Wider Screenings film review - Breakheart Pass (1975: d. Tom Gries)

FILM FACTS

* The final film for legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt after a 50+ year in movie stuntsmanship.

* Breakheart Pass has a cult notoriety for a staged fight sequence between star Charles Bronson and former light heavyweight boxing prizefighter Archie Moore.

* The scene involving railroad cars being wrecked involved real railcars bought secondhand for the film: no model work was used so as to keep the scene as spectacular as possible for a Bronson movie.

BREAKHEART PASS (1975)
d. Tom Gries; pr. Jerry Gershwin, Elliot Kastner; scr. Alistair MacLean; ph. Lucien Ballard; m. Jerry Goldsmith; ed. Byron 'Buzz' Brandt; cast. Charles Bronson, Ben Johnson, Richard Crenna, Jill Ireland, Charles Durning, Ed Lauter, Bill McKinney, Sally Kirkland (95 mins)

It was in the 1970s that rugged actor Charles Bronson became a major star, primarily through successive spates of violent films that increasingly made him the epitome of the righteous vigilante..

As such, he was especially effective in several remarkable works made in tandem with British director Michael Winner (including the seminal Death Wish) and then with another British director, J. Lee Thompson, who would bring the actor’s dubious persona into the reactionary nihilism of his more misanthropic, less popular, 1980s work. In the midst of this transition from Winner to Thompson, however, Bronson made a number of both offbeat projects and mainstream action vehicles, splitting his career. Two of his more popular action-adventure movies, which also traded on his co-star / wife Jill Ireland, were Breakheart Pass and Breakout, both directed by Tom Gries. The first of these was a noted success, boasting a screenplay by esteemed Scottish novelist Alistair MacLean then at the end of a streak of popularity which saw his popular fiction transferred into such successful screen adaptations as The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Fear is the Key, Golden Rendezvous and Force Ten from Navarone. Yet, Breakheart Pass also remains a noteworthy entertainment for its peculiar combination of genres and as an odd, unappreciated point of transition to the hit adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Breakheart Pass begins at a frontier train station. A number of troops (led by Ed Lauter) are en route to a remote army Fort, where there is apparently some trouble. Traveling with them is Richard Crenna, adamant that the train gets there without any undue delay.

Crenna is accompanied by a woman (Jill Ireland), the only woman aboard the train. Soon a gambler (Charles Bronson) arrives and is recognized as a wanted man. He is apprehended and with a sheriff (Ben Johnson) secures a place aboard the train, over Lauter’s objections. Only Ireland seems to have any concern for the humane treatment of this new prisoner. Under pressure to keep the train moving at all costs, Crenna reveals that these troops are replacements for those decimated by an apparent diphtheria epidemic at the Fort. Once they get underway, Bronson (who has had some medical training) is released from his confines and things begin to go awry when it seems that someone aboard the train is a murderer. When a horrific action decimates the unfortunate troop of soldiers, Bronson begins to do some investigating of his own, gradually uncovering a conspiracy involving some of the people on the train, whose motives are not all they seem. When Bronson looks at the cargo of medical supplies he realizes a horrifying possibility and begins to suspect that their destination, the title location, will be the site of an impending clash of agendas.

Breakheart Pass is most delightful in its combination of the differing literary traditions of Alistair MacLean and Agatha Christie, re-positioned as a Western. It is this offbeat generic hybrid which makes the film ultimately a distinctive, if minor, popular entertainment very much concerned with the nature of paranoia and deception.

Yet both MacLean and Gries slyly insist on a historical context for this mounting paranoia. Thus, the film is set at a time when the West was being tamed but when there still persisted men resolute in their outlawry and moral chaos. The mark of time in Breakheart Pass is that this criminal element has now progressed to the point where it is organized enough to attempt a major undertaking, a “caper” as another 1970s genre would have it, in the process threatening to undermine the progress of Patriarchal law and order. By implication thus, the advent of organized criminal enterprise in the Frontier has necessitated a larger, federal governmental intelligence agency to uncover the threat within. This sense of the evolution of the nation in a constant action and reaction dynamic adds an ironic context to this lean, efficient action adventure and ties neatly into the dominant concern for law and order in 1970s American society. Hence, it is the constant, dutiful reaction of the forces of law and order to the threat of an impending chaos which determines the film’s emphasis on exposing deception.

In Breakheart Pass thus, the popular genres and issues of the 1970s were conflated into a distinctive and expertly mounted adventure, as much a distillation of popular entertainment forms as it is a sly comment on the underlying instability behind a tentative American social compact (as arguably represented by the microcosm aboard the train).

It is a mark of this film’s cleverness that it actually roots these then-contemporary concerns in the chaotic origins of the nation itself so that there is, in much of it, a palpable but almost mythic sense of oozing malevolence, the idea of an unknown chaotic entity (or entities) controlling the fate of the people aboard the train: a destiny greater than they realize perhaps. Bronson’s struggles are thus meant to both re-impose Patriarchal justice and to reveal the nature of conspiracy to those who maintain a faith in the appearance of things. This gulf between appearances and actuality births a mounting paranoia which, the more it progresses, threatens to undermine the faith in American enterprise, which Bronson is symbolically poised to redress. Despite the dissection of interpersonal relationships in a situation of confinement, the gradual restoration of symbolic trust and order is the overriding concern here. Director Gries never lets this override sheer entertainment value, however, and the result is perhaps a superior, assembled “product” well aware of its popular place.

The visual transfer is serviceable, available in both fullscreen and anamorphic widescreen versions. Sadly, clarity levels remain infused with grain, although there is a fine sense of nostalgia and history in the use of distorted, sepia-like tones running under the opening credits.

The print shows signs of wear, often feels murky and the frame edges show some fading. That said, the film does feature an unusual depiction of early railroad station society – making for a neat evocation of the train’s role in the advance of the American social compact (the underlying conceit in this film). The sense of confinement aboard the train is well established, as is the sense of impeded motion. Frequent cutaways to the surrounding landscape further the sense of a journey into increasingly inhospitable terrain. The mounting snow cover thus enhances the feeling of isolation and the stop-start rhythm of the train journey itself is used to pace the narrative. Constriction motifs abound and there is a nice contrast between the cramped train interiors and the dangerous vastness of the natural landscape beyond it – hence the compositions involving windows, exits and entrances. A fight atop the moving train (between Bronson and onetime boxer Archie Moore) is a definite highlight, but it is the mounting paranoia and the frustrations of a stop-start journey that work best. The film is not as violent as that usually associated with Bronson.

The sound transfer is in Dolby Digital mono only. Within those limitations it makes good use of the expected locomotive and associated train sounds. Indeed, aural rhythms nicely mirror the unfolding narrative dilemmas, uncertainties and considerably aid the sense of frustrated progression: American history as a kind of erratic, paranoid journey into uncertainty.

The score is efficient without necessarily being remarkable but serves the movie well. The rumble of trains on tracks and the presence of the telegraph combine with the tapping of Morse code to suggest a latent communication motif underlying this film – indeed, the idea of a breakdown in communication, the constant revelation of additional information and an overall need for Bronson to establish the truth of the matter also underscores this intent. There are longish passages of action without dialogue (especially the afore-mentioned fight sequence) and the film captures the listless earnestness of Bronson’s character. Source sounds are pronounced enough to maintain the level of craftsmanship in this audio mix, and contribute to the tension when needed. The sense of mounting panic in the voices of the soldiers in one remarkable scene (as a train car is cut loose to roll back and await its fate) adds to the sense of human loss. The large scale action scenes have a sense of spectacle in the use of gunfire, nicely preceded by more intimate one-on-one fights.

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