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| How long were you alone with that dog? |
The film tells the story of tomboy Natalie “Natty” Gann (Meredith Salenger, in her first starring role) and her widower father, Union-organizer Sol (Ray Wise.) Eking out a meager existence in Depression-era Chicago, Sol must leave Natty for a while after receiving a job offer from a lumber company in Washington. Following a run-in with the local police and threatened with being turned in as an abandoned child by her unscrupulous landlady (a harpy-like Lainie Kazan,) Natty hops a freight train heading west, hoping to find her father. Making her way across the country, she encounters both kindness and cruelty from humanity and nature alike, her courage and ingenuity put to the test with each mile traveled. Along her journey she’s joined by a wolfdog whom she rescues from a dog-fighting ring (who becomes something of a protective guardian) and an experienced drifter named Harry (a young John Cusack,) who mentors her in the rules of riding the rails.
The Journey of Natty Gann, as mentioned above, falls into a particular category of film that you don't tend to see any longer: that of the "family adventure." A familiar sub-genre to those of my generation, repeats of this film (or others like 1993's A Far Off Place, 1989's Cheetah and 1991's White Fang) or action-oriented TV shows like Canadian-import Danger Bay made up a considerable chunk of The Disney Channel's line-up from the mid '80s through the early '90s. Played as straight as a realistic period-piece, with no fantasy elements and little outright goofiness, for many these yarns felt like modern-day continuations of the "boy's adventure tales" that categorized such institutions as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Treasure Island. Though definitely aimed at a younger audience, the film features a number of surprisingly heavy moments that cast a grim pall over the story (including a scene in which a hitchhiking Natty escapes an attempted rape.)
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| 'Steada treated, we get tricked... |
Generally, Natty Gann holds up very well in this regard - and has earned itself something of a reputation as an underrated treasure. It's easy to see why, as everyone involved in the production seems to've brought their "A game" to this seemingly simple adventure tale. Jeremy Kagan's direction is confident and focused. An eclectic director of film and television (including successful 1977 drama Heroes and 1991's cult favorite By The Sword,) Kagan went on to become a full-tenured professor of film direction at USC. The film is bleakly gorgeous, with British cinematographer Dick Bush (a frequent collaborator with Ken Russel, of all people) finding intricate beauty in both majestic wilderness and squalid shanty-towns. Additionally, the late James Horner turns in another warm and lyrical score that supports the action and family-based drama well, sitting comfortably alongside his popular scores for 1985's Cocoon and 1988's The Land Before Time. Interestingly, Horner was brought in to re-score the film, as original composer Elmer Bernstein's more "western" styled score was deemed unsatisfactory by the filmmakers.
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| We have to dance for Natalie! |
The acting is fantastic across the board. Meredith Salenger has a mesmerizing screen presence for such a young actress, and it's a shame that she only starred in a further four films before briefly leaving Hollywood at age 18 (though graduating from Harvard with a degree in psychology is certainly nothing to balk at.) Since the early '90s, Salenger has popped up in smaller roles in film and television, including a cameo in Disney's Race to Witch Mountain in 2009 (playing a reporter named Natalie Gann - well played, Disney.) Additionally, it's always a treat to see Twin Peaks' Ray Wise pop up, especially when he's not playing a villain or corrupted authority figure. His performance as Natty's father is at turns warm (in his scenes with Salenger) and gut-wrenching (as his character becomes cavalierly suicidal following news of Natty's supposed death.) Meanwhile, a fresh-faced John Cusack turns in a subdued performance as the worlds' cleanest young hobo, bringing a bit of teenage romance into an otherwise straight-forward adventure film.
