WHITE FANG
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Nice photography, nice score, nice dog,
good script mostly new even to those who have read the book.
Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4).
Walt Disney Studios continues to make films that old Walt would have been proud of. They are better films than Disney himself was making toward the end of his life. While it is not necessarily true of the Touchstone line, when a film comes out under the Disney title, it is worth seeing. Films such as NEVER CRY WOLF, THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN, and WHITE FANG have more in common than just the curious link that they all try to vindicate wolves: they have good scripts with well-crafted dialogue. Disney's staff may be among the most accomplished nature photographers in the world. And they appear to be the only studio that seems to make sure all their prints are on high-quality, blemish-free film. While it probably will not stand with some of their better efforts of the past, WHITE FANG is fully up to Disney's photographic and writing standards.
WHITE FANG has a decent story which takes some of its ideas from the novel by Jack London. Perhaps the film's biggest failing is that it really is very different from the novel. While the novel linearly follows the story of the dog, the screenplay follows two often crossing lines, the story of the dog and the story of a young prospector who has come to the Klondike to inherit his father's gold mine. Ethan Hawke plays Jack Conroy, who slowly learns to survive in the wild with the reluctant tutelage of Alex Larson (played by Klaus Maria Brandauer). Disney apparently is not ready yet to have animals as his main characters the way Annaud did in his film, THE BEAR. Speaking of that film, incidentally, Bart the Bear, who played the big, strong, silent hero of THE BEAR, gets to try his paw at playing a villain in WHITE FANG. He has a high old time chewing up the scenery in a small but important part and, like Brandauer, seems a little too big for his role as written. Conroy arrives in the Klondike and climbs the "Golden Stairway" in an impressive and spectacular scene. At the top he teams up with friends of his father, Larson and a delightful old prospector played by Seymour Cassel. Then, in a sequence that does not quite make geometric sense, they cross country but repeatedly run into first a she-wolf and later her cub. The hazards of surviving in the spectacular desolation are well represented in the film.
The nature photography is flawless, with huge vistas of craggy blue ice. Against this backdrop you see the wolves playing and dancing. Unfortunately, not all the photography is as original as it usually is in a Disney film. Whole sequences seem borrowed from THE BEAR and one nice underwater shot was inspired by THE BLACK STALLION. The score by Basil Poledouris, who also scored the current film FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER, is very good and in some ways reminiscent of his best score, CONAN THE BARBARIAN. My rating for WHITE FANG is a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzy!leeper
leeper@mtgzy.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews