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AT THE MOVIES |
 Jim laughed all the way through this classic Hollywood musical set in the Canadian wilderness. You see, it was filmed at Big Bear Lake in California. |
American and British films
often weren't accurate
of TheColumnists.com
All I ever needed to
know about my country of Canada I learned through movies.
Growing up in Toronto in the 1950s, I had exactly one Canadian
TV Channel (CBC) to help me out and it was packed with home grown
country music shows, old Hollywood movies and TV shows from L.A.
Canadian TV drama existed, but it ran after my bedtime, although
I do remember catching snatches of such future Hollywood stars
(from Canada) as Lorne Green, Barry Morse and Bill Shatner.
My accumulated knowledge of Canadian history came from a bunch
of movies that circulated the neighbourhood burbs. Here's my
Top 10 list of the films that turned me into a proud Canadian:
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| I first saw this American movie at a revival at Toronto’s Beach movie palace in 1955. As a nine-year-old kid I just loved it--the blazing Technicolor, the brilliantly staged action scenes. Watching it decades later on TV, I realized much of it was filmed on the Paramount backlot with the actors in front of projected slides. As a rewrite of history, it’s hokey. Director Cecil B. DeMille blends the rebellions of 1871 and 1885 into one and, just for American audiences, plops Texas Ranger Gary Cooper (as "Dusty"Rivers) right into the action. Preston Foster and Robert Preston are the Mounties, but the real leader of the Rebellion, Louis Riel (Francis McDonald), gets a subordinate part behind the likes of scene stealers George Bancroft and Akim Tamiroff. I wonder what today’s Metis people think of Paulette Goddard speaking pidgin English and getting her bottom spanked. But I’ll still watch this one if it ever appears on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). |
 A poster for the French language version, which would have played on screens in Quebec. When first shown in the U.S., this film was known as "The Invaders." |
| This was the story of World War II Nazi U-Boat crewmen, whose boat is sunk off the Canadian coast, trying to escape into the then (pre-Pearl Harbor) U.S., which was still neutral territory. The reaction of Canadian audiences to this contemporary English film was instantaneous: They stood up and applauded. Never before had they seen themselves presented in true life scenes. Director Michael Powell shot most of the exteriors on actual locations and then returned to English sound stages for the interiors. Only one Canadian actor was featured: Raymond Massey as a soldier attempting to get over the Peace Bridge at Niagara Falls to the U.S. Watching it again recently I saw how theatrical Laurence Olivier was playing a fur trapper. Leslie Howard as a disillusioned pacifist seems equally dim, as if Ashley Wilkes had wandered in from the deep South and taken over his character. Glynis Johns replaced Elisabeth Bergner, who filmed her exteriors in Manitoba then refused to return to wartime Britain for interior shots. This saga picks up resonance as it goes across the dominion. I saw it first in a 1954 reissue and catch it every time it’s on TV. |
 Montgomery Clift as a priest carrying a dreadful secret. |
| I was seven or so when I first saw this Alfred Hitchcock thriller--at a kids’ matinee yet--at Toronto’s Century Cinema. I was very confused by this one. It was filmed in Quebec City where the lower town remains defiantly French. Monty Clift as a Catholic priest who cannot divulge a killer’s identity is as usual magnificently tortured. And the back story of his love for Anne Baxter (a peroxide blonde here) was well established. Only I got mixed up when most people spoke English and not French. When the chase gets underway, it’s exciting. But Karl Malden and Brian Aherne as French Canadians, well, I’m still confused 50 years later. Few of the habitants seem to speak French. |
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| I learned all about Nova Scotia when I first saw this English film at Toronto’s Odeon Danforth. Of course, decades later director Philip Leacock confessed to me it was all shot in Northern Scotland because filming on location in Nova Scotia was just too darned expensive. Taking another look see recently I still enjoyed the sheer simplicity of the tale of two young boys (Jon Whiteley and Vincent Winter) who find a baby and keep it for companionship. Duncan Macrae is their stern grandpa and the film looks at an isolated village facing challenges in 1900. Still a winner, but avoid the 1990 remake with Charlton Heston. |
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| I swear my dad took me to see this English film at Toronto’s Palace theater because a buddy (mistakenly) told him it was all about a fishing spree. Instead we sat down to a deeply engrossing World War II adventure about the only German P.O.W. who ever escaped Allied confinement to return to Germany and fight again. Posters outside blazed it was a “TRUE STORY!” OK, it’s true and very exciting after lieutenant Franz von Werra (Hardy Kruger) is transported to a camp in Canada. He escapes, makes his way to the St. Lawrence river and swims for freedom on the U.S. side. I’ve just watched this one again on DVD and it holds up, but imagine my disappointment to learn the Canadian scenes were entirely filmed in Switzerland. The Canadian side of the St. Lawrence was too heavily built up by 1957 to be used. |
