A Scene of Awe

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

NEVER CRY WOLF

Directed by Carroll Bollard Screenplay by Curtis Hanson, Sam Hamm and Richard Kletter

Landscape is character," the writer's old aphorism holds. Given the imagistic capacity of their medium, and the talent and will to use it, movie directors al ways have the opportunity to go it one better: they can turn landscape into a character, a protagonist as dramatically charged as any human figure can possibly be. Carroll Ballard, who directed the lovely The Black Stallion, has taken this commercially risky chance with Never Cry Wolf and has made something splendid of it.

Based on Farley Mowat's account of his one-man, government-financed expedition into the deeper reaches of northern Canada in search of ethological and biological information about wolves, the film re-creates most of the book's incidents with a minimum of fictional embellishment while sustaining a dramatic momentum of its own. Most important, it is in every sense true to the spirit of Mowat's writing, which mixed self-deprecating hu mor, outrage over man's misunderstanding and misuse of the wilds, and a sense of selfdiscovery.

Mowat's adventure had prejudiced beginnings. Responding to complaints from hunters, his employers hoped he would prove wolves, whose bad reputation in lore and legend ever precedes them, were responsible for the decimation of the caribou herds of the tundra and offer a justification for lupine slaughter. Mowat found, in stead, that man was the predator, that the wolves, besides being agreeable and intelligent in their domestic ways, performed an invaluable Darwinian function in selecting out the unfit deer. All this Ballard shows in images of great but distinctly unsentimental beauty, stressing the contrast between the blundering ways of man and the sometimes harsh, sometimes subtle efficiency with which a natural environment functions when left to its own devices. As the Mowat character, Charles Martin Smith plays with ingratiating innocence, stubborn and plucky. His art, like that of Ballard's cameraman, Hiro Narita, lies in understatement that does not imply dispassion. Ballard and his masterly crew of film makers have reimagined a corner of the natural world, metaphorically connecting the cold spaces and indifferent silences of a vast land with the heated struggle for existence taking place closer to the ground, nearer to their cameras. They leave us awed. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.