Canadian Pacific (1949)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) The nice thing about the cultural appropriation debate is that unless you’re a white male Los Angeles-based filmmaker (and even then…), I can guarantee you that there’s at least one movie out there that takes your culture and gets it wrong. Even Canadians, so undistinguishable from Hollywood types as to silently invade their ranks, can point to a rather remarkable body of work from major studios treating Canadian history in weird and inappropriate ways. The Rose-Marie films (especially the first one) remain among the worst of those Hollywood-takes-on-Canada films, but Canadian Pacific does have a loopiness of its own. Never an attempt to create a Canadian western, it’s more like the screenwriter got hold of a children’s Canadian history book and thought it would make a different first act to an otherwise unremarkable western. Never mind the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway — an entire set of Canadian values are quickly thrown overboard as our hero (Randolph Scott) shoots down trappers, “Indians” (no relation with First Nations; all relations to Hollywood racist clichés) and fur monopolists and you’ve got the usual Western tropes playing out north of the border. The lower-cost colour cinematography (in Cinecolor, whose investigation will take you down a rabbit hole of alternative colour systems) does better justice to authentic Canadian landscapes than a black-and-white version would have. Alas, by the time the film gets down to business once it’s done explaining how Canadians are so different from Americans, it quickly becomes a very ordinary western, whose lack of qualities makes cultural appropriation even worse. Canadian Pacific may be worth a few laughs, but those laughs quickly stop once it starts portraying First Nations people as cruel and childish — get that out of here. I do believe that there’s a great movie to be made about how Canada united itself through two contiguous steel tracks — but it’s going to be made in Canada, and it will reflect the values of this nation rather than the dubious ones of another.