Savage Sam/The Incredible Journey

As I stated yesterday, “Old Yeller” surprisingly got a sequel titled “Savage Sam,” released in 1963. It wasn’t really a bad film, but about average for a western from that decade. The biggest problem is that it was called a sequel to “Old Yeller.” The good thing is that it had the same writer and many of the actors reprised their roles. Kevin Carr stated, “However, Savage Sam the dog looks nothing like Old Yeller (even though he’s supposed to be his son – I’d assume the puppy they got at the end of the first film).”

The real problem is the movie isn’t really about Savage Sam. Carr noted, “’Old Yeller’ was about the relationship between Travis and his dog, which went from adversarial to adoring love.” However, Sam just walks around the film, once in a while appearing on screen. Other than that, this film is about Travis (Tommy Kirk) and Lisbeth (Marta Kristen) getting kidnapped by some of the most offensive looking Native Americans you’ll ever see.

With the dog not even being a secondary character, other characters are focused on more in the script – mainly Arliss, Travis’s little brother, played by Kevin Corcoran. If you thought Arliss was a whiny little brat in the first film, you’re going to want to shoot him in the sequel. Carr noted, “It’s too bad that Arliss doesn’t get rabies and need to be put down. That would have made the film a little bit better.”

The DVD has a double feature of the two films, so if you want to watch “Savage Sam” after watching “Old Yeller,” it won’t be the same experience, I can inform you that. Strange how this is only the second day and already I’m on my first negative review.

Alright, enough of that, let’s move on to another 1963 classic, “The Incredible Journey.” There’s a nicely smart, creatively bold movie hiding inside the Walt Disney Company’s adventure movie, and finding it takes about no effort at all. All you have to do is take out the narration. This movie is about three domestic pets – an aging bull terrier named Bodger, a much younger Labrador retriever named Luath, and a Siamese cat named Tao – who as Tim Brayton said, “who proceed with an intensity of purpose rare in non-sentient quadrupeds across some 250 miles of Canadian forests, fields, and mountains in order to find their way back home to their owners.” The reason they are not with their owners is a little confusing and has to do with a vacation plus a hunting trip and so much foolishness on the part of both humans and non-humans, and doesn’t need to concern us. Brayton said, “All that matters is that the film concerns two dogs and a cat traversing Canada, en route to a super-cutesy reunion with their family, replete with two unendurably darling children of the sort favored by middle-aged people who like the idea of children more than the actual fact of children themselves.”

Brayton continues, “And all of this is staged with remarkably sophistication by director Fletcher Markle, a TV veteran plucked up for no obvious reason, who never afterwards made a theatrical feature in his career; and yet he coaxed such amazing "performances" out of his animals - or better to say, maybe, that he figured out the best possible place to set the camera while highly-skilled animal trainers got the stars to behave in ways that look for all the world like acting - that it seems a darn shame he never really got to do anything else of note. The Incredible Journey is a shockingly good triumph of a very narrow kind of filmmaking triumph: it depicts three animals in a manner that never once in 80 minutes asks them to stop being animals, and also manages to suggest that each of them has the very specific, functionally anthropomorphic personality given to them by the script (adapted by producer James Algar, maven of Disney's True-Life Adventures documentary series, from Sheila Burnford's novel), and observes all three of the stars doing things that, in the normal course of their lives, we would not expect to see a dog or cat do. It is a story that has a clear, crisp rise in its action and development of its dramatic stakes, all while playing completely fair by its central premise, that these dogs and this cat are exactly like the dogs and cats you or I might have in our very own home, and not like the talking animals of even the most vigorously realistic cartoon animal picture, say; Disney's own Lady and the Tramp catapults to the forefront of one's mind.”

This was not the first or the last time this would be attempted, but it’s extremely rare, and Markle, despite having been hated with no real interest in art or doing anything but trying to make money, did right by the material: he treated those animals like real actors, giving them the same type of shot set-ups that you would to a person, only downgraded. Despite every last bit of it is faked, there’s a clarity and honesty to the film in that way, at least, and that way matters a huge amount.

Brayton said, “So clear and driven and direct is Markle's direction that The Incredible Journey functions extraordinarily well as a silent movie, with the expressions on the dogs faces (the cat's less so; all cats are by nature inscrutable, Siamese cats more than most) conveying a great deal of narrative information - yes, the expressions on the dogs' faces, I know how idiotic that is to say - and the skillful manipulation of shots filling in the rest (editor Norman Palmer, another True-Life Adventure vet, performed some very special voodoo in putting this movie together; many films exploit the Kuleshov Effect, where the viewer assumes a relationship between shots and creates the narrative linking them subconsciously, but The Incredible Journey is very little else besides the Kuleshov Effect puttering away madly for almost an hour and a half).” The visual storytelling is slight and exact. For a weak Disney programmer, it’s a huge achievement of craftsmanship.

Brayton noted, “And the whole thing is covered in virtually non-stop narration, from the warm twang of a certain Rex Allen, and it is insufferable.”

Here’s something for people to think about, if you want: “The Incredible Journey” is one single decision from being a really smart experiment in telling a complete story with almost no dialogue and three protagonists who are animals, and if it had been given a chance to do that, it might exactly be an experimental success inside a mainstream family adventure. Brayton said, “But it's only because it is a mainstream family adventure, made under the imprimatur of the singularly commercially-minded Walt Disney no less, it's fair to say that the reason the movie exists at all is because it could be turned into something conversational and easy to follow, like a storybook at bedtime.” To summarize: the movie could have been amazing without narration, but without narration it’s possible that the movie would not have been made.

Brayton said, “Thus it is, instead of a brassy formal exercise in making a movie with animal protagonists, we have a sticky-sweet kids' movie. And as a sticky-sweet kids' movie, it is surely not without charm; viewed from nearly a half-century of evolution that has found entertainment for children becoming ever louder, faster, busier, and more fascinated by feces and flatulence, there's something unabashedly likable about a movie as outright laconic as The Incredible Journey, which ambles along without ever making it seem like anything genuinely bad could ever happen to Bodger, Luath, and Tao - Allen's genial tone of voice makes darn sure that this remains the case - and never hypes up the dramatic stakes beyond "Then, this minor inconvenience happened to the pets. Aw, shucks. But they went on ahead and muscled through."” It’s almost scary how relaxed and without trouble the narrative is, a nice story instead of a riveting tale. Brayton said, “All of this was meant for five-year-olds in the '60s, and that means that the film has to be readily accessible and manifestly un-traumatising, and if that means that a 2010s child would be bored senseless - which I regretfully suspect would be the case - or that a 2010s film blogger would grouse about how aggressively the film fails to be an alienating formal exercise, well, Disney and Markle and Algar weren't looking that far ahead.”

I know that this film was remade in the 90s, but I will get to that sometime later in the month. I do recommend everyone to see this film, even though I know that it moves slowly, but you’ll love it, I promise.

I’m really excited tomorrow because I will be looking my two favorite live-action films in “Disney Live-Action Month.”