La loi du nord [The Law of the North] (1939)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) Following a viewing of Canadian Pacific immediately by a look at La loi du nord was probably a mistake, as it gave me a double dose of Canadian cultural appropriation by two different cultural hegemons: late-1940s Hollywood western clichés in the first case, late-1930s French exoticism in the other. Keep in mind that Canada occupies a strange place in the French-European imagination — often a wild frontier compared to the rigidity of French society, sometimes a gateway to the American continent, except in accented French. French-Europeans still consider French-Americans as cute colonials with a funny patois (I’ll tell you about my Paris trip some other day) and you don’t have to scratch deep to find hilarious misconceptions, such as igloos being a common type of dwelling in Quebec. As bad as those clichés are, they were far worse in the 1930s, and La loi du Nord clearly plays with those ideas. The plot has something to do with a New York businessman murdering his wife’s lover and escaping to the wilds of Canada, but viewers on this side of the Atlantic are likely to be more fascinated by how the country is portrayed by the European filmmakers (director Jacques Feyder being of Belgian origins). Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is that it features no French-Canadian accent and some curiously atypical mountains — something explained by how the film features only European actors… and was shot in Scandinavia. Eh. Plotwise, much of the film serves as a tragic romance between the belle of the film and three different suitors, with a rather tragic ending. Even in dispassionately looking at the film without commentary on Canadian cultural appropriation, it’s really not a great, and probably not even a good film — La loi du Nord tepid, badly justified and even more badly paced. But it’s good for a laugh or two.