NORTHWEST PASSAGE (71)

Directed by: King Vidor (1940)

Starring: Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan, Nat Pendleton

The Pitch: Colonial rangers mount an expedition against hostile Indians.

Theo Sez: One of the most gruellingly physical adventure stories I've ever seen, right up there with the likes of PLATOON and DELIVERANCE : shot almost entirely outdoors, detailing a long, punishing trek through rugged mountain country (apart from a disposable first twenty minutes and a single, spectacular action set-piece) it's a war movie in all but name - men (barely a woman glimpsed in the whole two-hours-plus) pushed to the limit of their endurance, forced to withstand pain, hunger, exhaustion, marching through swirling rapids and mosquito-infested swamps and, above all, never complaining or rebelling ; because, as their leader puts it, "the moment discipline's gone, everything's gone". The authoritarianism, not to say Fascism on view is breathtaking - Tracy isn't just an inspirational leader but an infallible one, his orders to be obeyed blindly (significantly, things only go seriously wrong when he allows a decision to be put to the vote) - even though these are described as the men who built America, and contrasted with the oppressive British authorities (who don't allow free speech). The irony is no doubt unintentional, but the film's brutality seems quite deliberate - above all in the big action sequence, a dawn attack on a village full of sleeping Indians (which is then destroyed, and its inhabitants systematically massacred, by our brave heroes). One watches with amazement, but what's most amazing is the crude, irrefutable poetry in the film's harshness : the details of the men's regime, the constant emphasis on food and sleep (we're always seeing them being shaken awake, forced to move on), build to something as powerfully authentic as a folk-song, and it looks tremendous, a velvet symphony in brown, blue and khaki - the raid on the village (shot from above) is as visually supple as the softer, more impressionistic one in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON ; even Tracy gets a lyrical moment, when the gap-toothed Brennan complains that "I'd hate to be a man who's always as right as you are" ("I'm not a man now Sergeant, I'm a soldier and commander ... And if you ever meet me when I'm just a man, you may have to use a little charity"). Shameful, offensive and rather magnificent ; depressingly macho and remarkably beautiful.