The Hollywood Mountie always gets his man
Just as Hollywood liked Mexico as a setting
for Westerns, as I was waffling on about the other day in The American Western south of the border, so too Canada had its
allure as a scenario for the oater. Hollywood had its own vision of what Canada was like, though as with Mexico it was often just another theater for the derring-do of the classic Hollywood Western star.
There were slightly fewer Hollywood ‘Canadian’
Westerns, though, than ‘Mexican’ ones. That will make this article shorter, you
will be relieved to hear.
Coop in
Canada
A classic example will do to start us off:
Paramount’s turgid North West Mounted Police,
a 1940 Cecil B DeMille-directed picture starring Gary Cooper. This was
notionally a story about the so-called North-West Rebellion of 1885, led by
Louis Riel (Francis McDonald in this movie). Louis David Riel (1844 – 1885) was a Canadian politician, founder of the
province of Manitoba, and a leader of the Métis people of the Canadian
prairies. Riel sought to preserve Métis rights and culture as their homelands
in the Northwest came progressively under the Canadian sphere of influence. He
led two resistance movements against the Canadian government. The first was the
Red River Rebellion of 1869 - 1870; during this Riel was forced into exile in
the United States (Montana). But he returned in 1885 and renewed his opposition
to the Canadian government, and this was known as the North-West Rebellion
of 1885, in which he urged the Indians to rise in revolt. (In the movie the
Indians are all ‘Ug’ stereotypes, as DeMille's Indians usually were). It ended in Riel's arrest, trial, and execution on a
charge of high treason.

The real Riel and the reel Riel
Now, when revolutions and
rebellions occurred south of the border, Hollywood was usually more or less on
the side of the revolutionaries. Juárez v. Maximilian? Warners’ Juarez was very pro- Juárez. Pancho
Villa v. President Huerta? In all those movies Pancho was the good guy (or at
any rate the one in the right). Fox’s Viva Zapata! had quite a left-wing slant, directed as it was by Elia Kazan and
written by John Steinbeck (MGM had been going to make it but studio execs
reckoned that Zapata was “a goddamn Commie revolutionary” and sold the project to Fox).
However, Cecil B DeMille
was not Kazan and his writers Alan Le May and Jesse Lasky Jr. were no
Steinbecks. DeMille shot the picture as a straight
‘Redcoats v Redskins’ drama in which Riel and his supporters are unmitigated
evils. There is no hint that they might actually have had some right on their
side. Well, you couldn’t be against Queen Victoria, could you? That little old widow in Windsor. Of course
Hollywood studios weren’t exactly paragons of liberal politics and they were
happy to toe the pro-government line, and Cecil B DeMille wasn’t exactly the
most assiduous presenter of historical fact. In fact his films are historical
bunkum. Laughably, he cultivated a reputation for doing detailed research.
Gary Cooper played the ‘gringo’ figure. Just
as he would later cross the Rio Grande to fight in the likes of Garden of Evil and Vera Cruz, so now he would be a Texas Ranger gone north to bring
back a criminal (George Bancroft). Hollywood was generally happier with a true
American hero in these alien contexts.
Two-Gun Tex: Coop in Canada
Being DeMille, huge swathes of the movie were
shot on those enormous studio sound-stages that he liked (he hated going on location)
and the outside shots that he had to do were filmed in California. No one
actually went to Canada.
Tyrone in
Canada
This choice of locations reached its reductio ad absurdam in Fox’s Pony Soldier in 1952, in which the sunny
sandstone of Arizona did duty for Canada. It is actually very attractive
terrain, shot by Harry Jackson, Oscar nominee for another picture, but it’s
hardly Canada. Never mind. This one starred Tyrone Power, who, unlike Coop,
didn’t really do Westerns as a rule. He was Jesse James in 1939 and he was also very good in Fox’s smaller but very good (and underrated) Rawhide in 1951, but he only did six
cowboy films in total and apart from Jesse
James and Rawhide, two were
Canadian Mountie pictures, one was a Brigham Young biopic and in the other he
was Zorro; they hardly count as Westerns at all.
Canada, AZ
Pony
Soldier is supposedly based on a true story (but we
all know how that goes in Hollywood) about a young, inexperienced Mountie named
Constable Duncan MacDonald. It’s 1876. The RCMP has only being going for three
years and no one has yet told Duncan that the Mountie always gets his man. As a
result, he returns to base having let the fugitive he was pursuing escape.
After this faux
pas he is assigned to bringing the whole Cree tribe, which has fled
its "reserve" over into the US, back into Her Majesty’s domains,
as well as rescuing two captives that the Cree have taken. To achieve this
mission he only has one helper, the comic-relief fat half-breed sidekick Natayo
Smith, played, with gusto, by Thomas Gomez. New Yorker Gomez is one of the
highlights of the movie, in fact. He brings life to what otherwise risks being
a rather plodding ‘Western’.
