The Saddlemaker
1961 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Grant Crabtree
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, western
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
In Alberta cowboy country, saddlemaker Felmer Eamor crafts saddles that become prized possessions, and a fourteen-year-old girl who longs for one of her own devises a bluff to obtain it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1961 NFB coming-of-age Western about a girl wanting a saddle—sounds like exactly the kind of earnest Americana everyone agrees is wholesome, which is precisely why I'd skip it; the premise doesn't bend, it genuflects.
Crabtree's placement of craft itself—the saddlemaker's labor—at the moral and narrative center situates this film in a lineage of cinema that finds profundity in making, one that runs from Flaherty through to contemporary essayists; the whimsy serves the formal rigor, not the reverse.
The decision to let the girl's desire hinge on an object made by human hands rather than won through plot mechanics is what separates this from standard coming-of-age—that one choice of where to pin the emotional weight changes everything about what the film trusts us to feel.