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| I first saw "The Iron Curtain" in 1954. It was a theatrical reissue, but why did they run it at a kids’ matinee? It was the true story of communist Igor Gouzenko, played by Dana Andrews, who tried to defect to the West via Canada with secret documents during the Cold War. There wasn't much action for youngsters, so the kids ran up and down the aisles of the Crown cinema during its run. By then I was already watching the Army-McCarthy hearings from the Buffalo CBS-TV affiliate, so I was well versed in anti-Communists trying to stem the Red Peril. I remember shots of Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney as defectors running around darkened Ottawa streets, but I sort of forgot about the movie until a bizarre incident at the Toronto Star in the early 1980s. It was very late at night and as I was working on deadline I went into the Star canteen, which never closed, and spotted veteran reporter John Picton at the back of the restaurant interviewing the real Igor Gouzenko. And he didn’t look at all like Dana Andrews, I can tell you that. |
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| And now to "Great North" stories. Never liked them. I grew up in Toronto, which has a mixed forest, summers as hot and sticky as New York city, so what did I know of polar bears and the like? A host of Hollywood epics instructed me. I saw "Rose Marie" (1936) on TV and just laughed, It was photographed at Big Bear Lake in California. Same with "Call of The Wild" (1935), which was filmed in Bellingham, WA. I have no idea why I fixated on "Mrs. Mike" because it was just as hokey as the others. It was the true story of Katherine Mary Flannigan, a Boston woman who moved to the Canadian wilderness with her new husband, a Mountie. Those transparencies they used in the background to suggest "the bold north" didn’t seem authentic. I just think it was the diligent reporting of the daily facts of Mountie life . Having Hollywood stars as handsome as Evelyn Keyes and Dick Powell didn’t hurt either. |
 Novelist Morley Callaghan |
| Finally the day dawned! My first all Canadian feature! Aged 12, I ran to Toronto’s Towne cinema for this feature length anthology of four stories by Toronto novelist Morley Callaghan. And, boy, was I bored! Callaghan has since become a favorite novelist of mine. When I later delivered parcels for Eaton’s department store, I’d see him sitting on a park bench in Rosedale, but was afraid to introduce myself. But this one was like a string of overly long live TV dramas. I saw some familiar faces (and voices since Raymond Massey was the narrator): Don Borisenko, Beth Amos, John Drainie, Judy Welch. The film seems to have disappeared since then. Today I can’t remember much about it. |
 LEO G. CARROLL ...played a professor with kinky interests |
| I was determined to stick with Canadian-made films. I sampled this one in 1961. I sneaked into the theatre because this one was “R” rated by the Ontario censorship bureau as lewd and lascivious. When I heard that, I rushed to get in. This one was a sort of Canadian-style "The Chapman Report." Leo G. Carroll was a most elderly professor to be dabbling in sex surveys, I thought at the time. He narrated adult panel discussions of five kinky subjects. Well, kinky for me, I was just 15 or 16. They were titled Honeymoon (premarital sex), Homecoming (adultery), The Divorcee (promiscuous divorcees), Average Man (how does Mr. Suburban get sex), and Baby (abortion). Funny, but I remember very little of "One Plus One," except that I stopped eating my popcorn early from sheer embarrassment.. I think I really wanted to see this one because it represented the one picture comeback of June Duprez and I’d just seen her on TV with Sabu in "The Thief Of Bagdad." There were Canadians in the film who would later soar: Sharon Acker went to L.A. and prospered in movies and TV and Kate Reid reached the heights on the Broadway stage. But nobody has seen this clunker since 1961. It was that awful. |
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| I mention "Explosion" only because it was the first Canadian movie I covered as a critic. The topical subject matter: draft dodgers invade Canada and wreak havoc. Let’s see, I remember the Toronto premiere with Don Stroud getting up at a party and predicting co-star Gordon Thomson would be the next superstar. Well, it took awhile but Thomson finally hit it big in "Dynasty" in 1982 as Adam Carrington and has thrived on U.S. TV. In 1989, Canadian producers figured they needed some American names and so Stroud and Richard Conte were imported. The only thing I remembered from the premiere was the collected gasps from the invited audience at the bits of nudity. What did they expect? This one had a U.S. release via American-International, the studio of "drive-in" movies, and skin scenes were de rigeur. |
©2008 by Jim Bawden. This column first posted Oct. 13, 2008.
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