed, "I kept him out too long," before clarifying to the black-braided girl who has moved into his life as naturally as a ginger kitten that it was not guilt, but the necessity of taking care of another person that gave him the strength to return: "It was having to bring him in. It was because I said I would that did it. That's all." We did not doubt his careless, jovial kindness toward her in the saloon or the dog-chased stray in the street, but nothing in it forecast the kind of commitment he's describing, stronger than words like loyalty or love or come on, bébé. Perhaps we should have detected the fragility in Pedley sooner, like the very first night he was offered the game of checkers with a cajoling "Think you could take white and win?" and responded at once, "No, not a chance." It sounded then like the policeman refusing to play by his prisoner's rules, even for as little as a literal game; in hindsight it sounds much more in line with his cynical image of himself as just that much of a loser, sufficient to chill even the larger-than-life confidence of Jules Vincent. I had never taken much note of Corey except in The Big Knife (1955) where his dry manner is terrifying because of the void of human indifference it doesn't bother to conceal, but here I kept noticing what a shape-changer he is for all his apparent stoneface. He looks stolid and petty in his scarlet tunic, but in furs and shirtsleeves he can appear boyish, defenseless. So much of his growing sympathy to the audience happens in his face, professionally inexpressive to begin with, accumulating nerves and humor and stress and trust until it is actually quite frightening that his trauma wipes it so clean, a slack mask instead of a protective visor, and then knowing that his face was set in those dry lines by loneliness and disappointment and self-mockery, it is more poignant than even the film may have bargained for that Pedley shows such candid, uncomplicated happiness playing with the kitten in Jules' cabin. He cradles it in his arms as Jules tries valiantly, futilely to coax or jolt him out of his fugue, carefully pours it a saucer of milk and strokes its ears as it drinks, walled off from his memories and his sarcastic, rightful self and at some weird kind of peace. It is one of the reasons I have such difficulty believing the Hollywood ending of the film.
To be more precise, I can believe the more formally incredible elements of the ending, since they don't lose the emotional plot. Finally concluding that "it took a lot to jam him up like that—it will take something big to pry him loose again," Jules with flawless pulp-psych sets out to stage another near-death experience by shooting the same rapids with Pedley in the canoe that led to the death of Max Brody. It's a stupendous set piece, full of roaring falls and sun-crashed foam and process shots as jaw-dropping as Corryvreckan and it doesn't just end with Pedley coming out of his daze with an almost comic expression of horror and annoyance at Jules beaming at him from the midst of their lethal surroundings, it fulfills the romance's promise of mutual rescue when the canoe capsizes on a boulder and Pedley drags Jules up out of the river's scouring cauldron and hauls him the last few rocks to shore where the two of them collapse side by side, Pedley barely letting go his grip on the scruff of the other man's shirt long enough to pat him a couple of times on the back and then hang on to him again, responding to Jules' "Thanks, bébé" with his own drowned rat's grin, "Thanks to you." At the trial which follows, his testimony from personal experience of the rapids exonerates Jules of the moment when the lurch of the water turned a warning shot into manslaughter, a win-win which permits the Mountie to retain the professional credit of bringing his man in while employing his poker face in the service of righteous perjury. Outside the hotel, it is a lovely, affectionate touch for Jules to entrust him with the kitten with which he formed such an essential connection and identify it as a symbol of the home he should carry with him and it is equally adorable that Pedley names it "Bébé," the teasing nickname turned to a term of endearment that he recognized as his own even when he remembered nothing else of himself and I cannot believe that the film leaves him there on the dock waving goodbye to Jules and the girl even with Bébé riding his shoulder, for God's sake take him with you, he's been living in your cabin, you just have a Mountie now. Or maybe he quits the force, I don't care so long as the Production Code does not attempt to convince me that these two men are not perma-bonded to one another after the kind of Winterreise that would leave a het couple in a fadeout clinch or at least, African Queen-style, in the same damned frame. It is a minimal grace that the film does not try too hard to substitute Charisse. Her character is never even named, which gives some indication of her ranking in the story; I conclude she exists to be homosocially triangulated around, although her scenes with Granger in the first act serve to establish his all-comers chemistry, as mutually clear-cut with the girl as his relations with Pedley are a spikier slow burn. Perhaps the film OT3s them, obviously in a sort of V. Just reassure me he's still sleeping at the cabin even when he's in his right mind.
