Carroll Ballard, who began his movie career as a documentarian, arrived with a splash when his first narrative feature, The Black Stallion (1979), turned out to be one of the most gorgeously photographed pictures in motion picture history. It should come as no surprise then that Ballard's follow-up Never Cry Wolf (1983) is equally memorable for its stunning imagery, though it is also unique for its quirky character development and offbeat sense of humor.

Ballard and his dedicated crew spent many difficult months in the Alaskan wilderness shooting the story of a studious research scientist (Charles Martin Smith) who finds himself in the adventure of his life when he agrees to record the impact wolf packs have on caribou that roam the frozen tundra.

Smith plays Tyler, a somewhat fictionalized version of Farley Mowat, a real-life naturalist who wrote the book that Never Cry Wolf is based on. Tyler has been sent to determine whether wolves are decimating the caribou population, but starts having second thoughts about the job during a perilous plane trip to his destination. The plane's pilot (Brian Dennehy) is forced to climb out on the wing in mid-flight to fix a broken engine, while Tyler holds the controls steady. A great deal of the film's kick comes from the incongruity of the especially nerdish Smith having to behave heroically.

During his stay in the wild, Tyler befriends an aging Inuit Indian named Ootek (Zachary Ittimangnaq), and the man's adopted son, Mike (Samson Jorah.) But the most compelling relationship in the picture is certainly the one that develops between Tyler and the wolves, who turn out to be far less damaging to the caribou than he was led to believe.

Never Cry Wolf in the vicinity of Nome, Alaska, where it's so cold the ground is frozen solid to depths of almost 200 feet! Throughout shooting, he realized that the most significant scene in the film – the image that would sell the picture to audiences – would be a caribou stampede that Tyler finds himself in the middle of after falling asleep and stumbling naked out of his tent.

This small detail made an already extraordinarily difficult scene all the harder to take for poor Charles Martin Smith, who had to repeatedly strip down and pursue a pack of animals that could have easily trampled him to death. It was a whole lot easier when Smith just had to park a moped in front of a hamburger joint while playing "Terry the Toad" in American Graffiti (1973). However, Smith reportedly met Ballard's challenge with something approaching good humor.

"We had to do the scene outside of Nome," Ballard told Rolling Stone writer Tim Cahill at the time of the picture's release. "In no other place in the world except maybe Siberia, could you get the caribou in a place where you could control them."

Well, theoretically, anyway. Ballard quickly learned that anything having to do with caribou was easier said than done. For one thing, he had to film the animals before they were brought down by local hunters who sell their ground horns as an aphrodisiac in Japan, where an ounce of the stuff cost as much as an ounce of cocaine. Simply getting the caribou to stay in one place was almost impossible. At one point, after the people of Nome gathered and fenced in 4,000 of the animals, the entire herd swam away under the cover of fog! Planes eventually found the creatures spread over 50 miles of land.

After that disastrous false start, Ballard, and Smith in all his naked glory, managed to film a very memorable sequence. "The studio had already spent ten times more than anyone in his right mind would on such a scene," Ballard told Cahill. "So we talked about mechanical caribou, electronic caribou, caribou made out of clay, animated caribou, men running around in caribou suits. We thought about finding the biggest caribou herd we could find and parachuting everyone right into the middle of it."

In the end, Ballard and the crew had to return the following year to the peninsula where the previous herd of caribou managed to escape. The six minutes of footage that appears in the finished film of Never Cry Wolf came to define the picture in most people's minds, as Ballard suspected, and used up a full one-third of the budget.

Director: Carroll Ballard
Producer: Lewis Allen, Jack Couffer, Joseph Strick
Screenplay: Curtis Hanson, Sam Hamm, Richard Kletter (based on the book by Farley Mowat)
Editor: Peter Parasheles, Michael Chandler
Cinematographer: Hiro Narita
Music: Mark Isham
Art Direction: Graeme Murray Cast: Charles Martin Smith (Tyler), Brian Dennehy (Rosie), Zachary Ittimangnaq (Ootek), Samson Jorah (Mike), Martha Ittimangnaq (Ootek's Wife).
C-105m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Paul Tatara