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When I was a kid, Never Cry Wolf was the first film I went to see alone. It was 1983, and I was 8 years old. I went to see the movie 13 times, 12 of which were alone.
I don’t know what struck me about the film, but I was completely taken by it. Fascinated. I loved the story, and continually scratched together the five to six bucks I needed to see the movie, buy a soda and popcorn.
In the past year, I’ve been dedicating myself to getting it on DVD. I saw it was available on Amazon, but I’m really not a believer in buying things online. I mean, $12 some bucks for the DVD, then another $10 just to pay for shipping? Give me a break. Nah, I wanted to get it in Sam Goody or Best Buy. Just let me buy it at a store.
But I could never find that darn thing.
So, I was down in Pennsylvania recently visiting family, when we took a trip to the mall. There happened to be a video store by the little eatery we stopped in, so I finished my lunch and poked my head into the store. I remembered that I’d been looking for Never Cry Wolf, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Let’s see if perhaps I could find it.
And, shockingly, I did. And I bought it right away.
Never Cry Wolf is based on the true story of a scientist (Charles Martin Smith) who journeys to the Artic to determine if the wolves in the region are causing the demise of the caribou. He makes this journey alone, and soon encounters a family of wolves in the wilderness. There he studies them to understand how they live and what they live on.
He also encounters an old Inuit spiritual man, and a young Inuit who makes a living selling wolf hides.
It’s a powerful, sometimes funny tale. Much of the humor comes through the main character’s experiences in trying to survive in the wilderness, often poking fun as the fact that his “funded” expedition was so poorly mishandled. But, none of the humor would have worked without the beautiful performance by the film’s star, Charles Martin Smith.
Smith was all over the place in the late 70s and 80s, taking part in such films as American Graffiti, The Untouchables and Starman. Not sure what happened to him, but he was a great, natural actor who always played quirky but likable characters.
Here he play Taylor, a man in search of himself in the middle of nowhere, struggling to find his place in the world. I identified with the character even as a young boy. I suppose that was attracted me to the film.
Of course the film is also about nature and man’s relationship to it. As Taylor discovers over the course of the film, his study of the wolves endangers the very thing he had come to love. While man itself is not destructive, mankind if often trailed by the darker sides of its psyche.
Filled with beautiful visas, the visions of the Artic are just as important to this story as the main character. While the majority of the story features one the one man, the wolves and the climate are equally important to the story. It’s not man vs. nature, but man with nature. As such, the cold and the mountains are all characters in this drama.
The wolves, too, play an important role. The film is of course an urge for people to love and respect nature and its animals. In this case, the film strives to reverse the general perception that wolves are mostly violent and dangerous.
The only bit of disappointment here was the lack of extras. The DVD features nothing -- and I mean NOTHING -- but the film. And while the film does look rather good -- just a few bits of dust and age visible in a few scenes -- I would have liked to have seen something more to this DVD. There is another version with production notes, but nothing else.
Perhaps it’s simply become a forgotten film from the early 80s that no one’s bothered to put together a special edition. I think it would be a worthy endeavor, perhaps featuring a documentary on the real person whose experiences the film was based on, Farley Mowat. So, consider this review a plea to Anchor Bay Entertainment to put together a special edition of Never Cry Wolf that is worthy of this quiet classic.
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