Lest the viewer doubt the veracity of their slash goggles, Marton would go on record describing The Wild North as a love story between two men, a fact which he appreciated his actors grasping: in other words, suck it, Joseph Breen. I would believe it if you told me it had been adapted from an illustration in Man's Life, but it was technically inspired by an episode in the life of the historical Albert Pedley, who had presumably agreed not to sue MGM. I wish the version streaming on the Criterion Channel were not so atypically beat-up—the famous Ansco Color looks fine if a little televised, but the overall picture looks like it was duped off someone's VCR, including cigarette burns and fractionally desynched sound. The location shooting deserves better, even if I can't evaluate how convincingly Idaho stands in for northern proto-Alberta. The overall Canadian-ness of the production may be questionable in the extreme, but what is not at all in question is the film's friendliness to missing scenes, a consideration not usually of paramount importance with me and yet here we are. A pair of handcuffs is introduced with a matter-of-fact "Slip into these." One of the heroes has an emotional support cat. Did I remember to mention the avalanche? This pack brought to you by my better backers at Patreon.
The north of the title is the historically drawn setting of the North-West Territories of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically a remote stretch of semi-settled land above the Peace River where the winters are good for mink and marten but bad for men. It is the home ground of Jules Vincent (Stewart Granger), a gregarious silver fox of a trapper who trusts wild beasts and whiteout conditions far more than laws, towns, and "ribbon clerks," especially after a fatal mishap on the river leaves him wanted for murder. Technically it's within the jurisdiction of Constable Pedley of the North-West Mounted Police (Wendell Corey), although somewhat out of the scope of his woodcraft, which doesn't stop him from setting out in the teeth of winter to bring the fugitive trapper in. Perhaps it's fool's luck that the weather holds as far as the traplines; he is warned amiably, dangerously that turning straight around to McQuarrie will take weeks instead of days. "I made it here," he answers as if the matter's settled, "we'll make it back." The rest of the film is everything that happens on the way to finding out if that's true.
With the greatest of affection for this movie, although it goes to some trouble to establish its premise before plunging full bore into the handcuffs, kittens, and PTSD, the truth is that it doesn't need a plot. Its proper genre is enemies to lovers; it needs a pair of well-matched leads and room for their combative chemistry to bloom and a sufficiency of incident to clarify their feelings toward one another, which is in fact how the screenplay by Marton and Frank Fenton is structured. It snaps almost audibly into focus the second the two men share the screen. Granger should never have been directed to play his part with a boisterous French-Canadian accent—at his most successful he recalls Laurence Olivier in 49th Parallel (1941)—but he has the joie de vivre without strain, striding tall and weather-bronzed into town after six months in the wild, as charming and amoral as a trickster. He rolls up to the saloon with a rescue kitten tucked inside his shirt as unselfconsciously as he offers a favor without strings to a Métis singer (Cyd Charisse) and takes on a drunken patron to defend her. More than one character likens him to a fox, a deer, a timber wolf. He admits modestly, "I'm almost an animal myself." Formally charged with the murder of Max Brody, he invites his arresting officer to a game of checkers and a gracious warning: "If I hadn't killed him, he'd have gotten me killed and the girl with me . . . You think you're the law in a red coat, eh? To me you're just a man come to get me killed." They drink coffee, play another game, set out by snow-swirling dawn; the first night they are alone on the trail, he tries to strangle Pedley. Viewers at this juncture may not feel terribly perturbed. The Mountie was not introduced sympathetically, repossessing a string of stolen horses from an Ojibwe village with all the casual insensitivity of legal injustice, an unattractive and incongruous figure in his paramilitary uniform which makes him look like a tin soldier dropped down among real leaves and white water. He has human substance, we see it in his stiff, civil interviews with McQuarrie's shopkeeper and the "Indian girl" he didn't expect to find making a calico-curtained home out of his quarry's cabin, his sergeant's treatment of him like a slacker when he's overdue for leave, but so long as he pursues his duty as if there's no difference between horses and men, he embodies the law at its most implacable and useless, his demonstrable intelligence locked down to the limits of his orders: "If you have reasons, there are men who'll listen to you. That's not my job." He shows no more emotion when he handcuffs Jules than when he loses to him at checkers. The night he has to fight his bound and silently laughing prisoner off his throat, we get a glimpse of a different Pedley, a frightened man with his brown hair ruffled wild, the glacial blue of his eyes calculating, uncertain. Earlier that day, Jules grinned at him as the snow whipped around them, the weather he had insisted on not waiting out: "It will break. Not before you do."
