Perfectly adorable

A lot of fun.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

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.

I am surprised that no videos or DVDs have been made of this movie. Certainly one of the best Stewart Granger movies I have ever seen (second only to Scaramouche).

CHAPTER 1 (written in December 2002):Wendell Corey is a Canadian Mountie, which captures Stewart Granger and together with an Indian girl (the beautiful Cyd Charisse) will bring him to justice, but he has to go through an almost impossible journey. On the way, Corey, apparently loses his mind. I saw this film when it was released, I was about 10 years old, and I used to consider it the best film I had ever seen. I wonder how I would react to it seeing it nowadays, but I'm sure I could not be that wrong. CHAPTER 2 (written in March 2006) I saw this film recently and it did not measure up to my expectations. I still think it is a good film, but what most impressed me the first time I saw it were the colors and the beauty of Canada. With time, all films were made in color and my geographical hunger for the North was satisfied by many other films about the same region and even further up.

I first saw The Wild North when I was just fresh back from Korea in 1953. I was so impressed by the story and the scenery that I returned to the little movie theater down the block to see it three more times before it was replaced on the bill. The action is terrific and the scene where the wolves attack Wendell Corey and Stewart Granger makes your heart pound. The setting is breath taking and the ending is perfect. The Movie makers paid great attention to detail, right down to the Tea Cartons and the Tobacco packages. I loved it. If they ever release it again, I'll see it for the fifth time.