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."

( We're not going to make it, either of us. )

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.