Overlooked Movies: Northern Pursuit (1943)

I keep finding old movies that I’ve never seen, despite the prodigious amount of them I watched on TV when I was a kid. NORTHERN PURSUIT, made in 1943, is a World War II espionage adventure starring Errol Flynn as a Canadian Mountie battling Nazi spies and saboteurs, until a bad decision leads to him being kicked out of the RCMP in disgrace. Things go from bad to worse from there as, disillusioned by what’s happened to him, he’s recruited by the very spy ring he was trying to break up.

Okay, stop me right there if you’ve figured out the big plot twist. It’s certainly not hard to do, and the script doesn’t keep the viewer in the dark for very long, either. But as I’ve said many times before, it just doesn’t matter. The fun (and this movie is a great deal of fun) is in watching some top professionals go about spinning an exciting, entertaining yarn.

I wouldn’t say Errol Flynn is one of my favorite actors, but I’ve always liked him and his movies. Helmut Dantine is the head bad guy, and he’s as sleek and evil as you’d want him to be. There’s plenty of stalwart support from John Ridgley as a fellow Mountie, Gene Lockhart (a little miscast but effective as a Nazi spy), and Tom Tully as an RCMP inspector. Jay Silverheels, Tonto his own self, is supposed to be in the movie somewhere in a bit part, but I never spotted him.

The script is by none other than the old pulpster Frank Gruber, who really knew how to tell a story, and veteran screenwriter Alvah Bessie. It’s based on a story by another prolific pulp writer, Leslie T. White. I don’t know which of White’s stories was used as the source material, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was published originally in ARGOSY or ADVENTURE. And NORTHERN PURSUIT was directed by Raoul Walsh, who directed many pictures I liked a great deal, such as THE ROARING TWENTIES, DARK COMMAND, HIGH SIERRA, and WHITE HEAT. He’s another one who really knew how to tell an exciting story. I mean, just look at the guy! That’s what a two-fisted movie director should look like.

Not that NORTHERN PURSUIT is perfect. I thought the final showdown could have been a little more dramatic, and then the very end of the movie, Flynn’s last line, is so oddly wrong and tone-deaf, especially considering all the good notes the movie’s hit up until then, that I can only suspect it was included at the insistence of some studio executive overly enamored of his own cleverness. It’s jarringly out of place, and if you watch NORTHERN PURSUIT I think you should just pretend it ended ten seconds earlier than it actually did. And if you like World War II espionage adventure movies, you definitely should watch it. I enjoyed it a lot.