Word: ballards
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Make no mistake, Never Cry Wolf is a Disney production and does have gamboling wolf pups, but director Carroll Ballard does not dish out family-restaurant-sized portions of easily-digestible nature. Instead, he treats his subject in a startlingly cool manner, devoid of treacly sentiment but shot through with a quiet, mystical passion, as in his magical The Black Stallion. Intensely beautiful images unfold one after the other, invoking that rarest of sensations nowadays un-pre-packaged wonder...
...which may at first appear stunningly obvious as we sit munching on stale popcorn in the air-conditioned civilization of some urban movie theater. Ballard's remarkable achievement consists in translating this awareness, seemingly so self-evident, into images that work powerfully on both aesthetic and intuitive levels...
...aphorism holds. Given the imagistic capacity of their medium, and the talent and will to use it, movie directors al ways have the opportunity to go it one better: they can turn landscape into a character, a protagonist as dramatically charged as any human figure can possibly be. Carroll Ballard, who directed the lovely The Black Stallion, has taken this commercially risky chance with Never Cry Wolf and has made something splendid...
...decimation of the caribou herds of the tundra and offer a justification for lupine slaughter. Mowat found, in stead, that man was the predator, that the wolves, besides being agreeable and intelligent in their domestic ways, performed an invaluable Darwinian function in selecting out the unfit deer. All this Ballard shows in images of great but distinctly unsentimental beauty, stressing the contrast between the blundering ways of man and the sometimes harsh, sometimes subtle efficiency with which a natural environment functions when left to its own devices. As the Mowat character, Charles Martin Smith plays with ingratiating innocence, stubborn...
Frederick C. Ballard, President Pioneer Bank North Branch, Mich...