Foresight or psych-out, the remark hangs over their journey with far more intrigue than the more obvious questions of escape or betrayal as the dynamic between the two men crystallizes ironically: whatever powers of the Crown he may represent, in the cold, wild privacy of the backlands that burns off illusions as fast as body heat, Pedley has no more authority than the bracelets on his prisoner and Jules knows it as well as he does. It's never stretched as far as slapstick, but it seems self-evident that the constable is more or less bluffing his way back to civilization. The blizzard they mush into might as well drift them in tiny leaflets reading told you so. Seven miles out on the first day, he puts the dogsled through the ice of a snow-flattened lake and has to make camp to dry out long before nightfall, unwrapping his soaked moccasins and dutifully noting the incident in his logbook under his prisoner's amused, waiting eye. Teased about his nerves by the man who made a serious effort to murder him, he holds his own with a sarcasm that passes for stoicism until his second or third night lying awake with the rifle and both axes on his side of the fire, by which time he's zoning out by day and Jules has something new to razz him about. Such are the ambiguities of their relationship that we can't even tell whether Pedley really has gotten them both farblondjet in the boreal forest or whether Jules is genially gaslighting him about his grasp of the terrain. And yet The Wild North does not feel like a psychological thriller, any more than a screwball comedy just because its leads can hardly stop arguing long enough to kiss; actually, a screwball comedy would be right at home to the script's sly implication that being nettled, rattled, and partly made a fool of isn't just a lawman's deserts, but the best thing for him. Certainly in McQuarrie he showed few signs of the dry sense of humor that meets a swagger of doomsaying from Jules with self-deprecating reproach, "You shouldn't talk like that. You'll scare me to death," or slides a zinger of his own past the Code as they debate their situation: "Life? You're too full of it." Indeed, Jules has not just the physical presence to make the long-legged Mountie look like, in the useful phrase of Gemma Files, a bossy little nutter, but the absurd +10 charisma to carry off provocations like never once addressing the other man by name, referring to him with relentless nonchalance as "bébé." It's outrageous, patronizing and flirtatious, and as such strikes exactly the right note for their opening antagonism that transmutes without fanfare into an odd, barbed camaraderie. "Guess I'm the only one who cares how you feel," Jules sighs one night with theatrical commiseration, interesting himself in his catlike, obstructive way in whatever task the officer is attempting to complete. To our delight as well as the trapper's, Pedley responds with what the literature of the time might call a queer twist of a smile: "Everybody's got somebody." Their affinity does not negate the threat each poses to the other, the weird eddies of control and vulnerability throughout their interactions. If anything, it boosts the emotional density; when a pair of opportunistic strangers assess the Mountie as the disposable one of the party, the fact that we are almost confident which way Jules will jump when invited to join them doesn't make it any less brazen of Pedley to offer himself up as a dare. The trapper can still raise the stakes, reminding gracefully, "After all, I'm not taking you back, you're taking me, eh?" There's a dissertation in the deadpan of Pedley's "Don't let me forget."
As much fun as it is to watch these characters skirmish appreciatively with one another against the blue-and-white sweeps of snow and sky, The Wild North has two curveballs to pitch at its protagonists and they elevate the narrative from standard operating procedures of pulp fiction to rather vortical levels of id. The third act of this movie resembles nothing so much as a Whumptober bingo card. Even rating the proceedings as highly on the scale of mid-century male romance as I was doing already, I did not see any of it coming.
