Jack C. Couffer Movies

The wolves of the Arctic Circle and its environs, the stunning beauty of a Northern winter, a biologist who braves it all to record the lives of the wolves, and Inuits who save the biologist's hide and share their own wisdom openly are all winners in this film that is a tribute to the skills of writer and director Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion). Based on Farley Mowat's autobiographical novel of the same name, Tyler (Charles Martin Smith) is a normal biologist until he gets up into the Arctic winter in order to prove that the caribou herds are not being decimated by wolves; then he becomes a semi-klutz, unable to instinctively adapt to the deep freeze around him. After he sets up his first stake-out, a native Inuit named Oolek (Zachary Ittimangnaq) comes along to help him out and gets him better established in an isolated hut, where Tyler is left to fend for himself again. That he does, but not because he can see in advance what his needs or problems are going to be -- he just comes up against the worst when it happens and works from there. At the same time, Tyler gets to carefully and closely observe a wolf family he has already dubbed as George, Angeline, and the three pups, and he has several comic interactions with his distant "pets." Oolek and his friend Mike (Samson Jorah) drop by to keep Tyler company for awhile, sharing their observations on nature and life in an easy-going, non-committal manner. With Tyler's perseverance and the knowledge gained from experience and through these conversations, the real culprit in the decimation of the caribou turns out not to have four legs at all. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The Best of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures assembles the cream of Disney's "live action" short subjects crop. Since Disney usually equated "best" with what won at Academy Award time, this collection highlights the studio's Oscar-winning nature shorts. We are thus treated to the first of the "True Life Adventures" series, 1949's Seal Island, filmed in Alaska by nonprofessionals Alfred and Elma Milotte. Others in this compendium include Beaver Valley (1950), Nature's Half Acre (1951) and Water Birds (1952). The feature-length True-Life Adventures of the mid-1950s and 1960s have been packaged for video on a title-by-title basis. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Darwin Adventure stars Nicholas Clay as 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin. The film covers the whole of Darwin's life, with emphasis on his volatile evolutionary theories. The "adventure" of the title is Darwin's 1831 fact-finding voyage on the good ship Beagle, in search of nature's secrets in the darker corners of South America. The story ends in Darwin's declining years, during which time many of his theories have been adopted and refined by younger, more broad-minded naturalists. The Darwin Adventure plays like a Cliff's Notes version of the subject's life, packing far too much into its 91 minute running time to be properly digested by the average filmgoer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

"I love to shoot film" is the sanguine motto of TV lensman John Cassellis (Robert Forster) in Haskell Wexler's 1969 Medium Cool, a semi-documentary investigation of image-making and politics. With his soundman, Gus (Peter Bonerz), John films such events as gruesome car wrecks with frosty detachment, considering himself a mere recorder of circumstances, his only responsibility to get his film in on time. Even his girlfriend, Ruth (Marianna Hill), cannot understand or penetrate John's complacency. Encounters with signs of the late '60s times, however, raise John's consciousness about the implications of his job, as he films a verbal attack by black militants on the media's racism, gets fired after he objects to having that footage turned over to the FBI, and meets Vietnam War widow Eileen (Verna Bloom). John witnesses the violence of the state firsthand as he and Eileen search for her son amidst the real-life demonstrations and riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Even though he realizes the political power of pointing a camera at anything, John finally cannot extricate himself or his loved ones from a culture obsessed with recording any sensational, gory incident. Scripted (from a novel by Jack Couffer), directed, and shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer and political activist Wexler, Medium Cool systematically questions the ideological power of images by combining documentary techniques such as "talking heads" and cinéma vérité with staged scenes between the actors. By the time Wexler and his crew start filming Forster and Bloom among the actual events at the convention, all barriers between fiction and fact are broken down, as Wexler's assistant can be heard warning, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," when tear gas is thrown. The footage of cops clubbing people in the crowd is real, but Wexler's presence also turns it into part of a fictional story, revealing filmed "reality" to be as artificially constructed as any other fiction, subject to the interpretation of whoever holds the camera and, perhaps, to larger institutions of power.

Funding Medium Cool partly out of his own resources, Wexler had free reign during production, but when the execs at Paramount saw the result, they were not pleased. Despite the timely subject matter, Paramount delayed and then curtailed the film's release, tempering its impact on critics and audiences. Regardless of that record, Medium Cool stands as a vital late-'60s film for its incisive narrative and formal dissection of the visual politics of "truth," and its awareness of how coolly seductive televised violence might be as entertainment, especially in a historical moment marked by incendiary images of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and counterculture protests. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

At only 67 minutes of running time, this Disney animal adventure story by James Algar is still slow-paced. The star of the tale is Lobo (which means "wolf" in Spanish), a legendary wolf who lived in the region of New Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. The story begins with Lobo as a young pup, just finding out about life in the wild. One of the unusual moves he makes is to befriend a baby antelope, normally a brief snack for a wolf. Even though Lobo is different, he soon learns that he has to defend himself against all sorts of four-legged creatures. It also does not take long for him to learn that the two-legged creatures with guns and traps are the most dangerous of all. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This episode of Walt Disney Presents proves that the battle for survival does not exclusive rage in the "big" world of man and animals. Using extreme close-up photography, the program shows the survival techniques, both inherited and adopted, use by the minutest forms of plant and animal life, on land and in the sea. In a remarkable sequence, time-lapse photography illustrates the life cycle of the humble oat seed. Rutherford Platt and Tilden W. Roberts served as consulting biologists for "Battle for Survival," which, curiously, was neither rebroadcast nor released theatrically after its initial April 1961 play date. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Michael Higgins plays an outwardly charming young man who befriends Doris Fesette and her two daughters, Jean Allison and Lois Holmes. The family is vacationing in a British resort town, next door to an unoccupied cottage. Higgins sweet talks his way into renting the cottage, so that he may drop in on the family any time he likes. One of those times, he reveals himself to be a homicidal maniac. Edge of Fury is based on Wisteria College, a novel by Robert M. Coates. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Scene from several of Walt Disney's "True-Life Adventure" short subjects were incorporate in this episode of Disneyland. Winston Hibler, a fixture of the short-subject series, served as both director and narrator. Told in a sequential fashion, the narrative illustrates how animals manage to stay alive through the processes of adaptation and natural selection. "Survival in Nature" proved popular enough to be rebroadcast three times during Disneyland's 1955-1956 season. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With cheerful shamelessness, Walt Disney managed to use several first-season episodes of his Disneyland TV anthology to plug his newest live-action theatrical feature, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Disney introduces this episode by strolling into his studio's "Monster Room", where reams of research material concerning squids, octopi and the like are kept on reserve for the benefit of his animators and photographers. The rest of the episode features candid shots of the film's stars, Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre, as they prepare to interact with the fabricated monstrosites created for the picture. According to Douglas, he waived his usual salary to appear in this episode, opting instead for copies of Disney films for his youngsters. Monsters of the Deep was shown three times during Disneyland's inaugural season. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide