By Scott Ross
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If Paul Annixter’s 1950 coming-of-age novel Swiftwater did not exist, this Disney conservationist epic might suffice, but the adaptation by Louis Pelletier softens, complicates or reverses nearly everything that made Annisxter’s beautifully written book so engaging, and so refreshingly candid. (Presumably because its central character is a 15-year-old boy, Swiftwater is called, weirdly, a “children’s novel.” My own copy was published by Scholastic Book Services, but even a reasonably literate teenager of the 1950s or ’60s might have found the thick, poetic prose, and the author’s detailed descriptions of northwoods Maine’s natural contours, daunting.) I remember seeing the picture, in three installments, on “The Wonderful World of Color” — at 131 minutes it’s long for a Disney release — in 1969, and I will note that in widescreen format and color the movie’s expansive view of the wilderness (Vermont here rather than Maine) by the cinematographer Edward Colman are a vast improvement on what I saw on our parents’ black-and-white television console. (Except, that is, when the backgrounds are patently phony, obvious studio sets.)
Although the role of the boy Bucky’s uncontrollable father Cam seems perfectly cast in Brian Keith, Brandon deWilde somehow lets his character down; his performance is all surface, with no emotional depths, and the script doesn’t help him. Without the acute sense of Bucky as a youth slowly coming into his manhood through his increasing relationship to the land, which Annixter limns expertly, and which informs his and Cam’s actions, the story becomes a shallow exercise in conventionality. Its wrongheadedness is exemplified by the rhyming fist-fights between the boy and a sneering town youth called Whit Turner, and by Tom Skerritt’s astonishingly bad performance in that role. You’d never know what a fine actor he was if this was all you ever saw of him. Early in the novel, Bucky, offended by Turner’s callous shooting of wild geese returning to the area (Cam, raised by Micmac Indians, believes them to be sacred totems, a sense he has passed on to his son) beats Whit up and only a year later does Turner attempt to enact his vengeance. The movie has Bucky beaten to a pulp at the top of the action and besting Turner at the end, a bit of narrative reversal that smacks wholly and tiresomely of cliché.
In the role of the local sage, Walter Brennan was given a watered-down diminution of the book’s garrulous old man who drives nearly everyone away with his unwanted and argumentative theories, turned here into a loveably twinkling local favorite. Even worse is Ed Wynn’s role, created for the picture, of a deaf old coot, with Wynn interpolating his “perfect fool” persona, complete unto typical Ed Wynn mannerisms. I love Wynn in the right part, but when he’s either misdirected or indulged in his schtick he’s correspondingly more annoying than far lesser talents. The young Linda Evans is lovely as the girl Bucky has known all his life without really understanding and the good supporting cast includes Philip Abbott, Frank de Kova, Paul Hartman, John Qualen and Parley Baer, who gives a vivid account of the venal owner of the land the Calloways occupy and who, when he evicts them for non-payment, looks genuinely shocked when he calls Cam his friend and Calloway ripostes that the man has no friends.
I’ve always felt that Brian Keith had everything an actor needs — good looks, intelligence, wit, range, humor and a commanding and distinctive voice — and he brought all of these to bear, usually in work that was not worthy of his gifts, throughout his career. Keith portrays Cam Calloway in all of his colors, including those, like his tendencies to drink to excess and to abandon his family when his wanderlust takes over. These are not the sorts of human qualities usually on display in heroic characters in the live-action Disney pictures of the period and it’s to both Keith’s credit and the screenwriter’s that they are not elided over here. The movie’s best performance, however, is Vera Miles’ as Cam’s long-suffering wife Liddy. Called “Ma” in the novel, Mrs. Calloway is not a character to whom the reader readily warms; like Ma Joad she’s been downtrodden for so long, and has sacrificed so much for her family, that she has little time for humor, and a smile is as alien to her as a filet mignon. The role was slightly reconceived for the movie, and made warner overall, and Miles gives everything to it. We understand at a glance her tensions, her anxieties and her undemonstrative but overmastering love, and when she weeps happy tears over the wished-for gift Cam and Bucky give her for Christmas, everything about her performance that makes it effective comes together in that moment.
Between Walt Disney, Louis Pelletier and the director of Those Calloways, Norman Tokar, the movie became overlong and enervated. An example of their profligacy: When after Cam has broken his leg Bucky goes alone into the wilderness to retrieve the animals for which they’ve previously set traps he takes the family dog, which the Bucky of the book eschews, knowing the excitable canine will just muck things up. In the movie, of course, not only does the hound accompany him, but is made to run off in pursuit of an ermine and chase it across the thin ice of a pond. It’s one of those typically “Disney” moments that made people grind their teeth in the ’60s and is as extraneous as Max Steiner’s musical score, composed in a fashion that suggests he didn’t realize it wasn’t still 1944. Even Bucky’s confrontation with the pelt-destroying wolverine* is somehow less terrifying in the picture than in the book, and its ultimate victory for Bucky is lost to the viewer; Annixter tells us that, having vanquished the beast with his knife despite his terror, he’ll never be frightened of an animal again. Pelletier did retain Annixter’s conservationist narrative (I suspect that was half the reason Disney made the picture, even as his company was raping the Florida Everglades to build his east coast theme park; deflection is such a useful tool) but altered the means by which the wild goose refuge is attained. In the novel, a drunken Cam plunges into the misty lake he’s set aside for the geese in a booze-induced attempt to converse with the birds and is shot to death by ravenous hunters. He’s still accidentally shot in the movie, but survives. His act in the book may be foolish, but it’s entirely in character. Not only are Cam’s actions even more foolish in the movie; Disney even robs him of his sacrifice.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
*The Calloways are not, whatever the surface-oriented idiots who habitually comment on imdb listings believe, opposed to hunting and thus, hypocrites where it comes to the wild geese. They depend on trapping and hunting generally for their livelihoods. It’s only the migratory geese Cam and Bucky consider sacred, a legacy of the father’s Micmac upbringing.
So few critics, so many poets 