In my defense, the entire point of the bear trap is that under deep-drifted snow, no one sees it till it snaps. It is not foreshadowed by anything; Pedley is returning from a bitter facing-up—as he has been refusing to admit to Jules, holding out an ever less likely hope that he was just second-guessing himself, he's lost—when the heavy iron jaws close on his leg, bringing him down in his tracks and worse than the approach of the wolf which forces him to struggle to the limit of the chain for his rifle is the sight of Jules standing over him, clicking his tongue as if the Mountie has merely managed to embarrass himself again, not put himself totally into his prisoner's power. He can point the rifle at Jules, but Jules has merely to display his bound hands with regret. "Caught in my own handcuffs," Pedley mutters with the familiar wryness and then seriously, as he reaches at last for the key to unlock them, "It took luck, Jules. Remember that." For a moment, we have no choice but to believe that the trapper, the cuffs still glittering from one wrist as he pulls the rifle like a whiplash from his former captor's hands, really will take the sled dogs and the remaining supplies and abandon the helpless man. Some kind of blow-up has been building between them, more than a shortage of salt and coffee. After the constable's near-miss with murder, Jules boasted, "Don't worry, bébé. That's a job I'm keeping specially for myself." That morning, Pedley accused him of trying. "I could've dumped you anywhere and written in that little book of mine that you think is so funny that you made a break for it and got away. Then I'd have to become a man like you—or was it an animal you said you were? Before I turn into that, I'll let this country take me." Now it might: exposure, starvation, predators. It would have been easy at the start of their journey when he was nothing to Jules but a cop come to fetch him to a death sentence, even conceivable that Jules could have given him the slip and a fighting chance to survive on his own. Leaving him chained in the snowfields is an execution. Even the men who tried to kill them were offered better odds. Jules hauls the dogs to a stop, and studies Pedley pinned in the snow at his feet, and with the faintest of smiles stoops to spring him from the trap. That night marks their first real moment of intimacy, not the professional courtesy of playing checkers or even their complicated banter, but the crackle of firelight as Jules finishes bandaging his companion's leg and Pedley with the tight angles of his face as open as we have ever seen them quietly dismisses any notion of a home of his own and envies, without meanness, the haven of cat and girl that Jules has waiting for him in McQuarrie. It is not something he could have admitted even a night ago without drawing some mocking response from Jules, but the time for head games is past. It was one thing to rag the Mountie remorselessly when there were handcuffs and a service revolver between them, but now Jules has his freedom and Pedley is wounded, not critically, but disablingly, and Jules' malicious compliance in letting the less experienced man chase his own tail through the mountains has left them farther from people and shorter on provisions than the cold equations of the north woods have much tolerance for: he may have gotten Pedley killed after all. A night ago, he wouldn't have asked so diffidently, as if the other man's opinion really mattered, "You think I wanted to kill that man? You think I'm like that?" It's a sweet, definite shift, symbolized by the handcuffs given a farewell kiss by Jules and tucked back inside Pedley's coat. It is officially a shared joke that the Mountie who at this moment couldn't arm-wrestle a french fry for Canada still maintains he's bringing in his man.
In the rest of my defense, I read the normal amount of Jack London and I was not prepared for Chekhov's wolf attack. It is true that as they set out originally, Jules baited the Mountie about the possibility, and a gathering number of wolves have been pacing them ever more closely over the last few days, but the film has scarcely settled into its new status quo before the two men are shoulder to shoulder by different firelight as the dogs whine and yelp in agitated chorus and their leaner, wilder kindred prowl the circle of rocks and snow. "A pack," Jules identifies them, "like you and me. We're finally together, you and me . . . Makes it a little bit better, eh?" Gripping his rifle as tightly as a talisman as the trapper hefts his axes beside him, Pedley agrees, "Makes it better." It's brutal. The cinematography by the legendary Robert Surtees has heretofore favored wide takes in open air, but now it's all close, red, fire-fragmented work, blade-chunks and rifle-cracks and barks and snarls and suddenly a man's voice screaming, terror-shaken by the throat. When it's over, half the dog team is dead, Jules looks worn and torn, and Pedley has to be peeled like a rag of fur off the bloodstained snow. He doesn't answer to his partner's jubilant "We did it, bébé! We did it, you and me." He doesn't react to the smoke of his own flesh as Jules, careful, troubled, cauterizes the terrible wound at his collarbone. He stares a thousand yards and breathes and that's the most that can be said for him. As Jules tauntingly prophesied and can take no pleasure in now, Pedley broke. It is a bitter, shocking gut-punch, especially as the conclusion to a scene as breathless as the wolf attack. Like Jules, we were misled by the constable's stubbornness, his slowly admirable ability to forge on damn-fool despite his glaring disadvantages; he seemed so resilient, as if he could be thwarted, scared, humiliated, but not fazed. He sways in the grey bluster of snow-light, bareheaded as a corpse, too far gone even to rise to the bait of the deliberate, derisory scrawl in his logbook that Jules leaves to smolder in the ashes of their fire: Pedley blanked out and I'm bringing him home like a lost papoose – Vincent. All at once we are in a different kind of adventure, where instead of bantering with a beloved adversary as far as the fringes of civilization, Jules is shepherding a shell-shocked mess to safety as fast as he can keep them both pointed in the right direction, which will turn out to require the exquisite reversal of handcuffing the man who arrested him to the sled to keep him from wandering off in his traumatized state and freezing to death. "You want to go in like this?" the trapper shouts on the ridge above McQuarrie, trying to shake back to sanity the listless, nerveless bundle that used to be an officer of the NWMP. "You want people to talk about it the rest of their lives? How the mouse brought back the cat?" It produces no more response than his earlier, anxious tenderness or violence. There's nothing for it but to stagger down the slope and take Pedley home.
