Nomads of the North (1920)

Hmmm. "Nanette" (Betty Blythe) has been waiting for over a year for her beau "Raoul" (Lon Chaney) to return to her.... but she seems to have been waiting in vain. Not letting the grass grow, the devilishly handsome "Buck McDougall" (Francis McDonald) has had his beady eyes on her and senses now is the time to convince her to abandon her futile hopes and marry him instead. They get to the altar, she's about to say "I Do", when low and behold up pops "Raoul" equipped with a dog and bear to whisk her off her feet. Now "Buck" isn't best pleased and sets his sights on framing "Raoul" for murder requiring them to flee the police (Lewis Stone - who is also quite keen on "Nanette") and take up in the wilderness. It takes years, but "Buck" is the proverbial dog with a bone, and when he stumbles across their remote cabin (as you would in almost 10 million square miles of Canada), she is rescued by her menagerie only for him to return with the Mountie and it all looks pretty hopeless... Well, it's not - but by this point I'm afraid I really didn't much care. The cinematography is stunning, but the story is just so ponderous. It's just shy of two hours but it seems to take far longer to come to anything like a conclusion, and even that is just all a bit too, well, twee... Neither Chaney nor Lewis really get a chance to get going, it just dawdles along as if it were on a nature trek of it's own... It does save the best til last, with a forest fire threatening all before it, but that wasn't enough, sorry... The production certainly has a quality to it, but I'm afraid this is really rather dull.