All-time worst hunting movies
Flicks damning to the sport abound; who's going to be the first
in Hollywood to make "A River Runs Through It" for hunting?
By James A. Swan, Ph.D.We live in a media world, where many people define the value of things they have never seen or experienced according to what appears on TV or at the movies.
Once upon a time, hunters were heroes on the small and big screen. Today they more often are portrayed as villains, slobs, butchers, criminals and jerks.
The following are my nominations for some of the worst depictions of hunting.
Children's films
The 1942 Disney animated feature "Bambi" is the best-known movie casting a negative light on hunting. It targets audiences of women and children, making Daddy's deer-hunting trip seem cruel and turns him into a bad guy.
But hunters are not the only people who have trouble with "Bambi." According to movie critic Roger Ebert, "Bambi" is "a parable of sexism, nihilism, and despair, portraying absentee fathers and passive mothers in a world of violence."
Disney made "Bambi," but a blanket portrayal of Walt Disney as an anti-hunting crusader is inappropriate.
In 1955, Disney did make a cartoon entitled "No Hunting," but the star was Donald Duck. In 1935, Disney produced a cartoon, "Duck Hunt," starring Mickey Mouse.
Let us not forget that Walt Disney also gave us the immensely popular 1955 "Davy Crockett" television series, starring Fess Parker, where a hunter hero was the star of the show.
And there was the hunting-hero series "Daniel Boone" in 1961, as well as scores of other Westerns with American Indians, trappers and frontiersmen.
Even today, decades after the last episode of "Davy Crockett," thousands of kids going to Disneyland take home replicas of coonskin hats.
Some time ago I interviewed Fess Parker at his winery at Los Olivos, Calif. He worked directly with Walt Disney and said that Walt grew up on a farm and had hunted when he was younger. "He just knew how to tell a good story," Fess told me.
Many children's movies that deal with hunting romanticize ecological principles and avoid issues about who eats who.
Contrast Walt Disney's 1960s "Bear Country," which was realistic, with the 1989 film "The Bear," about an orphaned, cute, bear cub who is adopted by an adult grizzly.
In "The Bear," hunters encountered are out after pelts, and the market hunters ultimately become hunted by the grizzly, which does not kill them. One lesson here is that the bear has more heart than the simple, brutish, greedy hunter.
The wildlife footage in "The Bear" is beautiful, but, in reality, male grizzlies often eat young cubs and bear hunters are not evil people.
The advent of computer animation technology gave us talking animals, as in "Babe." It's likely we will see more and more talking animals as stars. What remains to be seen is whether the animals will tell the truth or not.
In contrast to "Babe," the 1978 Warner Bros. animated feature "Watership Down" is ecologically and biologically accurate.
Modern children's movies seem to almost always cast hunters in a negative light.
"Hill Farm" (1989) is an academy-award-winning animated short about tourists and hunters damaging a farm.
The recent popular children's movie "Jumanji" (1996) has fantastic special effects of animals popping out of a magical book, but there is a hunter buffoon who is careless, reckless, trigger-happy and wants to kill these wonderful animals, or anything else that moves. This is not a good message to give to kids about hunting.
The 1996 release, "Shiloh" is a story about a hunting dog rescued from his abusive owner, a hunter. Contrast the plot of "Shiloh" with "The Biscuit Eater" (1940), in which two young boys take the runt of a litter of bird dogs and turn him into a champion.
Then there is "Bless the Beasts and the Children" (1972) about a group of teen-agers at summer camp who attempt to prevent a hunt to reduce the herd of buffalo on a wildlife reserve.
The message here is that hunt disrupters are heroes and sound wildlife management is bad.
Adult features
In the 1978 classic, "The Deer Hunter," soldiers returning home from the Vietnam War find that shooting deer brings up troubling guilt feelings and flashbacks.
Hunting buddies who drink to excess and are reckless in the woods go hunting before and after serving in the war, but the actual story is about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it affects one's life. Ebert considers "The Deer Hunter" "one of the most emotionally shattering films ever made."
Numerous movies start out with people hunting animals but end up hunting other people.
"The Most Dangerous Game" (1932) is about two trophy hunters who end up stalking each other. The same story line has carried on in the modern classics "Hard Target" and "Surviving the Game."
In "The Big Cat" (1949), a puma steps in the middle of two feuding families. Another family feud is described in "The Voice of Bugle Ann" (1936), which takes place in the hills of Missouri, where people are using hounds for night fox hunting. When a man moves in and decides to erect fences and raise sheep, a family feud begins, escalating when a prize hound named Bugle Ann is lost.