Like any number of narratives with a surface of supercharged id, The Wild North has some intelligent, not overly telegraphed things going on in its depths. Never mind if the mechanics are as macho as wolves and blizzards, the engine of the story is the act of becoming human, in Pedley's case by vulnerability, in Jules' by compassion—or becoming visible as human, to oneself as well as to others. "It was my fault," Jules explains his responsibility for the mute, strange man now sleeping in their bed, "I kept him out too long," before clarifying to the black-braided girl who has moved into his life as naturally as a ginger kitten that it was not guilt, but the necessity of taking care of another person that gave him the strength to return: "It was having to bring him in. It was because I said I would that did it. That's all." We did not doubt his careless, jovial kindness toward her in the saloon or the dog-chased stray in the street, but nothing in it forecast the kind of commitment he's describing, stronger than words like loyalty or love or come on, bébé. Perhaps we should have detected the fragility in Pedley sooner, like the very first night he was offered the game of checkers with a cajoling "Think you could take white and win?" and responded at once, "No, not a chance." It sounded then like the policeman refusing to play by his prisoner's rules, even for as little as a literal game; in hindsight it sounds much more in line with his cynical image of himself as just that much of a loser, sufficient to chill even the larger-than-life confidence of Jules Vincent. I had never taken much note of Corey except in The Big Knife (1955) where his dry manner is terrifying because of the void of human indifference it doesn't bother to conceal, but here I kept noticing what a shape-changer he is for all his apparent stoneface. He looks stolid and petty in his scarlet tunic, but in furs and shirtsleeves he can appear boyish, defenseless. So much of his growing sympathy to the audience happens in his face, professionally inexpressive to begin with, accumulating nerves and humor and stress and trust until it is actually quite frightening that his trauma wipes it so clean, a slack mask instead of a protective visor, and then knowing that his face was set in those dry lines by loneliness and disappointment and self-mockery, it is more poignant than even the film may have bargained for that Pedley shows such candid, uncomplicated happiness playing with the kitten in Jules' cabin. He cradles it in his arms as Jules tries valiantly, futilely to coax or jolt him out of his fugue, carefully pours it a saucer of milk and strokes its ears as it drinks, walled off from his memories and his sarcastic, rightful self and at some weird kind of peace. It is one of the reasons I have such difficulty believing the Hollywood ending of the film.