Power and Gomez wear the red
The other Mountie movie Tyrone appeared in? It was
a tiny (uncredited) part in a forgettable small-studio B-picture, Northern Frontier, in 1935. This was a
low-budget Poverty Row effort starring Kermit Maynard as a Mountie who gets his
man. It was shot round Big Bear Lake, California, that being Canadian enough
for the producers.
Of course Coop and Tyrone weren't the first to don the scarlet tunic. William S Hart had done it right back in 1921 in O'Malley of the Mounted, and doubtless there were others silent Mounties too.
Bill Hart wore it too (though in black & white)
Alberta
puts the West in Western
It was perhaps ironic, given that these
‘Canadian’ stories were filmed in the US, how many later ‘true’ Westerns, i.e.
stories set in the United States and Territories, would later be shot up in
Canada. The Snake, Bow and Maligne Rivers were the ones Robert Mitchum rafted
down with Marilyn Monroe (when they weren’t being filmed back at the Fox
studios with a back-projection screen) in River of No Return.
Canadian river in back-projection
Last of the Dogmen, Mustang Country, Brokeback Mountain,
Unforgiven, Open Range, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, all set in the US, and even some scenes of The Searchers were filmed up in Alberta, and this list is certainly
not exhaustive (nor will it be continued now).
Alan Ladd
in Canada
One thing about Raoul Walsh’s Canadian
Western, though, two years after Pony
Soldier, was that it was actually shot in Canada. Saskatchewan, aka O’Rourke
of the Royal Mounted, was filmed in the Banff National Park, and stunningly
beautiful it is too, shot in Technicolor by John F Seitz, a seven-time Oscar
nominee, no less, who, however, never actually won one.
It is 1877, in
Saskatchewan. Alan Ladd (Whispering Smith in red) has been brought up by the
Cree and become a policeman. He does everything to prevent the Cree allying
with post-Little Big Horn Sioux, who have come north into Her Majesty’s
domains, wanting to wipe out as many redcoats as they had bluecoats. Ladd has
his own Tonto in the shape of Jay Silverheels, his blood brother, but Jay is a
bit cross at being disarmed by a mule-headed and insensitive British RCMP
officer (Robert Benton) and so he sides with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
In a Bountyesque
episode, Ladd mutinies against Benton and leads the party bravely to safety. In
the group is Shelley Winters, a large saloon gal, who is distinctly out of
place. She is accompanied by an Earpish US marshal (in fact it’s Hugh O’Brian
so no wonder he looks Earpish) who is taking Shelley back to Montana to stand
trial for murder, though really he is in love with her. So once again we had a
Canadian version of the gringo.
There is loads of action as the Sioux attack a
lot. Well, it was Raoul Walsh picture. There’s a high-speed canoe chase,
obviously the prototype for Bullitt or The French Connection (not). It’s
really a straightforward cavalry Western that just happens to be set in Canada
and the soldiers have red uniforms instead of blue. Ladd isn’t very good (he
never was as a Western action man) and the part cried out for Errol Flynn but I
suppose the female fans were happy either way.
Robert
Ryan in Canada
Talking of the Sioux, in 1961 Fox produced The Canadians (yet to be reviewed) in
which the Sioux, led by Michael Pate (obviously -
he was the specialist at Indian chiefs) come to Canada after Little Bighorn,
and Mountie Inspector Robert Ryan permits them to stay if they live by Her
Majesty’s laws.
Ryan gets his man too
However, Montana rancher John Dehner and his gun-thugs kill all
inhabitants of one of their villages. The question is, as per usual, will the
Mountie get his men? It was Burt Kennedy’s directorial debut and is supposed to
be based on a true story.
Randy in Canada
Another
Hollywood Western star who went to Canada, Randolph Scott, went there quite a
lot. In 1939 he allowed himself to be upstaged by eleven-year-old Shirley
Temple (already a wizened old hand at the movie business) in Susannah of the Mounties. This not quite unwatchable
picture (though there are moments when you have to turn away) had Randy as an
Inspector (a sort of colonel, I think) in the Mounties. He
looks rather daft in his ‘British’ mustache and red uniform with silly bell
hop's cap. And I didn’t know Her Majesty’s officers rode mustangs with Texas
saddles or spoke with Virginia accents. A couple of his brother officers were
actually English anyway, so at least central casting got that right.
