North to Alaska (20th Century-Fox, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 25) my husband Charles and I watched a used DVD from the North Park Library of an engaging if hardly great movie: North to Alaska, a 1960 vehicle for John Wayne with a strong, if rather oddly assorted, supporting cast and Henry Hathaway – the director you got then if you had John Wayne for your movie and his best directors, John Ford and Howard Hawks, weren’t available. The film is one of those movies that never quite settles on a tone; one minute it’s slapstick comedy, the next romantic comedy, the next melodrama, and only rarely (in just one scene, an armed confrontation between Wayne and his mining partner Stewart Granger on one side and various claim jumpers on the other) the sort of action movie one expects from a Wayne vehicle. The plot deals with the Yukon gold rush in Alaska in 1901 and casts Wayne and Granger as Sam McCord and George Pratt, respectively, who’ve struck it rich with a highly productive gold mine. Pratt wants McCord to go to Seattle to bring back his fiancée Jenny Lamont (Lilyan Chauvin), whom he left behind there promising to send for her when he struck it rich. It’s now three years later and Pratt has struck it rich, but in the meantime Jenny got tired of waiting for him and married a scrawny little nobody with male-pattern baldness because he was rich. (Jenny’s true motives become apparent when Sam hunts her down and tells him that he and Pratt are now worth $1 million each. “A million dollars?” Jenny says, obviously wondering if maybe she should have held out and got a better deal on George than on the milquetoast she did marry for money.)

Bereft of George’s actual girlfriend, Sam hits on the idea of getting him a replacement, and in search of one he high-tails it to “The Hen House,” the local “dance hall” (the standard Production Code-era euphemism for a whorehouse) and meets Michelle “Angel” Bonnet (Capucine, t/n Germaine Lefebvre). Since she’s French, like Jenny, Sam offers to take her to Nome and pass her off as the original Jenny, thinking George won’t know the difference after three years apart. Once Sam takes Michelle back to Nome, she attracts the decidedly unwelcome amorous attentions of the film’s principal villain, unscrupulous club owner Frankie Cannon (Ernie Kovacs), whose thin “roo” moustache and overall imperious manner made me think, “Ah, this is what Harvey Korman was parodying as ‘Hedley Lamarr’ in Blazing Saddles.” It turns out Frankie and Michelle had a previous romantic relationship in New Orleans, where she was plying the oldest profession (or at least as much as that could be hinted at in a late Production Code-era film) and he was one of her johns. It’s clear he’d like to resume their sexual relationship and she couldn’t be less interested in it. In one respect North to Alaska is a film ahead of its time; Michelle is depicted as a feisty, independent character with her own mind – especially ironic given that the actress playing her was on record as saying, “Men spoil women in America. A woman needs to know that the man is her master.”

In other respects it’s a film very much of its time, a carefully assembled vehicle for John Wayne – after watching Sylvester Stallone the night before in Creed and marveling that his acting hadn’t improved one whit between the original Rocky in 1975 and Creed 40 years later, it was ironic in a way that we were watching a man who became an iconic superstar despite his virtual inability to act (though in at least one film, Howard Hawks’ Red River, either Hawks or the writers broke through and actually got a genuinely powerful and emotional performance out of him) – in which Hathaway and a stellar team of writers (John Lee Mahin, Martin Rackin, Claude Binyon and an uncredited Ben Hecht and Wendell Mayes) deliberately crafted a story that would allow Wayne to do all the things he could do well and avoid the things he couldn’t. Among the things Wayne could do well were both straight action and comedy action – the opening fight scene in Kovacs’ bar is wonderfully funny even though one suspects (as one does through the entire movie) that Wayne is being stunt-doubled through much of it. (Part of the fun watching the film is seeing if you can tell when John Wayne stepped out of the scene and his stunt double came in.) It’s also odd for a movie set in Alaska that there’s no snow – though imdb.com lists the Canadian Yukon as one of the locations it’s pretty clear that most of the mountain scenery came from southern California – and almost no twilight.

North to Alaska is the sort of movie in which the filmmakers deliberately tried to include multiple elements that would draw disparate audience members in to buy tickets, including trying to appeal to the teen audience by casting then-teen idol Fabian as George’s younger brother Billy. Billy naturally got a schoolkid’s crush on Michelle as soon as she enters – Sam has offered to take her to the mine to protect her from Frankie’s slimy advances – and the two of them get plastered on the supply of champagne George had been saving to celebrate Jenny’s arrival. (Ya remember Jenny?) Fabian gets to sing one song on screen, a limp romantic ballad called “If You Knew,” which led me to joke, “Is this the boy that was supposed to save rock ‘n’ roll after Elvis got drafted and Buddy Holly died?” Much better remembered is the film’s great title song, sung by country star Johnny Horton over the opening credits and a huge hit for him even though he didn’t live long enough to enjoy it; he died in a car crash just days after the record was released. In fact, Horton wasn’t the only person associated with this movie to meet an early and macabre demise; two years later Ernie Kovacs also would die in a car accident (and he’d become a posthumous poster child for seat belts; his name was frequently invoked during the subsequent campaign to have seat belts required in all cars and their use made mandatory), and after a lifetime of dealing with depression and bipolar disorder Capucine committed suicide by leaping out of an eight-story building in 1990. (It was apparently not the first time she’d tried it.)

North to Alaska builds to a great finale, a no-holds-barred battle in a muddy street in which Kovacs’ character emerges plastered with goo that makes him look like a science-fiction monster in a really cheap “B” movie, while Sam McCord a.k.a. John Wayne is neatly paired off with Michelle a.k.a. Capucine (I’d always assumed she got her name from the capuchin monkey, but it turns out according to imdb.com that it really came from the French word for the nasturtium flower) despite his demented assertions all movie that marriage is slavery and he won’t allow himself to be tied down to any one woman. At least North to Alaska is a souvenir of the days when color movies were actually colorful; the cinematographer was Leon Shamroy, and he loved neon-bright colors and the sparkling glow of sunny daylight throughout his films. If you wanted a genuinely dramatic use of color, Shamroy was not your man (John Alton was); but if you just wanted your film to sparkle brightly whether that made any sense in terms of your story, he was the right cameraman for you.