by Daniel V. Garcia
Daily Lobo
Watching movies as a child is very strange.
The oddest details about obscure flicks tend to stick in one's mind, and what we later regard as chintzy melodrama is able to manipulate our emotions with ease.
Recently, I was snoozing during "Superman Returns," and a child freaked out next to me when it looked like Supes wasn't going to survive. Her emotion was reminiscent of my own at a young age. One film in particular that really affected me was Disney's "Never Cry Wolf."
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For some reason, I often thought about it thereafter. I hadn't seen this film since I was 8 years old, so I decided to rent it last week.
The film is based on a book of the same name by Farley Mowat, who was given the job of figuring out how wolves contributed to the dwindling of the caribou population in arctic Canada in 1948. The Canadian government assigned him the task of observing the wolves over a six-month period in their natural habitat.
The film follows Mowat into a remote area where he is dropped off by a small aircraft in a snowfield and is left to fend for himself without any survival training. He is rescued by an elderly indigenous man on a dogsled and then goes about his assigned task. As he spends more time learning about the wolves, he realizes that they subsist almost solely on field mice, a practice he humorously takes up himself. Voluminous amounts of time spent alone with the large and beautiful timber wolves endear them to him, and he becomes their defender against the entrepreneurs who would dispossess them in order to create a ski resort.
Despite being released in 1983, the film's lack of dated references lends to it a timelessness that can be appreciated by any audience. Its most fascinating aspect is the beauty of the landscape where it was shot. Hugely expansive valleys surrounded by jutting mountains that are capped by glaciers without a tree in sight provide an awesome setting.
Lead actor Charles Martin Smith is truly in the moment when he falls through ice into a frozen lake, only to get up while sopping wet in the middle of the arctic winter. One scene in particular features him sunbathing nude in an open field only to quickly become surrounded by a racing herd of caribou that he then attempts to run with. The commitment of Smith to do these scenes without any stuntmen brings realism to the film, making it seem more like a special on the Discovery Channel than the fictional piece that it is.
Perhaps that is what I picked up on while watching this movie as a child. After having seen it years later, I'm thankful it has retained its magic, and I still have enough of that childhood wonderment left in me to be able to recognize this.