Yes, well…
The Indians (it’s an Indians-against-the
railroad plot) are even more “Ug, me big chief” than was usual for this time
and the script is very weak despite (or because of) the fact that no fewer than
nine writers contributed to the screenplay from a Muriel Denison novel. There
were even two directors. The Indians also wear their feathered war bonnets and
paint all the time, rather like you and me wearing our tuxedos or long dresses
to wash the car.
Randy was back north of the border in 1949 for
Fox’s Canadian Pacific. Canadian Pacific is certainly not one of
Randolph Scott’s better Westerns. In fact it is one of his weakest. In his very
good book The Films of Randolph Scott
(McFarland & Company, 2004) Robert Nott is particularly down on it and goes
so far as to call it “abysmal”. Nott says, “It may not be Scott’s overall worst
film, but I rate it as his overall worst Western.” He adds, “Randolph Scott or
no Randolph Scott, it stinks.” Myself, I think that’s going a bit far. It does
have action, color, and Victor Jory as villain, after all. But I do admit, it’s
pretty weak generally.
Randy built the Canadian Pacific
It’s just the generic American railroad
Western transposed to Canada, one of those UnionPacificky nation-building stories. Scott would something similar in Santa Fe (1951) and yet again in Carson City (1952). It starts with
politicians afraid that if no railroad is built over the Canadian Rockies,
British Columbia might secede, obviously a fate worse than death. But never
fear, Canadian Pacific boss Cornelius Van Horne (Robert Barrat, rather good)
assures the parliamentary committee that his man Tom Andrews (Scott) is on the
job, and if anyone can find a pass over the mountain range, he can. And, then,
as expected, the film goes all fuzzy and we morph to the (Canadian) Western
frontier and there’s surveyor Randy, duly gazing at majestic peaks and mapping
a route.
It was at least shot in Canada and is very
attractive visually. It was photographed by Fred Jackman Jr. (201 silent,
B-movie and TV Westerns including six Randolph Scott oaters) up in the Banff
National Park again and round Lake Louise in Alberta, even if a lot of scenes
are shot on sound stages.
And the following year he was back
Scott
obviously got the taste for the Canadian lifestyle (there definitely is one)
because in 1950 he was back for The
Cariboo Trail, again directed by the solid
but uninspired Edwin L Marin and again with Victor Jory as the bad guy. This
time it’s not railroads but gold and cattle, in British Columbia. Canadian Pacific had suffered from poor
writing (Jack De Witt and Kenneth Gamet) but Cariboo was written by Frank Gruber, a B-Western specialist,
certainly, but experienced (this was his fifth oater) who went on to do some
excellent little pictures like Denver and Rio Grande and a few more Randolph Scott movies. Gruber could do pace but
also managed some (limited) character development. The story was provided by
Scott’s friend John Rhodes Sturdy (splendid British Empire name) who had worked
as technical advisor on Canadian Pacific.
It’s about gold discovered in British Columbia and how Randy and his partners
drive cattle up there from Montana to settle in the Chilcotin country, “a
cattleman’s paradise”. In fact, though, it could have been set anywhere and is
a pretty generic Western, with standard elements such as a town owned by the
bad guy, rustlers stampeding the herd and the like.
Jimmy Stewart went there too
Borden
Chase’s story and screenplay for The Far Country (1955), the fourth of the Westerns James Stewart made with Anthony Mann, has adventurer Jeff Webster (Stewart) locking horns with crooked Judge
Gannon (a splendid John McIntire) on both sides of the Canadian border.
Excellent Western
It’s a
gripping tale shot in the rugged scenery Mann loved to use in spectacular
Athabasca Glacier and other Jasper National Park locations. It is definitely
Hollywood’s idea of 1896 Canada, with the townsfolk of a very Wild West Dawson
electing a marshal with a tin star. But it’s a great movie.
Bob Steele, James Craig, and so on. They were all
Mounties.
Loads
of other Western stars made ‘Canadian’ Westerns, often about as Canadian as I
am (i.e. not at all). Try Bob Steele, for example, in Northwest Trail (1945). It’s a contemporary
Western (another reason purists will discard it) from a Poverty Row studio in
which Mountie Bob, on a fancy Palomino, comes across an annoying and rude woman
(Joan Woodbury, who took roles as an ‘exotic’ woman in various Roy Rogers,
Hopalong Cassidy and Johnny Mack Brown oaters) in her stranded convertible,
which he politely repairs notwithstanding her facetious and irritating remarks.
Then he finds that he is ordered to escort the tiresome dame up to a remote
camp. The car is soon left behind, though, and it becomes a straight Western
from there on in, with horses, guns and a gang of bad guys illegally mining
gold.
Bob gets his man
Or try Fort Vengeance (1953). It’s set in 1876. We know this because a
line of the dialogue tells us that Custer has been killed at Little Bighorn “a
few weeks ago.” In this version of ‘history’ Sitting Bull (Michael Granger)
raced for the Canadian border with his braves right after the battle, where he
immediately started stirring up trouble, trying to persuade the peaceable
Blackfoot under sage Chief Morris Ankrum that the redcoats are just as
perfidious as the bluecoats and the warpath is the only answer. James Craig
will save the day though. The Mountie Inspector is frightfully, frightfully
English, played by Reginal Denny, from Surrey, who would be the dastardly
Sir Harry in
Cat Ballou. It’s all in a quite nice Cinecolor, in Corrigan Ranch, California
locations. Good old Lesley Selander was at the helm. He was good at action so
there’s a fair bit of gallopin’ and shootin’. There’s a villainous
French-Canadian, Luboc (Peter Camlin), who takes Carey in on his scam, which
causes all the trouble. There’s a last-reel brotherly showdown, enabling Chief
Ankrum to announce sonorously that “There will be peace!” Phew.
All
those Yukon/Klondike pictures
The
gold strike in the 1890s was manna from heaven for Hollywood. Of course a lot
of the activity was on the Alaska side of the border and since the Tsar’s
basement sale, when Mr. Seward picked up the territory for 2 cents an acre,
Alaska was American. We can’t count those movies as Canada Westerns. All those
different versions of The Spoilers,
for example. Or John Wayne going North to Alaska in 1960. Mae West was Klondike
Annie for Raoul Walsh in 1936 and there were many Klondike movies set in
Alaska.
But
the Yukon itself, the Canadian province hived off from the Northwest
Territories in 1898, that was a magnet for Hollywood too. There was Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on TV but
big-screen Westerns or semi-Westerns were abundant. Charles Starrett went North of the Yukon in 1939. Monogram put
out several Yukon pictures starring Kirby Grant, like Trail of the Yukon (1949), Yukon
Gold (1952) and Yukon Vengeance
(1954). The studio also had Queen of the
Yukon in 1940, and in 1944 RKO gave us Belle of the Yukon, Randolph Scott’s worst Western. And so it went on.
Then
there were all those White Fang movies. Jack London’s mutt first came to the
screen in a 1926 silent but he has been back often since. Decidedly, there has
been a call of the wild going on as far as the Yukon is concerned.
Jack's book was often filmed
Canadian
Canada
Of course Canadians have made Westerns too,
not just Hollywood oaters pretending to be there. Dan Candy’s Law (1974) aka for some odd reason Alien Thunder was an all-Canadian affair. It had Donald Sutherland, 39, post-MASH,
pre-Day
of the Locust, as Constable Dan Candy, determined to hunt down a
Cree, Almighty Voice (Gordon Tootoosis, whose first film this was) who had shot
down Candy’s pardner, Kevin McCarthy. Sutherland, in his first ever Western, is
at full steam. And Chief Dan George is in it, as Almighty Voice’s leader,
Sounding Sky. This was after Little Big Man and he hasn’t aged a bit. He looks well
under 100. He was a Canadian, of course. We have Québécois Jean Duceppe as the
Mountie Inspector, or Inspecteur, wiz a vary Franche accsont. His boss, the
Brit General, is a complete idiot. The direction, by another Quebecker, Claude
Fournier, is, however, very leisurely, not to say plain slow. Pursuit movies
are hard to pace and this one often moves slower than a walking horse. Really, Dan Candy’s Law is a Canadian attempt at
a real Western. We are in the West of North America at some time in the 1890s
and it is a straight revenge/chase plot in which a loner hunts an Indian. But
as the subject of this article is the American Western north of the border, we
had better not dwell on it.

A Western, withowt a dowt
Or the
likes of The Grey Fox
(1982), based on the true story of Bill Miner, who staged Canada's first train
robbery in 1904, or the comedy Gunless
(2010) in which American gunfighter the Montana Kid arrives in Canada where the
code of the West is not quite understood, or The Mountie (2011), a sort of Canadian spaghetti, if that’s not too
implausible, or Six Reasons Why (2007),
another spaghetti or post-spaghetti, or indeed several others. They are beyond
my current remit.
Refuge
Mexico was sometimes used as a refuge for
outlaws and such, and it was also a place where the classic Western idea of the
“little piece of land” could be found, that new frontier where you could settle
down and run a ranch unmolested. That wasn’t quite the case with Canada. Yes,
sometimes badmen did cross the northern border, or head for it, in an attempt
to escape the law but I have never seen a Western in which the hero and heroine
set off for Her Maj’s domains to start anew. They got close – you know, Montana
and such – but cowboys don’t really go any further.
Well, that’s all I have to say about Westerns
north of the border. Thanks for reading, if you got this far.