The Far Country (1954)

 

The fourth western director Mann made with his favourite actor James Stewart, following The Naked Spur, followed by The Man from Laramie. The film has a fairly unique setting on the North-Western frontier, during the times of the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1899).

Stewart is Jeff Webster a farmer from Wyoming who has heard that the discovery of gold has attracted large numbers of prospectors to the Yukon. He therefore plans to drive a herd of cattle to the nascent settlement of Dawson, hoping to sell their meat for a good price to the prospectors. All seems to go well until his herd is confiscated during a bogus trial by a man called Gannon, the self-styled judge of the border town of Skagway. Jeff is hired by saloon owner and business woman Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman) to lead a caravan to Dawson, but he also steals his herd back from Gannon, who swears that he will hang Jeff as soon as he sets foot on American soil again…

Stewart usually played obsessive characters in Mann’s movies, single-minded, almost schizophrenic individuals looking for revenge or redemption. The movies’ main villain often was a mere reflection of Stewart’s hero figure, an unbalanced alter ego as one critic called it (*1). In The Far Country the hero and the villain (John McIntire in one of his flamboyant performances) seem to have very little in common: Stewart is taciturn and a bit cold-hearted, while John McIntire’s lawman is cheerful, almost affable in his devious wickedness. But both men are single-minded in their pursuit of success: Gannon makes the law (and bends it in his own advantage), Jeff Webster breaks the law (if he thinks he has been treated unfairly). 

It’s clear that the conflict between these two characters must lead to an outbreak of violence, but until the finale, when Gannon pops up in Dawson and starts cheating the helpless prospectors out of their claims, the film is more concerned with the formation of the community than with the conflict between the main characters. There’s also more romance and comedy than in most Mann-Stewart collaborations, creating an atmosphere that is occasionally closer to Ford than Mann. Most of the comedy is at the expense of a French Canadian tom-boy (played by French actress Corine Calvet) who is repeatedly called ‘Freckle Face’ by Jeff (to which she invariably answers: ‘I’m not a freckle face, I’m a woman!).

The film lacks the intensity of some of the other Mann-Stewart collaborations, but it's beautifully made, the Canadian locations - the Columbia Ice Fields and Jasper National Park - creating a magnificent background for the story of pioneers trying to survive in a cruel and unforgiving nature. Like some have suggested the film might have inspired Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which has a similar setting in a snowbound mining town in the Northwest. And the finale – which is a bit long in coming – is excellent, the shootout in the street of Dawson being particularly strong: it’s a bit of a ‘dirty’ shootout, set in the dark, the participants lying on the ground, crawling in the mud.

Director: Anthony Mann – Cast: James Stewart, John McIntire, Ruth Roman, Corinne Calvet, Walter Brennan, Jay C. Flippen, Robert J. Wilke, Connie Gilchrist, Harry Morgan, Jack Elam – Screenplay: Bordon Chase

Note:

·        (*1) Mann of the West, Julian Pitley, in: They Went That-A-Way, London 1982, p. 56