|
A miniature nature documentary makes for a brisk overture, a toast to Alaska's salmon: "She lays two million eggs and nobody ever calls her Mother." Settlers and roamers, as befits a Western transposed to the Arctic, a fishing community among glaciers. The scalawag (George Raft) returns home aboard the Who Cares boat, his childhood chum (Henry Fonda) runs the local cannery. (As the no-nonsense hotel owner, Dorothy Lamour welcomes her nomadic beau by bopping him on the noggin with a lunker.) Tensions with the Russian poacher (Akim Tamiroff) put the friendship to the test, the buds find themselves in each other's crosshairs. "No one more stubborn in the defense of morality than a reformed sinner." Something of a Flaherty revised by Hawks, served up in Henry Hathaway's own vivid line. (Salty technique is visible throughout—full views of the protagonists jumping out of windows into the ocean with soap in hand, a craning shot away from a close-up of names etched at the top of a totem pole, hatchets and chains and harpoons in montage during a brutal brawl.) Icebergs line the frontier in choice location footage, just the right timbre can crack chunks off of them. On a moonlit Saturday the hamlet gets gussied up for dancing, a funny singalong is followed by indigenous rituals that bring out Fonda's pantheistic side. "The woods and the water... The sea that makes music." A surprising Albert Lewin production, his relationship with the filmmaker is humorously reflected in the vaudeville duo of logorrheic newspaper owner (John Barrymore) and laconic typesetter (Lynne Overman). Clashes with pirates, sacrifices at the rudder, all that and Slicker the trained seal, too. "Our country's story. Around the horn, across the plains, drowning in the seas and bones in the mountains." Mann moves the formulation South in Thunder Bay. With Louise Platt, Fuzzy Knight, Vladimir Sokoloff, Duncan Renaldo, John Wray, Michio Ito, and Stanley Andrews. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |