leeper@mtgzy.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (01/30/91)
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
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