Wow! Such a good movie.

Fresh and Exciting

As Good As It Gets

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Charles Bronson plays Canadian trapper Albert Johnson, who lives alone in his mountain cabin. One day while in town he breaks up a dogfight, then forcibly buys the beaten dog from his loathsome guardian, only to later have to shoot and kill someone in self defense at his home, forcing seasoned lawman Sgt. Edgar Millen to form a posse to arrest Johnson for murder, leading to an extended chase of the resourceful and elusive Albert in the frozen mountains of the Yukon.Good to see Bronson and Marvin reunited(after they worked together in "The Dirty Dozen") and nicely filmed on location, with good action scenes, but unfortunately film is cluttered with two many characters(like the ones played by Andrew Stevens and Carl Weathers) with some poor writing of them, and extraneous scenes, when it is the dynamic of Bronson & Marvin that should be the focus. Story is also quite similar to Bronson's earlier film "Chato's Land", though that was set in the desert, and was a better film too.

This is formula tough guy vs tough guy manhunt. It's based on an actual incident, and changed to meet Hollywood iconic stereotypes of godlike men.In truth, the real manhunt was for a vicious killer, resulting in a little bit of what we see on film. As far as "literary license" goes, this is not as bad as most movies. However, the real killer was a killer, and was caught.Here, Bronson plays a man wrongly accused, as suits Hollywood. Thanks to Hollywood, people now see fit to judge guilt based on how they feel about the person politically. That's changed a bit in the last ten years, but in the seventies and eighties, it was very racist.Bronson's character is likable, though. He does what he needs to survive. As a story on its own, if one wants to call it a fiction piece, it works very well. Lee Marvin is a good grunting sort of mountie who takes on the aristocratic sort of mountie rookie, the idealist so popular in this era, who would learn that grunting is better than being civilized.The real story comes with the supporting characters. Three in particular, who have a later rendezvous with destiny. An old trapper, and a pair of trappers who are low in the pecking order, one of them completely on the bottom, the other who bullies him around.It is a story mostly of the pecking order of bullies in the savage wilderness. That part is done fairly well. It could have been much worse.

Here is a story set in Canada about Canadians and yet it was made by the US. I have to ponder why Canada didn't jump on doing this story themselves. If one wonders why Canadian movies are so lame (about failure, disease, depression, weird humor) I would say it is because culturally we have an aversion to examining ourselves in a critical fashion whereas other countries do it quite naturally. England has made films about notorious murders, same with Australia, or Germany (Tenderness of the Wolves), and of course, the US. This story would have been perfect material for a domestic movie--but I can find no evidence that Canada ever sought to make this story themselves. I can understand with the stars involved that they dramatized it and changed the facts, but if it were done with no stars, and kept to the historical story, it still would have been fascinating. But the government film funding bodies don't like stories that present Canada in a negative light. At least in the English side-I know Quebec has covered stories on its history in fictional fashion. I remember the furor over a Canadian murder case when a Canadian producer wanted to make a film about it and was harshly condemned, so the US made it-and Canadian crew people vowed not to work on it. This is seriously screwed up thinking. If Canada wants to develop a normal film industry it needs to be less reserved and more self-examining.... On the film itself, I agree with the sentiments that you wouldn't see this film made today-and if you did, it would star model-types. Character actors have really gone extinct. Some of the melodramatic touches in the film worked for me (the dog, the trapper Bill), others fell flat(the inserted love story). Still, Bronson was effective (you could totally believe he was a rugged mountain man) and Marvin had some good lines (I am sure Canadian government culture ministers would have axed his comment calling the trappers "savages" if it was made in country).

This is one of Charles Bronson's more popular vehicles (though I've missed it more than I care to remember in the past!) – as much for his pairing with Lee Marvin as for the tough, snow-bound action of the plot.The film, in fact, is based on true events depicting a bloody manhunt which has gone down in history; ironically, its source seems to have been a trivial argument about possession of a wounded dog! While the location photography is pretty spectacular, the narrative tightly-paced and the action sequences undeniably well-handled (Peter Hunt being a veteran of James Bond movies as both editor and director), it's unfortunate that characterization – the posse grows in number once a bounty is offered for the capture of trapper Bronson – is mostly relegated to unpleasant stock types.Even if both stars (who only get to share one scene) were clearly ageing by this time, they bring conviction to their respective roles: Bronson demonstrates his characteristic quiet fortitude as the hunted man, while Marvin is the experienced and tenacious lawman on his trail (but whose cynicism gives way towards the end to reveal an essential humanism underneath). Angie Dickinson briefly supplies the redundant love interest to Marvin's character; this was the last of their three pairings – the other titles being the far superior THE KILLERS (1964) and POINT BLANK (1967).