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| In your eyes... |
While there is much to appreciate in The Journey of Natty Gann, the film does tumble somewhat at the end, unfortunately leaving something of a bad - or at least misjudged - impression (spoilers for the climax lay ahead.) As mentioned above, Sol is under the impression that Natty is dead (her wallet being discovered at the scene of a train derailment that she'd actually escaped from,) and so takes on a series of ever-more-dangerous jobs for the lumber company. On the morning that Natalie happens to finally arrive at his jobsite, he's involved in a job in which several laborers are caught in a dynamite-blast gone wrong. I say "involved in" because Sol is not amongst the injured - though the film very briefly suggests that he was. Now my problem is not with this bit of bait-and-switch, but with the fact that between Natty's arrival at the jobsite and her eventual reunion with Sol, nothing really happens. Natty is told to wait for her father, then driven up the mountain to where he's working. Then she's driven back, but hops out of the car. Sol, meanwhile, travels down the mountain with his injured co-workers, missing Natalie, until he eventually (and confusingly) appears in the middle of the road to re-join his wayward daughter. So for the better part of 10 minutes, the film decides to stretch out a very simple game of "car-tag" because apparently the screenwriter thought that having a bit of drama at the very end was unnecessary. This was unfortunately one of those endings where I had to go back and re-watch a few times, thinking that maybe I'd missed something. Unfortunately the film then offers nothing in the way of a denouement, with Natalie and Sol warmly embracing each other on a mountain road as the credits very suddenly begin to roll.
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| John Cusack returns in "Better Off Dead 2: Suicidal Boogaloo" |
In my Escape to Witch Mountain post I noted that the year 1975 was a diverse year for Walt Disney Productions, with that film pointing toward the darker turn Disney’s film slate would take by the end of the decade. With The Journey of Natty Gann, released a decade later, we see the pendulum begin to swing back the other way. While not every live-action film Disney released in the early ‘80s was dark or adult-oriented (awful Love Bug sequel Herbie Goes Bananas was released two months after gothic nail-biter Watcher In the Woods, for example,) the studio’s increasingly diversified slate under president Ron Miller (a former student/football star at USC and husband to Walt’s daughter, Diane) was a significant departure for the “house of mouse” and it’s squeaky-clean public image. Their attempts at a more mature tone seemingly backfired, however, as the film studio’s steady financial decline suddenly became more of a freefall. Several high-profile box office flops - including 1980’s Midnight Madness and 1982’s TRON - came to define Disney’s tarnished image to the rest of Hollywood. Then, following Miller’s ousting by Disney’s board of directors (led by Roy E. Disney, Stanley Gold and Sid Bass,) in stepped new CEO Michael Eisner in 1984. Along with his appointed film studio chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eisner set about remaking the studio into a more family-oriented, money-making machine.
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| Some snacks aren't fit for Instagram... |
Significantly, during this corporate shake-up Disney released no movies in all of 1984 - and the four it put out the following year can easily be seen as a bit of “house cleaning,” releasing the last few projects started under Miller’s tenure. This isn’t to say there weren’t other projects started under Miller that the company would later reap the benefits of - including the founding of Touchstone Pictures, courting of George Lucas, and funding upstart artist and stop-motion filmmaker Tim Burton. But I digress. Even then, 1985’s first two releases - Walter Murch’s bleak Return to Oz and animated sword-and-sorcery flop The Black Cauldron - could be seen as the “last stand” of the dark corner Disney had wandered into. Once the darkness had spread from live-action into their animated canon, clearly the edges of this particular envelope had been reached.
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Once the decade was officially half over, Disney wanted to make it clear that the way forward was to play on their old family-friendly image. Theatrical posters for The Journey of Natty Gann featured a big, bold tagline across the top, actually more of a corporate mission statement than an ad for the film itself: “Unforgettably, Undeniably Disney.” This attention-grabbing statement featured the Disney name in the old familiar “Walt” font, and nearly dwarfed the film's own title. There would be an even less subtle tagline attached to posters advertising the film’s home video release: “The new Disney: Contemporary films for the ‘80s family.” Indeed, while Natty Gann has a grittier and more realistic tone than modern audiences would likely expect from a PG-rated Disney movie, at the time it signaled a definite realignment of not just their film studio, but their entire corporate outlook. Hereafter, the Disney brand would once again be associated with “wholesome” entertainment the whole family could enjoy, and nostalgia would be monetized to it’s fullest.
While something of a "lost stepchild" (released as it was during the great sea change that forever altered the future of Disney and it's audience,) The Journey of Natty Gann is, in many ways, the best that the forgotten genre of "family adventure" has to offer. Full of vivid, realistic acting and nail-biting adventure, the film remains a solid nostalgic favorite of those who grew up in a time when childhood entertainment wasn't always the squeaky-clean, oftentimes vapid fare it would become.
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