The “very special” movie that reminds Martin Scorsese of his childhood
Anticipation is building for Martin Scorsese to deliver his epic western crime drama movie The Killers of the Flower Moon, an upcoming project starring the likes of Leonardo Di Caprio, Robert De Niro and Brendan Fraser, amongst several other stars. We’ve yet to see the legendary director take on the western film genre, and Hollywood is buzzing with excitement.
The movie will tell of the murders that took place in the 1920s in a Native American tribe called the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after oil was found on their land. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of film, Scorsese will likely have been inspired by some of his favourite western movies of old.
There looks to be one western movie that Scorsese admired the most, though. He once wrote: “Take Canyon Passage, an example of the short-lived but very interesting sub-genre of the ‘noir western’ and a picture that’s very special to me. It’s one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the western genre ever made.”
Canyon Passage is Jacques Tourneur’s 1946 western starring Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward and Brian Donlevy. It tells of love triangles and a Native American uprising as adapted from a novel of the same name by Ernest Haycox.
“When you think of ‘westerns’, you immediately picture the plans or the desert, cast space that stretch on and on for miles,” Scorsese noted. “But this film, Tourneur’s first in colour, is set in a small town in the mountains of Oregon, and it is lush, green, muted, and rainy (one of the first scenes in the movie shows the cramped main street of Portland turned into a muddy bog by a downpour).”
The director continued: “Even the open spaces in this movie are just small mountain clearings. If you study Canyon Passage carefully, you’ll see that Tourneur constantly composes diagonally into small places, showing people walking up or down inclines, and it gives you the feeling that this is a real settler’s town.”
Canyon Passage was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Song’ for ‘Old Buttermilk Sky’ by Hoagy Carmichael and Jack Brooks, which actually arrives in one of the first shots in the movie. It’s also a moment that Scorsese remembers very fondly.
“Carmichael is singing a song as he slowly rides his donkey up the steep little main drag of the town – it’s repeated in the end, a song that instantly transports me back to my childhood whenever I hear it,” he said. “And it embodies the muted, understated beauty of the entire film.”
Check out the film’s trailer below.
