It becomes my duty to carry out the sentence which I have imposed on these men for killing and stealing within the territory under my jurisdiction. However, I want it strictly understood that there will be no undo shooting or cheering or drunken talk when I pull that lever on account it would offend the dignity of the occasion.
First Screening. Criterion Channel. Now this is my kind of western. It had everything that I wanted, starting with Jimmy Stewart playing a not-so-nice guy. In fact, he's a bit of an ass. How to separate that ass from the others asses in the film is pretty difficult and that was the 'charm' of the film. He was definitely playing against type. In fact, if there was anything I didn't like about the film, it was the tendency at the end to paint him as Rick and the casino as a kind of Rick's Place. There was a turn at the end, and I'm not sure how I would have done it, but I didn't particularly like that. i thought it was against character.
The real reason i love this film was the setting and the background. This was shot in Jasper National Park Alberta. And I know, because I've been to Jasper National Park, and I know what the Athabasca Glacier looks like. There is an amazing amount of outdoor shots that could have been done in Wyoming or Montana, but the production company wanted to shoot them in Canada to get the feel of the Canadian Rockies, and boy do they cash in. Never mind that Skagway is a thousand miles away from Edmonton. It certainly doesn't bother me for a number of reasons I'm about to elucidate.
For anyone who has taken the time to read Pierre Berton's glorious work Klondike, nothing you see on screen here will amaze you. This was one of the most fucked up things to happen in North America. Some dude finds a smidgen of gold in a big vein, and in three years more people travel through Skagway to Dawson than there are IN ALL OF CANADA. If there was a Wild West, it was here, and it started in Skagway. Alaska was a territory at the time, and let's just saw the law was a little slow in coming. To this end, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in this film that is beyond the fantastic. On the contrary, it seems like of tame.
My wife and I were in a Halifax hotel room laughing our asses off at a Canuck commercial that showed their stereotypical image of an American. Some Jeramiah Johnson looking mother fucker who hasn't bathed in a few years, ain't speakin' proper English, covered in killed fur and spittin' tabaccy indoors. As the commercial plays out, he just made it to the border from Skagway (I'll get to that in a minute) and want to come into Canada for the purposes of raping the Yukon for as much gold as he could carry. The Mountie was not just the perfect stereotype of Canadian lore, but it also flows pretty consistently with American images. Red Coat, Proper English, with one hand raised telling that dirty fucking Yankee (even if you're from Georgia, the Canadians consider you a Yank) he's gootah behave by that Queen's law in this territory, eh. This was a horrible way to portray our relationship in the past, but let's face it, there's more truth to it than we'd like to admit.
The trip from anywhere to Seattle was a journey in itself. The Northern Pacific wasn't a decade old and a trip from St. Louis to Seattle was MINIMUM 9 days. Just think of that for a second, and most of these jackleg Yanks couldn't afford sleeper cars, so they were in economy sitting up the ENTIRE TIME. Exhausted yet? Now let's talk about that steam paddle boat trip up to Skagway. There’s a reason we don’t use paddleboats anymore, much less on the open sea. I wouldn’t call people on paddle boats passengers. I’d call them survivors. This was the least persuasive part of the film to me.
Skagway wasn’t the Wild West, it was worse, and the real personage of ‘Soapy’ Smith is conveyed in The Far Country far less out of his rocker than the actual person. Skagway was worse than Winnipeg when they brought the Canadian Pacific through – and that was saying something. Idiots far and wide landed in Skagway to find out the Canadian border was ten days away on foot straight up a mountainside and you would be rejected unless you had 200 pounds of food on you (and other provisions) that would ensure you would survive not just the trip to Dawson, but the following winter. Most just turned back to Seattle. Most could not afford the prices in Skagway of goods shipped… on the same fucking paddleboat from Seattle… sold at ten times the prices. But even if you had the money for that and the mules to get you up to the border, you then had 500 miles of Canadian valley to go through. Say this took you four months to get into Dawson, you’d be lucky. Many turned back, or died in the winter. Dawson doubled in size weekly for two straight years, pausing only in the winter when very few made it in and no one dared leave. And the law you had to contend with was brutish, nasty, and short.
Stewart’s navigation through the times and people looked about as natural as his first shot on a horse coming up to the camera. He seemed to be an amazing horseman, and his scowl though unusual for us was natural for his character. His summation of events was divided into stuff that mattered to him and stuff he didn’t care about. His immediate purpose was to make money and retire on a ranch, a goal that is obscured by the end as we’re not too sure if it made it or not. This was an amazing experience of 97 minutes. In technicolor. With James Stewart. Not too much to dislike.