THE FILM
FILM DIRECTOR: Henry Hathaway
SCREENWRITER: John Lee Mahin, Martin Rackin, Claude Binyon, Wendell Mayes uncredited), Ben Hecht (uncredited)
FILM STARS: John Wayne, Stewart Granger, Ernie Kovacs, Fabian, Capucine, Mickey Shaughnessy, Karl Swenson, Kathleen Freeman, John Qualen
COUNTRY: USA
THIS BOOK
AUTHOR: Frank Brennand (Eric Lambert)
TYPE: Novelization
PUBLISHER: Four Square
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1961
COUNTRY: Great Britain
COVER: Paperback
THE ORIGINAL BOOK
ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Ladislas Fodor
YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1939
ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The Birthday Gift (play)
NOTES
GENRE: Western
WORDS: The word went out and a number of screenwriters turned in an adapted screenplay based on a 1939 play (which I haven’t read … can’t even find). When it came time to do a film tie-in, I assume the play couldn’t be dusted down because it is too different – it is a Hungarian play so I assume is not set in Alaska and by the sounds of it, it is a drawing room comedy or comedy of manners. That would throw off those looking to renew the excitement of the film. Some film tie-in novels are drastically different from their subsequent films but I think this would be a horse too far (to mix idioms). Accordingly, this novelization seems to follow the film closely. I will have to re-read it to see how close. Many of the scenes in the film were improvised on set as the script wasn’t ready for satisfactory filming at the start of the production. Likewise, being an English paperback, I’m not sure the author had access to the original written script as many commissioned writers do. Interestingly, the author, Frank Brennand, is a pseudonym for Australian author Eric Frank Lambert. As Brennand he did novelizations (no doubt to pay the bills) and as Lambert he wrote war novels and action (first from a left wing, then right wing perspective … by the 50s disillusion with communism seems to be normal amongst writers).
I love this film. I have watched it many times. It’s like comfort food. It is one of the earliest (if not the earliest) John Wayne film I recall watching as a kid. It’s two stories. One about gold mining and claim jumping in Alaska at the turn of the last century (much like the novel, and Wayne’s earlier film, The Spoilers) and a sex (well, “romantic”) comedy about misunderstandings, women, and the different types of men who pursue them. Each man in the cast is a different “type” of man. There is the one looking for love and family (Granger), the one who wants women’s company but doesn’t want to get married (Wayne), the youth looking to discover the joys of women (Fabian), and there is the cad (Kovacs). The film works on different levels (comedy, adventure, action, male female relationships) and on different age groups (my kids thoroughly enjoyed it, as I did as a kid, but adults get something extra out of it) and genders (women seem to enjoy it on another level). Everyone in the cast plays well and seem to be having fun. Fabian (who is great) has his best role, Kovacs plays the character (he played elsewhere) beautifully, Granger is energetic and straddles the westerns and swashbucklers he played often well, John Wayne is hilarious (he was much underrated in comedy), and Capucine is stunning and totally believable as the woman being chased.
I might have to go watch it now, again.
LINKS
TRAILER
MUSIC
the theme song by Johnny Horton and one that often gets sung in the shower
For many years I misheard the lyrics as ‘North to Alaska, you’re going the Russia Zone’
Well, they bought it from the Russians so perhaps you were channeling your inner historian, assuming you weren’t channeling words that bare some sort of sexual metaphor