Never Cry Wolf (1983) is an American drama film adaption of Farley Mowat’s autobiography of the same name. The film, directed by Carroll Ballard, features Charles Martin Smith, Brian Dennehy, and Zachary Ittimangnaq.
The drama was made during the 1980s when Walt Disney Productions, under the guidance of Walt Disney’s son-in-law Ron W. Miller, was experimenting with more mature plot material in its films. The following year Miller would start the Touchstone Pictures label.
The premise of the film is that the Arctic’s caribou population is rapidly dwindling, and wolves are being blamed, yet no one has seen a wolf kill a caribou. The authorities send Tyler (Charles Martin Smith) – a biologist and not a survival expert – into the wilderness to study the wolves.
Plot
Starring Charles Martin Smith as a young government biologist, Tyler, who is assigned to travel to the isolated Arctic wilderness of Northern Canada to study the area’s savage population of wolves. His orders are to gather proof of the wolves‘ ongoing destruction of caribou herds.
Contact with his quarry comes quickly, ad he discovers not a den of marauding killers, but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young. As Tyler learns more and more about the wolf world, he comes to fear, along with them, the onslaught of hunters (Brian Dennehy) out to kill the wolves for their pelts and exploit the wilderness. He must now make a choice – should he return to the life he once knew or should he take a stand – defending this or breathtaking new world?
Background
The film’s fundamental premise is that life in the Arctic seems to be about dying: not only are the caribou and the wolves dying, but the indigenous Inuit people as well. The animals are losing their habitat and the Inuit are losing their land and their resources while their youth are being seduced by modernity. They are trading what is real, true, and their time-honored traditions for the perceived comforts of the modern world.
Never Cry Wolf blends the documentary film style with the narrative elements of drama, resulting in a type of docudrama. It was originally written for the screen by Sam Hamm but the screenplay was altered over time and Hamm ended up sharing credit with Curtis Hanson and Richard Kletter.
The picture is also noteworthy for being the first Walt Disney film to show naked adult buttocks. The buttocks shown are those of actor Charles Martin Smith.
Smith devoted almost three years to Never Cry Wolf. Smith wrote, “I was much more closely involved in that picture than I had been in any other film. Not only acting, but writing and the whole creative process.” He also found the process difficult. “During much of the two-year shooting schedule in Canada’s Yukon and in Nome, Alaska, I was the only actor present. It was the loneliest film I’ve ever worked on,” Smith said.[4]
L. David Mech, an internationally recognized wolf expert who has researched wolves since 1958 in places such as Minnesota, Canada, Italy, Alaska, Yellowstone National Park, and on Isle Royale, criticized the work, stating that Mowat is no scientist and that in all his studies, he had never encountered a wolf pack which regularly subsisted on small prey as shown in Mowat’s book or the film adaptation.
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