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Following Tourneur (Canyon Passage) and Lang (Rancho Notorious), Otto Preminger and the European eye in the old Northwest. The river supplies the forthright metaphor, "sometimes it's peaceful, and sometimes wild and free," the widowed farmer (Robert Mitchum) rides alongside it behind the opening credits. The evocation of a prospecting camp displays the complex style of long takes and multiple planes of action, there are tents in the mud and the estranged young son (Tommy Rettig) waiting with a note pinned to his jacket. The feller with a past wants nothing more than to "start with the ground and work up," the little boy is more inquisitive but just as unsentimental, thus the subtle rearrangement of Shane. The saloon singer (Marilyn Monroe) and her gambling beau (Rory Calhoun) drift by, the scoundrel departs and Indians attack and the makeshift family heads down the rapids in a raft. "You get somebody in trouble, you get right in it with 'em." The urbane examiner in the wilderness, Preminger by the riverbank complicating the Manichean morality of the Western. The hero is unbending in his sense of righteous vengeance, he also once shot a man in the back and stops just shy of rape in the woods. Between him and the girl who understands desperation mediates the tyke who loves both, integers in the CinemaScope equation. (The mix of location filming and process shots accentuates the mysterious feeling, going from Alberta foam to studio tank and back as if in a dream.) "White men chasing gold. Indians chasing white men. Army chasing the Indians... What are you chasing?" The ending recognizes Sirk's Take Me to Town, another émigré's perspective. With Murvyn Vye, Douglas Spencer, and Don Beddoe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |