United States, 1954
Directed By Anthony Mann
With James Stewart (Jeff Webster), Walter Brennan (Ben Tatum), Jay C. Flippen (Rube), Ruth Roman (Ronda Castle), Corinne Calvet (Renee Vallon), John McIntire (Gannon), Connie Gilchrist (Hominy)
This western movie brings the audience far away, beyond the Frontier in fact: it begins on a paddle steamer leaving Seattle to Alaska and most of the events unfold in the Canadian territory of Yukon. The landscapes may be as diverse and spectacular as they tend to be in the genre but here snow and cold definitely play a bigger role; with his usual skills, Anthony Mann wonderfully conveys the towering and daunting nature of these northern mountains.
However, what is at stakes does not lie in the wild but lurks around the jerry-build, rickety buildings and muddy streets and paths of the small communities Jeff Webster moves through to reach his goal. This is a simple one: earn big money by selling cattle he has brought to this northern tip of the Americas in partnership with old friends Ben Tatum and Rube in order to move back in Utah and build a small farm where he hopes to live quietly and happily with Ben for the rest of their lives.
The small Alaskan port town where he arrives is booming but is ruled in a ruthless and greedy manner by a cunning and offhand judge, who is also sheriff and entrepreneur, Gannon. This is the spoiled West where opportunities are skewed by an unfair, wicked, one-man power. Webster turns out to be a new victim but finds the way to cross the border with his cattle and lands in a completely different location, a makeshift town born out of a gold rush, a place struggling to survive as greed makes men come and go and fuels violence. Unsurprisingly, it becomes another prey of Gannon, and he uses legal and illegal tricks to grab concessions secured by modest gold diggers.
His extending reach relies in part on his relations with an assertive and elegant businesswoman, Ronda Castle, who founded a saloon also dealing gold and tools on the US side of the border and is creating a likewise business on the other side. She unashamedly enjoys being a rich wheeler-dealer thanks to her chutzpah and acumen – no wonder that she is hated by Hominy, a saloon owner in the Canadian settlement, a perfect embodiment of the hardworking and strong-minded female pioneer reckoning not only to earn money but also to build a community. But Ronda is not only a brutal character: she is also in love from the start with Webster and tries to help him whenever she can. Romance spiced up the social and ethical issues and gets complicated as another, younger, poorer woman is smitten to Webster, frail and perky pioneer Renee Vallon.
This should leave Webster in a quandary; in fact, it leaves him unconcerned. He is a boorish and rough character, a man forced to hide in the steamer (thanks to Ronda who has noticed him – love on the first sight, it seems) because he is wanted for the murder of two men who failed to help him move along the cattle, a lonesome rider ignoring orders and customs, a bachelor who chooses to act dumbly when a woman is around. His tongue-in-cheeks remarks and nonchalant demeanor point to his indifference to mankind. Ben Tatum is the only human being he likes, so much so that he plans to live with him, though in a distant place. James Stewart plays a character that is not nearly as neurotic as the lead character of “The Naked Spur” he made the previous year with Mann but still is a thoroughly unpalatable fellow which looks down upon the very notion of help. Most of the film depicts the efforts of Ronda Castle and Renee Vallon to get him changed – to no avail. If they do not lose patience with him, the rest of the Canadian settlement sours on him quickly when he refuses to be a sheriff even as Gannon’s hands get bloodier in his rush to own and exploit the place.
It would take the only personal tragedy Webster could not have imagined to change his mind. The murder of his only friend is the ultimate sacrifice the hard-bitten adventurer could not accept, which leads to the final, predictable showdown. A shot that follows show the unison move of a crowd, their faces in plain view, from right to left towards him and Renee Vallon standing against the left side of the frame. When the crowd stands still it becomes obvious the shot is the much-needed moment of reconciliation between the selfish individual who has become aware of his responsibilities and the community eager to rally around a leader. The conflict running across the narrative is over – the evil has been eliminated and the group has become stronger.
“The Far Country” is one of those westerns heavily emphasizing the difficulty faced by people and the pride they fell as they build nation step by step, one community at a time, with the hope of getting both individual rights and commonweal respected with fairness. And it is told with panache that can sometimes labor the point; the narrative is too readily made complicated by the need for drama (like the avalanche), humor, and the trite romantic rivalry between a cunning dark-haired woman (who could have belonged to the kind of noirs Mann used to shoot) and a silly blond-haired girl (who brings to mind the lead female character of “The Naked Spur”). Too bad that Corinne Calvet’s scolding sound like a schoolteacher’s lesson for kids (and pushes the envelope of her role’s silliness).
The film’s visual irony is that this hidebound and lonely guy is never alone in the shots. He is either surrounded by a crowd, which is always either indifferent to him or plainly curious but never open to him, and that is why the aforementioned shot at the end sets an important departure, or facing a key character, more often than not Ben and his female admirers. There is a couple of shots that do examine him while he is alone. He is then in a cabin, recovering from the wounds he got when the bandits hired by Gannon tried to do away with him and Ben. He has just walked through the town and realized how the shenanigans of Gannon are destroying it and now seems to wonder what HE could do. This visual loneliness captures in fact the heartbreaking moment, perfectly performed by Stewart, when Webster changes, casting away his selfish shell to embrace the community spirit. Better late than never.