Canyon Passage. 1946. USA. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Screenplay by Ernest Pascal, based on the novel by Ernest Haycox. With Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward, Brian Donlevy, Patricia Roc, Ward Bond. DCP. Restored by Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation. 92 min.
Between his cycle of Val Lewton horror films and great noirs of the early 1950s, Jacques Tourneur made this Oregon Territory Western, one of the relatively few large-scale Technicolor productions of his career, and one that shows what he could do with color the way his earlier films showed what he could do with shadow. Edward Cronjager’s photography is deliberately unspectacular. The greens are deep and dense, the settlements rough-hewn and muddy, the Pacific Northwest rendered as something not quite tamed. Dana Andrews plays a freighter caught between loyalties to a gambling-addicted friend (Brian Donlevy) and feelings for the woman (Susan Hayward) his friend intends to marry.
The plot turns on a gold theft and a murder, but the film is really concerned with the social mesh of a frontier community, its dependencies, jealousies, and provisional solidarities. Hoagy Carmichael wanders through the film as a kind of folk chorus, singing songs that comment obliquely on the action. The final siege sequence, methodical and unglamorous, carries the quiet authority that runs through all of Tourneur’s best work.