To be more precise, I can believe the more formally incredible elements of the ending, since they don't lose the emotional plot. Finally concluding that "it took a lot to jam him up like that—it will take something big to pry him loose again," Jules with flawless pulp-psych sets out to stage another near-death experience by shooting the same rapids with Pedley in the canoe that led to the death of Max Brody. It's a stupendous set piece, full of roaring falls and sun-crashed foam and process shots as jaw-dropping as Corryvreckan and it doesn't just end with Pedley coming out of his daze with an almost comic expression of horror and annoyance at Jules beaming at him from the midst of their lethal surroundings, it fulfills the romance's promise of mutual rescue when the canoe capsizes on a boulder and Pedley drags Jules up out of the river's scouring cauldron and hauls him the last few rocks to shore where the two of them collapse side by side, Pedley barely letting go his grip on the scruff of the other man's shirt long enough to pat him a couple of times on the back and then hang on to him again, responding to Jules' "Thanks, bébé" with his own drowned rat's grin, "Thanks to you." At the trial which follows, his testimony from personal experience of the rapids exonerates Jules of the moment when the lurch of the water turned a warning shot into manslaughter, a win-win which permits the Mountie to retain the professional credit of bringing his man in while employing his poker face in the service of righteous perjury. Outside the hotel, it is a lovely, affectionate touch for Jules to entrust him with the kitten with which he formed such an essential connection and identify it as a symbol of the home he should carry with him and it is equally adorable that Pedley names it "Bébé," the teasing nickname turned to a term of endearment that he recognized as his own even when he remembered nothing else of himself and I cannot believe that the film leaves him there on the dock waving goodbye to Jules and the girl even with Bébé riding his shoulder, for God's sake take him with you, he's been living in your cabin, you just have a Mountie now. Or maybe he quits the force, I don't care so long as the Production Code does not attempt to convince me that these two men are not perma-bonded to one another after the kind of Winterreise that would leave a het couple in a fadeout clinch or at least, African Queen-style, in the same damned frame. It is a minimal grace that the film does not try too hard to substitute Charisse. Her character is never even named, which gives some indication of her ranking in the story; I conclude she exists to be homosocially triangulated around, although her scenes with Granger in the first act serve to establish his all-comers chemistry, as mutually clear-cut with the girl as his relations with Pedley are a spikier slow burn. Perhaps the film OT3s them, obviously in a sort of V. Just reassure me he's still sleeping at the cabin even when he's in his right mind.
Lest the viewer doubt the veracity of their slash goggles, Marton would go on record describing The Wild North as a love story between two men, a fact which he appreciated his actors grasping: in other words, suck it, Joseph Breen. I would believe it if you told me it had been adapted from an illustration in Man's Life, but it was technically inspired by an episode in the life of the historical Albert Pedley, who had presumably agreed not to sue MGM. I wish the version streaming on the Criterion Channel were not so atypically beat-up—the famous Ansco Color looks fine if a little televised, but the overall picture looks like it was duped off someone's VCR, including cigarette burns and fractionally desynched sound. The location shooting deserves better, even if I can't evaluate how convincingly Idaho stands in for northern proto-Alberta. The overall Canadian-ness of the production may be questionable in the extreme, but what is not at all in question is the film's friendliness to missing scenes, a consideration not usually of paramount importance with me and yet here we are. A pair of handcuffs is introduced with a matter-of-fact "Slip into these." One of the heroes has an emotional support cat. Did I remember to mention the avalanche? This pack brought to you by my better backers at Patreon.
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Thank you! It's just . . . like that.
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No, it's fair to be startled, it doesn't become not awkward just because it was the prevailing practice of the time. I think it is wonderful that you still channel-surf and snag on movies, though.
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Great review; gonna check and see if it's on Youtube.
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Thank you!
Great review; gonna check and see if it's on Youtube.
I deeply appreciate Criterion including it in their collection of "Snow Westerns," but it should be freely streaming as a public service.
[edit] *cough*
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Thank you! I hope you can and do.
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Your icon!
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Same thoughts
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I have never actually seen Due South.
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What a great review. I first really noticed Wendell Corey in Holiday Affair. It could have been a thankless role, the third wheel in the romance between Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum, but he does wonderful things with it.
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It's amazing. I have seen gayer movies of its era, but not usually ones where all the relationship beats could be transferred to an m/m romance without effort except for figuring out where the sex scenes should go.
What a great review. I first really noticed Wendell Corey in Holiday Affair. It could have been a thankless role, the third wheel in the romance between Janet Leigh and Robert Mitchum, but he does wonderful things with it.
I love actors who can do that. I've never seen Holiday Affair even though it comes around every year on TCM. Obviously I am running out of excuses.
Thank you!
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Thank you so much.
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I HAD TO SWITCH MY BRAIN BACK ON
(It needs a better first act—it takes too long to arrive at the point, which is Jules and Pedley meeting—but once it starts, it really goes.)
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My god I love this and will read it over and over
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*hugs*
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Thank you so much! It is an extremely important kitten.
I dearly hope you will write your fic for this movie. I was floored when I couldn't even find a Yuletide one-off.