North to Alaska (Henry Hathaway, 1960)

I was convinced this was a near-masterpiece when I first saw it about twenty or so years ago. Today it reads as little more than a solid western, with John Wayne and Stewart Granger pawing at Capucine for 122 minutes and Ernie Kovacs waiting for a paycheck. But its value to me has increased in that it provides more ballast against an argument of Pauline Kael's, from her infamous 1963 essay "Circles and Squares," that has always bugged me: "Movie-going kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I've talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore" (15). It doesn't matter if she actually talked to kids about these films; she chose to center them as the prime audience for North to Alaska because the film does as well. It courts pre-teen boys with cartoon sound effects during fight scenes and an older-brother surrogate in Fabian who plays a horndog teenager competing with Wayne and Granger for Capucine. But it's the verb "knows" that annoys suggesting it is somehow preordained that North to Alaska is superior to Hatari! in entertainment value or art or even auteurist credentials. And with no further evidence about either film's value provided, the statement just sits there in all its crankiness. It feeds into Kael's own theory about entertainment, developed more diffusely throughout her writing but no less a theory than auteurism, as an unpretentious, often gritty/violent, male-oriented aesthetic register. That entertainment can take many other forms doesn't concern her, at least not in this essay. In short, I still prefer Hatari!; its discursive drift and lax attitude towards the three-act structure provide plenty of entertainment for me and perhaps for the millions of moviegoers who made it the #7 highest-grossing film of 1962 in America. 

Grade: B+