Canyon Passage (1946, Jacques Tourneur) (Patreon)

70/100

"What's your idea of a friend?"
"Any man, I suppose, who believes as I do that the human race was a horrible mistake."

That exchange would leap out of virtually any context, but it's especially noteworthy here—spoken by a very minor character whose stated nihilistic worldview doesn't affect the narrative in any significant way. An odd choice for a throwaway moment, and I found myself returning to it as Canyon Passage, which struck me as sprawling and unfocused for much of its first half, gradually coalesced into a horror show coated with a veneer of conventional studio optimism. Not that the film doesn't exhibit signs of perversity early on, mind you. Love triangles are commonplace, but a man razzing his best friend about the latter's weak-ass kisses and then, when challenged to do better, planting a long steamy one on the dude's girlfriend (to which she responds by telling her fella "You brought it on yourself" and taking her leave)...can't say I see that on the regular. (The strangeness is compounded by a lack of any rancor between the two men immediately afterward, as if that display hadn't been indisputable evidence that the romantic status quo is unsustainable.) But I was nonetheless unprepared for just how ugly things eventually get, with blissfully innocent settlers butchered before our eyes and the ostensible hero casually revealed as a hypocrite whose evidentiary standards shift when it's a pal who's (rightfully) accused. My notes follow a hilarious progression from "still plotless, intention murky" to "toxic restlessness?" to "random dysfunction overload" to "FUBAR." 

By the end, I'd been won over, though it still feels as if the film is struggling to pretend that tomorrow is another day even as it secretly agrees with Jack Lestrade, the misanthrope quoted above. Its twin romances, in particular, get resolved much too tidily; I'm invariably annoyed when someone who's jilted conveniently has another paramour waiting in the wings, assuring us that nobody's getting badly hurt here. Renders the heartbreak meaningless, which is acceptable in a comedy but comes across as patronizing in a drama. And of course this is one of the zillion westerns that requires stomaching Hollywood's racist conception of Native Americans (though the film makes a point of having their climactic massacre be retaliation—however disproportionate—for Bragg's lustful murder). All of that's Ed, it wouldn't surprise me if a second viewing proved revelatory, since I spent so much of the first half uncertain about what kind of film this is, awaiting a straightforward narrative hook that never quite emerges. (Instead, multiple threads get subtly interwoven.) Andrews struck me as a tad stolid here, and Hayward seems to have stronger chemistry with Donlevy...but perhaps that's all by design, and this is a case in which ignoring the apparent restoration of order pays dividends. Just so long as that doesn't entail ignoring Hoagy Carmichael, who really should have been used as an actor more frequently—he was more than good enough to be regularly cast on a non-musical basis. 

X factor: Tourneur in color still seems fundamentally wrong to me. This is the third example I've seen (others are Wichita and The Flame and the Arrow), and while none of them looks at all bad—and Canyon Passage is impressively devoted to varying shades of brown—there's just no comparison to his monochrome work, which achieves a truly startling clarity of purpose in nearly every shot. Hard for a colorblind viewer like myself to speak definitively on this subject, but while it's possible that I'm missing something in the Technicolor pictures, it's very hard for me to believe that they're in the same league visually as Cat People or Out of the Past or I Walked With a Zombie*. Feels as if he's been stripped of a superpower. 

* Nicholas Musuraca was the cinematographer on two of those, so I guess you could make a case for him. But Zombie was shot by someone else, and while I haven't seen that film in too many years, I still vividly recall what it looks like.