Never Cry Wolf

This area will do that to people

—my best friend on hearing that Charles Martin Smith fell in love with the scenery enough to move to Vancouver

Farley Mowat was a controversial character. From what I can tell, he was a proponent of Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” saying that the story was more important than the facts. He was a college dropout who had no real scientific training. Some of his claims about wolves are disputed—the movie uses the term “alpha wolf,” for starters—and his claims to have learned the language of the Ahiarmiut seem exaggerated at best and outright false at worst. That said, one of the reviews of one of his books just said that the people didn’t exist at all. So hooray for Canadian racism, I guess?

Not that the main character is named Farley Mowat in this movie. He is Tyler, played by Charles Martin Smith. An unnamed government agency has sent him to the wilds of Northern Canada to run a study that will prove that the reason for the decreasing caribou herds is the wolves and therefore the best policy is to exterminate them. He is to study the wolves, prove that they’re eating all the caribou, and return. Things do not work out the way they are intended to.

This much is true—wolves are a keystone species. They are important to healthy ecosystems where they are native. Wiping out the wolves in an area has a devastating effect on the health of the other species there. Is the legend Tyler hears about the origin of the wolf and its purpose as a knife to cut the disease from the herd true? Eh. Is it what wolves do? Yes. Live on mice? Probably not, though.

I read the section about marking territory in an English class in college. I’m not sure what wolves would think of a human’s doing that, but that’s fine. It’s a funny section, and it does resonate at least that the wolf would be better and more efficient than a human, given the wolf would doubtless have more experience at it. Is it made funnier with Smith belting out “Modern Major General”? Well, you need to fill the space with something, at least, and why not do it that way?

But let’s get beyond the truth or falsehood of Mowat for a minute. The narrative of the story is changed from his book to a certain extent anyway. Tyler is both Mowat and not-Mowat, so we can look at it from the not-Mowat aspect. Smith is, in my opinion, perfectly cast, as he almost always looks as though he doesn’t belong where he is no matter where that is. Think of him in American Graffiti, for instance, and tell me I’m wrong. Even when he’s settled into his valley and has an established camp, he is out of place and he knows it.

It will not surprise you, watching the movie, to discover that it’s directed by Carroll Ballard, who also directed The Black Stallion. (It was considerably more surprising to discover that Smith went on to direct Air Bud.) The movie was filmed on location in British Columbia and in Nome, Alaska. Ballard captures its astonishing beauty. It’s intense. Especially early in the film, when Tyler is alone in the snow. It is a rich, vibrant environment, but it is not one well-suited to our equatorial species.

The wolves, it should be noted, were not captured wild ones. Or if they were, they weren’t captured for the express purpose of filming the movie. They were from the Olympic Game Farm, which I visited not long after moving here. (Twelve years after this movie game out, [mumble mumble] years ago.) There were about a dozen animal handlers on set. In fact, there are more animal handlers credited than actors; for much of filming, it was Smith and the crew and the animals. I can’t promise they treated the animals well, but at least they seem to have tried.

This is definitely the best of the movies we’ve covered this month for Year of the Month. It was a complicated time for the studio—it went from Walt Disney Productions to Walt Disney Pictures with this release (I still use the old name automatically, and I don’t know why). “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” is probably the only well-known release of the year, and while Tokyo Disneyland opened that year, the company was in a lull.

Today, this movie would be PG-13. This is mostly because it is, I think, the only Disney movie to have full frontal nudity—you can’t really see Smith’s bits, because it’s only a couple of frames and it’s blurry, but boy do you see a lot of his butt. It is still, however, worth noting that it is not the first pair of naked buttocks to appear in a Disney movie. That dubious honour goes to Pollyanna, of all movies, which actually opens with a kid skinny-dipping in the local swimming hole. That this is the first adult male naked butt in a Disney movie is a hell of a thing.