The Wild North

I am surprised that no videos or DVDs have been made of this movie. Certainly one of the best Stewart Granger movies I have ever seen (second only to Scaramouche).

I enjoyed both Corey and Granger performance. However, I especially liked Corey's strong character performance in "The Wild North". Corey's understated character contrasts well with the mountain man persona of Granger. In later years, Corey always was cast in submissive, retiring roles which really did not suit him. Corey projects a strong 'quiet' type of presence and with a high level of integrity. Cinema photography and accuracy is especially fabulous in this movie. No fake Hollywood sets for this movie.

The story builds as the character development becomes apparent. Viewers begin to identify and feel for the characters making the story even more vivid and realistic. The best compliment I can pay this movie is that it allowed me to feel like I was up North with them during the trek!

What awesome scenary provides the setting for this classic 1950's formulated drama! Solid performances by all actors.

It does seem like a scene vanished from the Turner classic version that I was watching. The jump in the film between scenes early in the movie seemed out of place. And, once you discovered a certain event had occured it seemed unlikely that this important scene was on the cutting room floor.

An adventures movie which predates some aspects of "river of no return" (Mitchum rebuilding a family with Monroe and a young son) by three years; the underlying subjects is the necessity for man to find himself a family : that's the trapper realizes when the film begins; a thing that the duty-above -all Javert-like longs for all along the story (he admits he's got nobody ,and he envies his prisoner who's got somebody waiting for him,were she a half-breed in a shack )

This adventures movie is at least as much a psychological drama : the events (the wolves,the meeting with two lost men) take a back seat to Granger/Corey relationship , a strange love /hate relationship ,a mutual admiration and a cat and mouse play:but who's the cat ? The pictures on location are splendid indeed and this odyssey looks like an initiatory journey ,mainly for the mountie.

Like Marilyn Monroe in "river of no return ", Cyd Charisse is a chanteuse in the first sequence ;and there's also a brat ,who,although no part of the family ,sides with the trapper who urges the shopkeeper to give him chocolate.

TCM just showed The Wild North today, in a version that had closed captioning added and looked as if it was digitally remastered since its last broadcast on TCM some years ago. Maybe Time-Warner will finally release the DVD of the movie in the near future. MGM in the early fifties turned out a series of high quality star vehicles, which were taken for granted then. With its small cast, The Wild North is like another movie of the period, The Naked Spur, which also deals with bringing a prisoner in. The Wild North has fine location photography in Idaho, a script that moves along and even some photographic effects courtesy of A. Arnold Gillespie. By 1956, with the forced sale of its Loew's theaters, the firing of Dore Schary as head of production and the end of contract system for studio talent, MGM went into a slow death spiral. There would be no more studio pictures like The Wild North, as MGM cut its output and filled a big chunk of its slate of releases with independent productions and movies made overseas. But at least I now have The Wild North on DVD, recorded from today's broadcast, as a souvenir from a vanished era in Hollywood history.