Rent The Far Country (1954)

Half Baked Alaska - The Far Country review by Count Otto Black

Anthony Mann's westerns starring James Stewart have such a high reputation as classics that they're almost beyond criticism, but the fact is, they're not all equally good. In this very slow and mostly actionless movie, James Stewart's selfish, unlikeable anti-hero spends the entire film being gradually persuaded to care about other people by assorted overwritten stereotypes we're supposed to find wacky and lovable, including Walter Brennan, who must have been the allegedly funny but actually rather annoying sidekick in ten times as many westerns as any other one-note character actor. And even that relentless barrage of quirky niceness would have failed if, just as our thoroughly disinterested hero was about to ride out of a movie that was almost finished anyway, the bad guys hadn't shot his only friend in the back, giving him a very belated incentive to do what a man's gotta do in the last five minutes.

The inevitable romantic subplot is more complicated than usual, but so peculiar that in the absence of very much proper western action, I kept being distracted by the thought that maybe the entire film was a massive joke in which the cast and crew all knew the main character was gay but they never told the studio bosses. Almost everyone seems to be oddly asexual, apart from the two women who set their sites on James Stewart, both of whom struggle to get his attention because what he really wants to do is ride away from them both and settle down in a cosy little cottage with Walter Brennan - yes, really! By the way, one of those women spends the entire movie dressed as a boy. She's also one of the worst actresses you'll ever see in an A-movie, has a foreign accent that makes Inspector Clouseau sound authentic, and plays her part as if she's slightly retarded. The chemistry between her and James Stewart is so non-existent that they never kiss because it would just look creepy.

The idea of a totally self-centered protagonist who eventually has to admit he's a real hero after all would become a mainstay of spaghetti westerns when they were invented almost a decade later, but in 1954 it was well ahead of its time, and they were still tinkering with it. Here, the balance between the ingredients is badly wrong, and James Stewart frequently seems to be in the wrong movie. And they really could have done with a couple more gunfights. Strangely, the same director and the same star made a very similar film two years earlier called "Bend Of The River", and it worked far better. It looks as though everybody mistakenly thought that the formula would work better still with an even more reluctant borderline amoral hero, and didn't realize that once they'd gone too far over that line, they'd have to invent a whole new genre.

Still good - The Far Country review by sb

FILM & REVIEW The 4th in the series of Westerns that Stewart made with Anthony Mann and although it’s fine on it’s own it doesn’t quite scale the heights of the others. This time Stewart plays Jeff arriving with 200 head of beef in Seatle and hooks up with his partner Ben (Brennan). Jeff is accused of murder so high tails it out on a riverboat upstream where he encounters Ronda (Roman). Arriving in Spokane he runs his cattle through town disrupting a hanging and annoys the local judge Gannon (Mcentire) who finds him not guilty of the murders but fines him the entire herd for the disruption. Jeff is hired by Ronda to help take food over the mountains to feed the gold rush in Yukon - he agrees but it’s all a ruse and he doubles back and steals back his own cattle. Together they head into Dawson which is over the Canadian border where Gannon can’t touch him. It’s a much changed town with the gold rush with money and trouble and killing on the rise. Jeff sells his cattle to Ronda and sets up his own gold claim with Ben but it’s not long before Gannon and his killers arrive to take over the town. Jeff has an interesting character arc in that he is a man on his own , minding his own business and won’t get involved as it’s nothing to do with him but as things develop he is forced to question this philosophy as events escalate. As I say it’s fine as it is but does tend to meander a bit in the middle and there is a love triangle and romance that kinda gets in the way although the way the finale is built is very good - so still 4/5

Ok western - The Far Country review by GI

Like John Wayne and John Ford, James Stewart had a filmmaking relationship with director Anthony Mann and they made a series of westerns together in the 1950s. This one has the usual Stewart characterisation of a hero with a dark edge. The Far Country is marked by the location filming in the snowy north on the edge of a glacier and the cinematography is quite amazing. But overall this is a standard western in the classic mould, hugely popular in the day but a little dated even though still revered today. Stewart is the no nonsense cattleman who is heading into Canada to go gold prospecting, the cattle he intends to use to fund this are stolen by a corrupt lawman (John McIntire) which sets the path towards violence. There's a couple of love interests and Walter Brennan is the sidekick playing a role he perfected in many other westerns. An interesting example of the Mann/Stewart western.