This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

The Worst Film Ever

Fresh and Exciting

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

An adventure movie from the early 50s, with dazzling locations set (according to the data) in the Grand Teton Mountains of Wyoming. Stewart Granger is a French trapper. If the producers knew what "grand tetons" meant in French, well, no movie would ever be made there. One of the locations is Jenny Lake in the National Park. I like Jenny Lake. I caught several cut throat trout there. I'm only adding that note because I knew you were dying to know.Buckskin-clad Granger visits the town to enjoy himself. He picks up a saloon girl, Cyd Charisse, a half-breed Chippewa, and takes her to the mountains in his canoe, as who wouldn't, along with an ugly and duplicitous roughneck whom Granger accidentally kills. Constable Wendell Corey is ordered by Segeant Preston of the RCMP to dogsled up into the snow-veined Rockies and bring back his man. Corey does find Granger and they begin their trek towards civilization but the journey is frought with every hazard that the thought of the untamed north Canadian woods brings to mind -- avalanches, wolves, rapids. Cyd Charisse has little to do. Her hair style is ill suited and makeup has turned her face and the face of all the other Indians purple. The Chippewa lived nowhere near Alberta's Peace River but no matter. Granger is the boistrous, hard living frontiersman, expansive, always cheerful and never overly sentimental. As the RCMP constable, Corey is his opposite. Quiet, deliberate in his movements, determined -- oozing unction and morality. Surprisingly, Corey does all right in what could have been an extremely pedestrian role.Overall, the film is typical of adventure movies of the period. Kind of fun, shot in alluring settings, and sometimes positively exciting.

A very fine adventures movie with a great Stewart Granger ,an actor so nice that even when he tries to become nasty we don't believe him.The fifties were his heyday,with such exciting works as "Moonfleet" "the prisoner of Zenda" or "the last hunt"."The wild north" shows Granger at the top of his game: with a mediocre actor,the character would have been trite.Wendell Corey's portrayal seems monotonous by comparison.Granger turns what could have been another cop-and-prisoner movie into an endearing absorbing story: it may have inspired Nicholas Ray for some of the scenes between Anthony Quinn and Peter O'Toole in "the savage innocents" .In the wild north, White is everywhere.This is white madness,says Jules Vincent ,a white madness which kills the minister and drives the constable crazy.Jules shows himself a real shrink who uses a real shock therapy: Pedley lost his reason in the snow,he recovers it in the white swirls of the river.Cyd Charisse is a dancer extraordinaire but as an Indian she is...well...Andrew Marton shows much tenderness in the scenes with the cat or when he films a boy's smile when he gets a chocolate bar.

Stewart Granger is a woods wise French Canadian trapper who's killed a man and Wendell Corey is the rookie Mountie sent to bring him back for trial.Problem is that this is Granger's ballpark they're playing in and it's one long journey back to some semblance of civilization. But strange as it may seem, Corey proves his mettle and a strange respect grows between both men.Granger and Corey have good chemistry between them, they'd have to or the film would be unwatchable. MGM put in some good action sequences involving wolves attacking their camp and a breathtaking whitewater canoeing challenge. The Wild North also features good location photography in some rugged regions of Idaho serving as the Canadian northwest. Oh, and there's Cyd Charisse who dances not a step as a beautiful Indian woman with a thing for Granger. Reason enough right there to watch the Wild North.

TCM just showed The Wild North today, in a version that had closed captioning added and looked as if it was digitally remastered since its last broadcast on TCM some years ago. Maybe Time-Warner will finally release the DVD of the movie in the near future. MGM in the early fifties turned out a series of high quality star vehicles, which were taken for granted then. With its small cast, The Wild North is like another movie of the period, The Naked Spur, which also deals with bringing a prisoner in. The Wild North has fine location photography in Idaho, a script that moves along and even some photographic effects courtesy of A. Arnold Gillespie. By 1956, with the forced sale of its Loew's theaters, the firing of Dore Schary as head of production and the end of contract system for studio talent, MGM went into a slow death spiral. There would be no more studio pictures like The Wild North, as MGM cut its output and filled a big chunk of its slate of releases with independent productions and movies made overseas. But at least I now have The Wild North on DVD, recorded from today's broadcast, as a souvenir from a vanished era in Hollywood history.