Although it contains many of the characteristic elements of the American western, Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946) avoids the usual formulaic structure. It is difficult to assess the nature of this film. It is a western. It has the plots of several different kinds of westerns, not to mention other sorts of films as well. It’s about homesteaders, about a small rustic town in the old northwest, about a complicated love story, about friendship, about rivals, about Hoagy Carmichael, about Indian raids, vigilante justice, and so on. The film touches on all these subjects, interweaving some and treating others almost in isolation. It’s more like a series of interconnected vignettes than a coherent, linear story.
Acting in this film is a strength: Dana Andrews as a Gary Cooperesque entrepreneur who likes to go his own way, Ward Bond, Susan Hayward, Andy Devine, a brief appearance by Burl Ives, and of course Hoagy Carmichael, who hangs around throughout the film singing songs that provide an out-of-context and somewhat inexplicable soundtrack. He’s a medieval minstrel singing Tin Pan Alley tunes in the Old West — make sense of that if you can. Devine is excellent as the patriarch of a family of homesteaders. Bond’s portrayal of an increasingly disturbed and threatening rogue is convincing.
The Technicolor cinematography is beautiful. Tourneur clearly appreciated the beauty of the American northwest. Only once or twice does one sense a set. Most of the outdoor scenes seem really to have been shot outdoors. Many of the indoor scenes, and scenes shot at night (there are many) are often dark and murky. The town is placed on the side of a hill in the woods. It looks like a real place and suggests what an old northwest frontier town would really have been like, though I don’t know whether the film portrays the town accurately.
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