Gold in the Straw

Children, like cats, will watch anything that moves, and the fact has not been lost on makers of children's films. Hustling for small change, they dress shoddy actors in seedy costumes, bloat fairy tales to 1 1/2-hour proportions and ship the results to Saturday matinees. In the throng, however, there are a few legitimate producers whose gold is all but lost in the straw. The best of them is Robert Radnitz, 44, whose movies--A Dog of Flanders, Island of the Blue Dolphins, And Now Miguel--are the sleepers of the children's film industry. All have won prizes, all are marked by a happy lack of condescension.

My Side of the Mountain, Radnitz claims, is intended for the whole family. But its main appeal is obviously to the intelligent preteenager interested in natural history. Sam (Teddy Eccles) is a Canadian youth who decides that four walls and two parents are too confining. With his pet raccoon Gus, he runs off to the Laurentian Mountains, befriends a falcon, a librarian and a folk singer (Theodore Bikel). The singer teaches Sam a fundamental truth: no boy is an island, entire of itself--and prepares him for the long hike home.

Jacob's ladders of sunshine, a parade of deer, fox, owl and bear, and a vigorous outdoor atmosphere that practically chills the viewer's nostrils, all give the film an air of actuality. Parents know better. Sam spends five months without a bowl of cereal or a pair of rubbers, yet never catches a cold, never asks for a glass of water at night and never needs a Band-Aid. My Side of the Mountain may be as delightful as Walden but it is plainly as fantastic as Snow White.

As a producer of children's films, Joseph Strick, 45, is less skilled than Radnitz. His prior movies have been fare that kids could scarcely see, much less comprehend: Ulysses, The Balcony, The Savage Eye. In Ring of Bright Water, he reverses himself and locks out the adults with a tale that makes The Three Bears seem Byzantine.

A middle-aged London accountant named Graham Merrill (Bill Travers) buys an otter to keep it from becoming a captive circus performer. Given his freedom, the animal returns the favor by wrecking Merrill's city flat and showing him that happiness is a cottage in Scotland. Merrill blithely quits his insurance job, hies to the highlands and begins a life of happy isolation. Even in children's films, a man cannot drift for long before a pair of pretty eyes begin blinking like a lighthouse. Here they belong to Virginia Mc-Kenna--Mrs. Travers in real life and his co-star in Born Free.

Though the film departs considerably from Gavin Maxwell's witty, eccentric book, it does manage to convey that peculiar love for a pet that can amount to an obsession. In addition, it provides the accepting child viewer with the prime requisites for motion pictures: 1) a star with fur, 2) adults who look foolish (as Merrill does when he tries, by flapping his arms, to teach a gosling to fly), and 3) no love scenes except those between otter and otter. The result is little otters, making Ring of Bright Water the best sex-education film ever to get a G rating.

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