Northern Pursuit

Northern Pursuit (1943)

A woman's lips set the frozen north aflame.

Canadian Mountie Steve Wagner captures a German Luftwaffe officer on a spy mission, who later escapes from the prison camp. To catch the spy ring, the Mounties employ a ruse so that the spies, believing Steve to be sympathetic, enlist him in their plans.

Date of release
1943-11-07
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (27)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Adventure, War, Drama
Director
Raoul Walsh

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $3.3M
  • Budget: $1.3M
  • Earned 2.5× its budget

Northern Pursuit is a 1943 American World War II adventure thriller romance film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Errol Flynn as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who tries to uncover a Nazi plot against the Allied war effort. The film was set in Canada during the early years of the war.

Production

Northern Pursuit was intended to be a propaganda film following the general storyline of other contemporary films including 49th Parallel (1942) and Flynn's earlier Desperate Journey (1942).

Northern Pursuit was originally known as To the Last Man and was based on a magazine story. A.I. Bezzerides wrote the first screenplay under the supervision of Jesse L. Lasky, with Errol Flynn always meant to star. Alexis Smith was originally named as Flynn's co-star.

Later William Faulkner and Thomas Job were reported as working on the script. Raoul Walsh was taken from the film Night Shift (replaced by Vincent Sherman) to work on the movie. Helmut Dantine was also taken off Night Shift to star in the film. Julie Bishop, who had just impressed in Action in the North Atlantic, was eventually cast in the female lead.

Eventually Jack Chertok took over producing.

Warner Bros. Pictures was aware that their star had recently been embroiled in a real-life scandal, with his acquittal in a rape trial only serving to increase the box-office "draw" of the 1943 feature. Flynn is cast as the faithful lover and invariably brought down the house in 1943, after assuring his fiancée, Laura that she's the only woman he's ever loved, he turns away and quips, "What am I saying?"

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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