The Far Country (Universal-International: U.K., 1954; U.S., 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 30) the film my husband Charles and I watched was The Far Country, fourth of the six items in the three-DVD boxed set from Universal, The James Stewart Six-Film Western Collection. I bought this set largely for the first two items, Destry Rides Again (1939) – the comedy Western with Stewart and Marlene Dietrich that was Dietrich’s comeback film (and the one parodied in Blazing Saddles) – and Winchester ‘73, an audacious film that kicked off the partnership between Stewart and director Anthony Mann and which I’ve regularly referred to as “a film noir in Western drag.” Following that they made Bend of the River – a film I liked but was disappointed in following Winchester ‘73 at least partly because it was shot in color (one of the last gasps of three-strip Technicolor), and the vivid hues of the process worked against the darkness of the story. Well, for The Far Country Universal-International also went with color, but this time cinematographer William Daniels (a refugee from MGM who had shot 17 of Greta Garbo’s 24 films – he said his one career regret was he had never been able to shoot a Garbo film in color – who left for Universal and went over to the dark side both figuratively and literally, shooting a lot of their noirs as well as noir-ish Westerns like Winchester ‘73 and this one) was able to get some surprisingly dark compositions out of the process. (It probably helped that the Technicolor color consultant – Technicolor required producers to use a Technicolor consultant either to shoot the film on their own or work with their in-house cinematographer – on this one was William Fritzsche instead of the fearsome Natalie Kalmus, estranged wife of Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus who remained a key part of the company even after they separated as a couple.)

The Far Country is also a considerably darker film than Bend of the River, not only in the characterizations of the principal villains, John McIntire as “Judge” Gannon and Steve Brodie as his gunman Ives, but in Stewart’s own. He plays Jeff Webster, who like Stewart’s characters generally is quiet and soft-spoken, but unlike most of Stewart’s roles he’s hot-headed and grimly unconcerned about the welfare of anyone else. In the opening scene, set in Seattle in 1896, Jeff sneaks a herd of cattle onto a ship bound for Skagway, Alaska, intending to make himself and his sidekick Ben Tatum (Walter Brennan in a relatively “with” performance – Brennan was famous for asking his directors, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when the directors inevitably replied, “With or without what?,” Brennan would say, “Teeth” – I’m guessing this was a “with” performance because you can mostly understand Brennan’s dialogue) a fortune by selling the cattle to newly rich prospectors and taking advantage of the wildly inflated prices for necessities during gold rushes. Only Stewart is also under indictment for murdering two men – he admits he killed them but says it was justified because they were trying to steal his cattle – and when he arrives in Skagway, Alaska he disrupts a hanging by inadvertently crashing his herd into the quickly and flimsily constructed gallows. He flees and hides out in the bedroom of Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman), who’s able to throw Jeff’s pursuers off the track by pretending to be in her bed alone when really he’s there with her. Jeff and Ben run afoul of Judge Gannon, who claims absolute authority over Skagway and announces he’s confiscating the herd as punishment for the disrupted hanging. Jeff and Ben manage to get the herd to stampede and head for the town of Dawson, Canada across the border.

Ronda Castle hires Jeff to drive her to Dawson and guard her supplies against raiders. Her plan is to open a branch of her gambling den and whorehouse (the latter, of course, is only hinted at in this Production Code-era film) in Dawson. Judge Gannon also arrives in Dawson and starts the same sort of campaign he pulled in Skagway, filing phony mining claims and running the rightful claimants off the land. Jeff and Ben make a large sum of money selling Ronda their cattle after a bidding war between her and Hominy (Connie Gilchrist), Grits (Kathleen Freeman) and Molasses (Connie Van), who run the local hash house and are losing business because all they can offer is bear stew and the local miners want real beef. Gannon insists that there’s no way Jeff and Ben can leave with their money, both from the sale of their cattle and from the mining claim they’re working just outside of town (in footage strikingly reminiscent of John Huston’s masterpiece, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), because the only way from Dawson to Seattle is through Skagway, which Gannon still controls. Jeff learns of an alternate route from a local (and unseen) Native – that’s the only time Native people are even mentioned in this movie, and none are ever actually shown – along the river. He warns Ben not to talk about this to anyone, but of course Ben can’t resist shooting his mouth off – the baddies catch on when Ben buys an extra two pounds of ground coffee from a store the villains control. Gannon and Ives organize an ambush, and in the ensuing gun battle Ben is killed and Jeff is temporarily paralyzed in his right hand. There’s a great scene in which Jeff realizes that his right hand has healed well enough he can use it to shoot again, and the music gives us a triumphal-sounding cue as he moves his fingers to show they once again work. (No composer is credited; the music was assembled from the Universal-International stock library and at least four composers – Frank Skinner, Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein and the young Henry Mancini – are credited on imdb.com.)

When Jeff regains his gun – despite a short-lived attempt to keep him from doing so by Renée Vallon (Corinne Calvet, a genuinely French actress who had a brief vogue in Hollywood in the early 1950’s playing dumb blondes to whom she gave a thin veneer of Continental cachet) – he starts another gun battle in front of Ronda’s saloon. Ronda, whom we’ve assumed will end up with Jeff at the end because we’ve seen two brief love scenes between them, actually gets herself shot and killed in the back, but Jeff lures both Gannon and Ives out in the open and kills them, then heads back to Seattle with Renée in tow as a sort of romantic consolation prize. I quite liked The Far Country even though there were potential depths to the story Mann and his writer, Borden Chase (who’d also worked on Winchester ‘73 and one of my all-time favorite Westerns, Howard Hawks’s Red River), could have sounded and did not. I especially liked William Daniels’s ability to get some quasi-noir effects into the cinematography despite working with Technicolor and shooting in the glorious expanses of Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada – and for once the scenery, though beautiful and breathtaking, doesn’t get in the way of the human actors in front of it. And there’s something of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the final scenes, in which, even though Jeff is on his way back to the U.S., he nonetheless encourages the townspeople of Dawson to mobilize against the unjust system by which Gannon stripped them of their claims, and fight to build a new, decent Dawson instead of the wild frontier town it was before.