Into the wilderness full movie movie#

As bad as his Bass has it, he doesn’t seem substantially happier in the flashbacks, in which we see him wrestle with religious indoctrination at a Christian school, declare that he’s “never much agreed with God’s will,” and warning his unborn son that “It’s hell here on Earth, and for that I am truly sorry.” He also witnesses his mother and only parent, dead from cholera, being sewn into a body bag. The Irish actor was something of a mainstay in Westerns, in titles like Major Dundee (1965) and The Deadly Trackers (1973), up through Unforgiven (1992), in which he makes a massive impression with minimal screen time as the arrogant royalist English Bob. The men groan about having to haul the large, wooden behemoth (22 mules do the heavy towing), but the hubristic Henry is steadfast-loping about the deck and smoking in the moonlight, he has the unhinged tenacity of Fitzcarraldo or Captain Ahab (Huston made his Moby Dick in 1956).Īs the crawling wounded, Harris is palpably pained, his despair and bitterness at his poor treatment kept in check in the service of finding food (raw bison, bone marrow and a live crayfish are among the entrees here) and not falling victim to wolves and the elements. We are here to explore the new America.” The speechifying is a smokescreen for the fact that the mauled, seemingly dying man is a nuisance, slowing down Henry’s mission to transplant a ship to the Missouri River. He tells his crew that “man is expendable. Even though Bass is “like a son” to him-he found the orphan stowed away on Henry’s ship-Henry is swift to justify abandoning the wounded man, advising that if he isn’t dead by morning, his designated sitters should kill him. Sporting a floppy stove top hat and jumbo-buttoned coat (with cravat peeking out), the Captain is as dapper as he is ruthless. While The Revenant uses real names, Man in the Wilderness substitutes Hugh Glass with “Zachary Bass,” and Henry is now simply “Captain Henry,” played by John Huston in a role customized for his particular rangy, Alpine presence. The Province of Soria in Spain stands in adequately for the American West, even if the ranges here don’t really resemble the Rocky Mountains.

Into the wilderness full movie movie#

Shot by cinematographer Gerry Fisher, the movie is also beautiful in its own right, rich with magisterial figure-in-a-landscape images and inserts of the early dawn sunshine slicing through branches and fog as ducks populate the foreground. Man in the Wilderness is leaner and more direct, and its psyche-providing flashbacks are more intelligently deployed than Iñárritu’s magic realism. He managed to partially heal himself and set out to track his abandoners, stumbling for 200 miles, perhaps fueled by some vague notion of revenge.Ĭompared to Iñárritu’s much-hyped portrayal, Sarafian’s 1971 telling is the more satisfying of the two movies.

One of William Henry Ashley’s “Hundred” group of hearty mountain men, Glass was graced with a colossal threshold for pain and an awe-inspiring survival instinct. Man in the Wilderness (1971) a truish folktale embellished by time: Glass, a trapper and explorer with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, went on an expedition led by Andrew Henry, only to be mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his impatient colleagues.

Iñárritu and Leonardo DiCaprio bagged Oscar gold for The Revenant (2015), two Richards-Sarafian and Harris (with screenwriter Jack DeWitt)-dramatized their own version of the Hugh Glass story.