"Hunter's Blood" (1987) is a cult classic, with a plot somewhat similar to "Deliverance" (1973), in which a group of men from the city go deer hunting only to be hunted, tortured and killed by a group of hillbilly poachers.
"The Shooting Party" (1984), "The Rules of the Game" (1939), "Shalako" (1968), "The List of Adrian Messenger" (1963) and "A Handful of Dust" (1988) portray wealthy aristocrats on elaborate hunting trips, where murder, cruelty, sadism and divorce take place. In these movies hunters are seen as ugly, unsportsmanlike, brutal and sometimes sadistic.
In contrast, "Gosford Park," the award-winning Robert Altman-directed murder mystery, includes a shooting party during a weekend at the estate of a British lord. The movie is a statement about cast and class. It doesn't try to make the hunters seem cruel, although some of the worst aristocratic snobs in the party seem to be out in the field solely to try to get some of the old man's money.
"The Naked Prey" (1966), starring Cornell Wilde, is an animal-rights activist's dream come true. In a turn of the 20th century setting, African natives pursue a trophy-hunting safari guide like an animal while his greedy client is butchered and presumably eaten without even a "fair chase" chance to escape.
"Powder" (1995) portrays a man gifted with rare paranormal powers who heals a deer shot by a hunter. The theme of hunting as a crime is strong here, as in the box-office smash horror flick "Scream" (1997). A series of bloody murders are committed where the victims are gutted. When suspects are questioned, they are asked if they like to hunt. The reason for the question, we learn, is that hunters like to eviscerate their prey.
If you are interested in depressing psychological dramas about obsession, "Moby Dick" (1930) and "The White Buffalo"(1977) are good.
Even better is "White Hunter, Black Heart"(1990), starring Clint Eastwood portraying the legendary film director John Houston, who is obsessed with killing an elephant. This is a good psychological portrait about ego and impotence, but it says nothing positive about hunting and we are left with the feeling that hunters are ultimately immature cowards.
To this category we also should add "The Stratton Story" (1949), about a baseball player who loses a leg in a hunting accident.
Last but not least is the 1999 Canadian feature, "Grey Owl," starring Pierce Brosnan and directed by Academy Award winner Richard Attenborough. "Grey Owl" is about a real person, Archibald Stansfield Belaney, whose writings in the early part of the 20th century launched a Canadian conservation movement.
In the movie, however, we learn that Belaney lived his life as a fraud. He was British and migrated to America after an unhappy childhood. But he claimed that he was Archie Grey Owl, a half-Indian taught Indian ways by a band of Chippewa.
Indian wisdom is the core of what he writes and speaks about, but much of what he says is highly romanticized and aimed to get the sympathy of white audiences more than accurately present ecological reality.
"Grey Owl" cost $28.9 million to make. It is one of the most expensive movies ever made in Canada. Fortunately, "Grey Owl" had a limited theatrical release abroad, never found an American theatrical distributor and went straight to video, thus indicating it was a financial disaster.
Today, beaver have hardly become extinct, the fur industry is doing quite well and Indians still trap, guide and hunt. The story of Grey Owl is an embarrassing footnote in history.
Spending that much money on a movie about Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot birthing the conservation movement would have been much more valuable to the conservation of man and beast.
A challenge to Hollywood
Making a movie that portrays hunters as dumb, stupid or criminal is easy, and it's not an accurate portrayal of the average hunter.
Hollywood, if you want a real challenge, how about giving us movies with a hunter hero who acts on sound wildlife science?
Maybe it could be about a modern outfitter/ hunting guide who leads a crusade to reduce the skyrocketing elephant numbers in Africa and takes on the anti-hunters.
Perhaps the central character could be a game warden willing to stand up for using using hunting to control the deer population to prevent range destruction and starvation by increasing hunting.
A powerful feature film could be made about the snow goose overpopulation on the breeding grounds at Hudson's Bay that is destroying that habitat and other species of nesting birds.
And, who is going to make the film that shows how the anti-hunting and anti-sealing forces have destroyed the economies and lifestyles of Inuit and others who depend on the sea for their livelihood?
Robert Redford made a spectacular movie, "A River Runs Through It," in 1992 that made flyfishing politically correct.
Who's going to be the first in Hollywood to make "A River Runs Through It" for hunting? And, who is going to fund it?
James Swan — who has appeared in more than a dozen feature films, including "Murder in the First" and "Star Trek: First Contact," as well as the television series "Nash Bridges," "Midnight Caller" and "Modern Marvels" — is the author of the book "In Defense of Hunting." Click here to purchase a copy.
To learn more about Swan, visit his Web site.
