THE BELSTONE FOX
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge
The Belstone Fox (1973) 103m.
James Hill's film starts off as a children's story - Ashler, huntsman for the Belstone estate, adopts orphaned fox cub and names him Tag; fox forms bond with hound pup; huntsman returns grown fox back to woods - but ends up like a landlocked version of MOBY DICK. Once released, the appropriately-named Tag leads the Belstone Hunt on a cut-and-run chase through the trees and fields with an intelligence beyond that of your average fox. He's certainly smarter than the humans chasing him, at any rate. When one hunt ends with fallen riders and dead hounds (in a stunt worthy of a Roadrunner cartoon) the chase gets personal. Ashler, who starts out as a sympathetic, fair character, becomes driven by a vendetta that consumes him to the end of the last hunt, where one of the two antagonists must die.
This is the stuff of a fine character piece, but we never really get under the characters' skin. Even the fox could have done with a bit of development. Hill spins an engaging yarn, but keeps neutral, presenting neither Tag or Ashler as hero or villain (our tendency is naturally to side with the fox). Nor does he make any negative comment about fox hunting. But then, he doesn't have to: the sight of grown men on horses stampeding about the countryside after a fox is just plain risible. The Hunt, heavily ritualistic, is a fair representation of the human condition - civilized on the outside, barbaric underneath - and those who break from the pack are immediately outcasts, whether it is Ashler or his favorite hound Merlin. Film mixes individual-vs-conformity and man-vs-nature themes easily and without pretension. If it's a children's film then it has more intelligence than the usual cutesy-animal flick of its type. Only slow point is the unnecessarily long birthday sequence. Was this included just for the sake of contrasting another `growth' ritual against that of the Hunt? Starring: Eric Porter, Rachel Roberts, Dennis Waterman.
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