OVP: Northwest Passage (1940)

Film: Northwest Passage (1940)

Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan, Ruth Hussey

Director: King Vidor

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Walter Brennan: click here to learn more about Mr. Brennan (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

One of my favorite jokes about Walter Brennan, and I want to say I heard it as an introduction Robert Osborne did on TCM to Kentucky a few years back, was about how you never entirely knew what age Brennan would be playing onscreen.  Brennan's big break in the mid-1930's in Barbary Coast, followed by him cementing his status as a valuable character actor in his Oscar-winning turn in Come and Get It, happened just after he had turned 40.  But most of his career was spent playing old men.  He didn't have all of his teeth due to an accident on a film set in 1932 (how he lost his teeth is hard to confirm-some say it was in a fight on a set with another actor, other stories blame a kick in the mouth from a mule), and his thinning hair made him look older than his age.  As a result, most of the roles that Brennan would become well known for in the thirty years when he was beyond being an extra & instead was a highly-billed (though never top-billed) character draw in movies would be playing older than he actually was, including Northwest Passage, where he plays a mentor role of sorts to Robert Young (our star in May!), who was just a decade younger than Brennan in this movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Northwest Passage is a fictionalized version of the real-life figure Major Robert Rogers (Tracy), who in 1940 was quite well-known thanks to the novel that this book is adapted from (Kenneth Roberts' book Northwest Passage, largely forgotten today, was the second bestselling book of 1937 behind only Gone with the Wind).  The film starts with a disgraced Langdon Towne (Young), after being kicked out of Harvard seminary as he wants to become a painter, joining the military unwittingly along with his friend Hunk Mariner (Brennan).  At this point, while they are critical players, it's Rogers who becomes the main headliner (this is MGM in 1940-you put Spencer Tracy in your movie, he's going to get the biggest part).  The movie follows them as they do raids alongside the Mohawk tribe against the French, but really the biggest problem for the soldiers is that they're starving and going mad with hunger (in some cases, quite literally) in the middle of the woods.  They finally reach the fort they are seeking, and at the end of the movie start a new adventure-seeking out "Detroit" and the famed Northwest Passage.

The movie is fascinating for a variety of reasons.  For starters, they only use half of Roberts' novel, and the studio clearly intended to make a sequel to the film, assuming it would be a hit in the same way that Gone with the Wind was (to the point where they billed it as "Book 1" on the title card).  However, the high production cost ultimately made it less-than-profitable even though it grossed a lot of money, and the sequel never appeared.  The film also attracted a lot of attention for its gross depiction of American Indians, including a raid on a sleeping American Indian village that results in one of the soldiers later attempting cannibalism on one of the deceased American Indians that they killed in the raid out of hunger.  Putting aside the Hays Code for a second (I am stunned the cannibalism was able to stay in this movie), this is hard to forgive & much like Song of the South, it wasn't a byproduct of our eyes today-it was criticized at the time too.

With that aside, there are aspects of Northwest Passage that are easier to recommend.  The film's river chain scene is the most famous sequence in the movie, and a great tribute to practical effects in early 1940's Hollywood, where they literally have one of the most realistic studio tanks rushing through a band of extras (plus stars Tracy, Young, & Brennan) as they attempt to fjord a river that would surely have drowned the men in real life.  The movie's cinematography, which was Oscar-nominated is gorgeous, a sea of green & brown as it was primarily shot outdoors in Idaho rather than in a studio lot (despite the above photo, which was one of the only good ones I could find with Brennan in it, the movie is shot in beautiful Technicolor), and it pays off with lush vistas for the actors to parade through.  The acting is solid too, particularly Tracy (who plays Rogers rightfully as a bit of a jackass) and Brennan.  Brennan would win an Oscar for his evil Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner that year (generally considered to be the best of his three Oscar wins), and he was on something of a role as he plays Hunk as sensitive, washed-up, and dare I say it...a little bit queer?  There's a scene where Brennan & Young are cuddled up and Young is talking about his girl back home that feels a bit gay to my Celluloid Closet eyes decades later.