CANYON PASSAGE (USA/1946)

Director Jacques Tourneur became famous for his poetic dramas of the supernatural billed as "horror" and given inappropriate titles by the studio for box-office's sake. Films like I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. He directed one of the classic film noirs, Out of the Past and a nifty iron-curtain thriller, Berlin Express. Familiarity with his remarkable career reveals a filmmaker as versatile as Howard Hawks. Period dramas like Stars in my Crown and westerns like Wichita and Canyon Passage are just as worthy of praise as the earlier films. Lamentably, to a large number of classic film aficionados, they remain unknown quantities.

Canyon Passage is his first color film, a Western as the title implies, set in 1856 Oregon with no canyons in sight (probably another studio-imposed title). Logan (Dana Andrews), a mule train owner, is robbed of a gold shipment while sleeping in a Portland hotel. He thinks the bandit was Honey Bragg, whom he believes had earlier killed two miners, though their murders were blamed on local Indians. Logan escorts Lucy (Susan Hayward), the fiancée of his friend George (Brian Donlevy), to the mining town of Jacksonville. They stop at the ranch of Ben Dance and his family. Logan gives a locket to Caroline, an English immigrant staying with the Dances, though Lucy doubts his serious intentions. Upon his arrival in Jacksonville, Lucy chastises George for his gambling, unaware that the problem is so severe that the banker is embezzling funds to cover his losses.

There's something of John Ford in Tourneur's rich depiction of communities, the forces that threaten to divide them and those that foster cohesion (the scene in which the whole pioneer community raise a cabin for a newly-wed couple is justly famous). Conflicts involving the nature of business and different approaches to justice are weaved into the plot gracefully. And of course, like every Tourneur picture, Canyon Passage displays his unique lighting schemes and masterful eye for frame composition. It's another beautiful and substantive film from a master filmmaker.