Spencer Tracy is the real historical figure Major Robert Rogers, leader of an elite group of Rangers within the British Army during the French and Indian Wars of about 1760, known in Europe as the Seven Years' War. Everyone else in the army dresses in outlandish red coats, high feathered hats, stockings, dirndls, tutus and whatnot. Rogers' Rangers dress in fringed buckskin of forest green and they wear moccasins like the real woodsmen they are. Well, they might make room for ONE elitist. Robert Young has just been booted out of Harvard College, intent on becoming an artist. Tracy has no particular use for artists but he does need a map maker and he enlists Young, and Young's comic sidekick, the ever-irascible Walter Brennan. There is a long and perilous trip by longboats from New Hampshire up to the Canadian border, one of those trips in which we can't stop for any wounded men. There is a fierce battle in which the Rangers wipe out an entire village of Abenaki Indians. When the Rangers discover that the French have captured their boats, it means they must make a ten-day march without food across a mountain wilderness. Starving, they vote to break up into smaller parties. Two of the parties are captured and slaughtered by the hostile Indians loyal to the French. The pitiful remnants catch up with the main body, tattered in mind and body. The movie has been called "racist" and it really doesn't treat all the Indians fairly. At the same time, the tribes of the Northeast woodlands were tough customers, rough not only on white settlers but on their Indian enemies too. The butchery was expected on all sides. Tracy keeps promising them that when they reach their goal, Fort Wentworth, in the middle of nowhere, the British will be waiting for them with sides of beef, vegetables, hot buttered rum, arugula salad, and diverse configurations of sushi. "Come on, men!", Tracy keeps shouting. "It's only a thousand more miles! A Ranger can walk it on his hands!" Alas, when they reach Fort Wentworth, it's falling apart, deserted, overgrown with sagebrush (in the mountains of New England). Either the British Army is late for the appointment or Rogers' message to them never got through. "Plenty of good ROOTS here," Tracy declaims, waving his arms operatically, "and Moses went for 40 days without food or water. And we've got plenty of WATER. Buckets full of water!" The Rangers, too pooped to pop, sink to the ground. Just as Tracy is leading them in a final prayer, salvation arrives. It's interesting to consider this movie from the perspective of the audiences of 1940, from which the whole story must have seemed like a metaphor. The Rangers are Americans. We are the allies of the British. The Indians are brutal maniacs who butcher women and children. In 1940 Britain was in the middle of a great air battle with the brutal Nazis. America wasn't yet at war but our sympathies were clearly with the Brits. The movie doesn't show us any villainous Frenchmen. Why not? Because in 1940, the French had just been overrun by the German Army and shifted its government to Britain. How could the movie paint the French as "bad"? The friend of my friend is my friend. (There's a good explanation for this dynamic. Google "balance theory" or "Fritz Heider.") The performances are good. Most of the acting looks like acting, which was expectable in a Hollywood product of the time. But Walter Brennan is, as always, Walter Brennan; and Spencer Tracy could play anything from Mr. Hyde to Clarence Darrow. Ruth Hussey's appearance is brief and that's just as well. She's pretty bland. As a tale of adventure, this is unimpeachable. As a war story, it's unusual in that it focuses not on the usual things -- battles, banter, shoehorned cardboard romance -- but on physical fatigue, on the difference between hope and despair. (In this way it reminds me a little of Norman Mailer's novel, "The Naked and the Dead.") The plot is so good it showed up a few years later, morphed into a story of American paratroopers isolated behind Japanese lines, in Warners' "Objective Burma." Well worth catching, not just because it represents Hollywood at its craftsman-like best, but because it's like looking into a time capsule.
Review of Northwest Passage
