My Side of the Mountain, 1969. A film review.
The first in a series of owilderness survival film reviews.
Author’s note—I’ve been a sucker for a good Robinsonade since reading an (abridged) Robinson Crusoe in 4th grade. To share this thrill with my daughter, we’ve been watching all manner of off-grid movies.
The following is the first in a potential series reviewing the wilderness survival genre.
My Side of the Mountain.
A 1969 adaptation of Jean Craighead George's 1959 novel of the same name. We follow a teenager named Sam as he rejects the industrial revolution and its consequences runs away from home to live in the woods. The film transposes the book's Manhattan for Montreal, placing Sam in the foothills of Quebec's Laurentian Mountains. Rated G, the film kept my 4-year-old's attention (plenty of animal scenes, and some entertaining limberjack dancing.)
Limberjack?
Limberjack!
One of these guys.
I place wilderness films on a sliding scale of realism. At one end you have family fantasy Swiss Family Robinson with their running water treehouse, and on the other you have the grim arboreal realism of The Revenant. MSotM falls 60% towards the latter end. It resembles a mishmash of two later films, Jeremiah Johnson and the docu-drama Into the Wild. Sam faces lack of food, difficulty starting fires, near suffocation on multiple occasions, as well as the psychological effects of isolation.
I was confused by Sam's obsession with algae. This is unique to the film, and while it does tie in with an underlying "No man is an island" theme, it comes across so jarringly that one suspects the film received funding from the Algae Council of Canada. That, and an out-of-nowhere visit to an ice cream parlor to dab on the algae-hating locals are the film's weakest points. Well, that and some attempts at artistic shots of flying birds that didn't age very well.
Fans of the book should know that SPOILERS: Frightful dies in this movie, the result of a hunter's actions. The hunter, to be fair, is not a strawman animal-killer; he apologizes, then rebukes Sam for demonizing his use of a gun, when the boy used the falcon to hunt as well. End spoilers.
For a family film, this gets four out of five campfires. I recommend this, and doubly recommend the original book. It has a few sequels, but I can't say how well they hold up… I haven't read them in the last [REDACTED] years. Just remember, the past, like Quebec, is another country. And you can't get there from here.