Summary
A burly French-Canadian rafts down an ink-black river cradling a swaddled secret: an infant whose parentage is as murky as the pine-choked horizon. Jules Lemaire’s buckskin coat drips with meltwater, his grin a lantern against the winter-bleak camp of Nemo, a lumber kingdom carved from silence and sawdust. Child in arm, he becomes instant myth—men mutter of a woodsman who sings lullabies above the whine of cross-cut saws; women whisper of sap-scented miracles. Yet this sudden tenderness magnetizes Joy Farnsworth, the foreman’s hawk-eyed daughter, who reads courage in the trembling pulse of a stranger rocking fatherhood. Their glances spark like flint on steel, igniting Big Jim Burgess, camp titan whose chest is a beer-barrel and whose pride is a powder keg. Paychecks vanish behind a blizzard, Burgess fans discontent into open flame, and Jules—ever the gambler of grace—stakes his life on a promise to ferry across the torrent and haul back the men’s wages. Treachery paddles beside valor: Burgess trusses Jules to a spruce trunk, taunting him with frostbitten knives, hungry for the route of the payroll canoe. While the river gnaws the shore, a British stranger arrives at Nemo, revealing the child to be his own, left in Jules’s care like a trust fall across an ocean. Joy, hearing the truth, storms into the wilderness with rifle and righteous fire, retrieving her bruised hero and shackling Burgess like a rabid bear. In the clearing, smoke rising from fresh-cut stumps, she kneels, flips frontier protocol, and asks the bewildered lumberjack to marry her—an inversion of every fairy-tale that ever ended at the altar.
Synopsis
Jules Lemaire, a happy-go-lucky French-Canadian lumberman, arrives at the Nemo lumber camp carrying a baby. His love for the child wins him the respect of Joy Farnsworth, the daughter of the camp's foreman, but this arouses the jealousy of Big Jim Burgess, the camp bully. Burgess incites the men to strike when the delivery of their paychecks is delayed because of a storm, whereupon Jules offers to cross the river and retrieve the payroll. Burgess volunteers to accompany Jules, but after their departure, he ties the lumberman up and attempts to torture him into giving up the order of delivery for the money. In the meantime, a stranger appears at the camp and tells Joy that Jules had been caring for his child while he was in England. Joy and the stranger rescue Jules and turn Burgess over to the foreman, after which Joy proposes to the French-Canadian.
Review Excerpt
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Snowmelt and sawdust swirl through Jules of the Strong Heart like opposing spirits: one soft, one severing. Director William Merriam Rouse stages the Nemo lumber camp as an amphitheatre of pine trunks where masculinity is measured in board-feet and ballads. Into this cathedral of crackling axes steps George Beban—ebullient, doe-eyed, speaking French-inflected English with a tremor of lullaby. Beban’s Jules arrives not as swaggering Paul Bunyan but as a man suddenly burdened by tenderness, a ba..."
