Bear with me

MAN IN THE WILDERNESS is the original of THE REVENANT, based on the same true story (attacked by bear, abandoned, seeks revenge). Richard Harris plays the protagonist and is sound casting except that it makes the thing too reminiscent of MAN CALLED HORSE and its sequel. Either get a new Dumbledore or change that title.

It’s directed by Richard Sarafian of VANISHING POINT fame, and looks great, photographed as it is by Gerry Fisher. We first see our coterie of beaver-trappers dragging a small ship through the undergrowth, a tribe of itinerant Fitzcarraldos led by John Huston in an eccentric hat, his smashed root vegetable of a face bolstering the production values considerably.

Unfortunately, it does have a very poor bear attack, compared to the sexually-charged ursine assault upong Leo DiCaprio in the later epic. Sarafian has chosen to intercut footage of Richard Harris wrestling with a man in a pantomime bear costume with other, different footage of a bear wrestling with a pantomime Richard Harris. With all the real giveaway shots held on just a few frames too long. Incomprehensible… you want to be a fly on the editing room wall. “Can you see it’s not a real bear?” asks one cutter, “I don’t think it matters,” shrugs another.

Widescreen makes this stuff harder to pull off, I guess.

As with THE REV, it looks at one point as if Smoky is getting amorous.

(It’s not as bad as the stuffed bear attack in CIRCUS OF HORRORS, but that one is more in keeping with the lousiness of its surroundings, so it doesn’t make me cringe like this ursine impersonator does.)

The editor is Geoffrey Foot (lovely name) who had cut a couple of David Lean films, so we can’t wholly blame him. Or can we? It’s probably too late to hold him to account.

It’s a very decent script by Jack DeWitt, who also wrote AMCHORSE and ROCKY (not that one) and FARGO (not that one, or that one).