User Reviews

**SPOILERS** Out hunting for food for the members of his expedition Indian scout Zachary Bass, Richard Harris,is suddenly attacked by a grizzly bear who savagely mauls him. Coming to Bass' rescue the frontiersmen of his expedition gun down the grizzly but not after the bear just about did Bass in.

With both massive claw and bite wounds as well as having lost a near-fatal amount of blood it's decided by the leader of the expedition Captain Filmore Henry, John Huston, to give him a proper and Christian funeral but there's only one catch! Bass, as badly injured as he is, is still clinging on to life!

With the two frontiersmen Fogarty & Lowire, Percy Herbert & Dennis Waterman, watching and waiting for Bass to finally kick off they turn tail and run at the sight of a group of Arikara Indians in the area leaving Zachary Bass to his fate. It turned out that Bass' fate was to survive and live to see his new born son whom at the time he never expected to live to see at all!

Inspiring and touching story of how Zachary Bass defied the odds and survived in the bitter and frozen woodlands an mountains west of the Missouri River. Bass not a religious man who was very cynical of life-due to hie own life experiences-found a reservoir of new strength to help him struggle through life's hardships. Which turned out to be a combination of belief in himself as well as that of an Almighty omnipresent and benevolent higher power: God.

Fighting off wolves and mountain lions for food in order to survive Bass soon becomes strong enough to make his way to the Missouri on foot just before Captain Henry's expedition. It's there that Bass finds himself in the middle of a life and death battle between Captain's Henry's men and hundreds of Arikara Indians lead by their chief Henry Wikoxon.

***SPOILER ALERT*** With most of Captain Henry's men killed by the rampaging Arikara Indians and it looking like curtains for those still surviving another miracle, one of many, happens in the movie to have Chief Wikoxon call his warriors off. Chief Wikoxon's great respect for Bass whom, in what Bass went through, he considers to be one of his own.

P.S The film "Man in the Wilderness" is actually based on a the true story of frontiersman and Indian scout Hugh Glass. Glass like Zachary Bass in the movie did survive a Grizzly attack and was left for dead by those in his expedition only to fool them surviving against impossible odds. Glass lived to be 53 years old, 13 years after that incident in the wild, only to be killed in 1833 together two fellow frontiersmen in an ambush by the Arikara Indians on the banks of the Yellowstone River.

On a trek through the Western wilderness, Richard Harris is mauled by a bear and left behind for dead by his colleagues, led by John Huston in a funny hat. Harris manages to survive, fix himself up as best he can, and limp along until he catches up with the others. He's been planning revenge but somehow, mainly through memories of his happy wife and child, he appears to have recovered the gentler side of his nature and, after collecting his rifle from them, he trudges off towards home.

It's a weird and, in many ways, unpleasant movie. The trail is through the wintry mountains of the mid-19th century West and everything is gray, cold, damp, and rotting. Harris suffers like blazes, squeezing laudable pus out of his infected thigh, killing mountain lions and dressing himself in their skins to keep from freezing, fighting wolves for the offal of dead buffalo, and enduring suffering in every form except restless legs syndrome.

There are a couple of touching scenes. In one, Harris hides behind a log while an Arikara woman give birth. She does so in the traditional squatting position. (The anthropologist Margaret Mead also insisted on using it.) And this scene and some of the others get some details right. The Arikara use a travois, for instance, and the woman gives birth alone in the woods without help.

But mostly it's pretty brutal. There is virtually no musical score except for some lovey-dovey violin music during Harris's flashbacks to home. It sounded powerfully familiar and I believe parts of the score entered the public domain or were simply ripped off for use in some of the theatrically released skin flicks that were popular in the 70s.

Harris's performance is good enough, though he rarely gets to use that wispy croak of a voice of his. Mostly he groans and grimaces. His wife is Prunella Ransome, whose appearance is an improvement on her name. John Huston took some lousy roles. This isn't one of his better ones, but as an actor he can do little wrong. He invariably comes across as the kind of guy you'd like to get to know better.

Richard Harris doesn't die easily in director Richard C. Sarafian's frontier film "Man in the Wilderness," a rugged tale of survival set in 1820 about real-life tracker Hugh Glass. Although it unfolds with a savage bear attack staged with a genuine bear (Peggy the Bear) and her handler, neither the film nor Richard Harris can top the first scene with what constitutes a dreary yarn of vengeance that lumbers on for 104 minutes. Legendary writer & director John Huston co-stars as an equally determined captain who forces his beaver pelt frontiersmen to trundle a small boat through the desolation galore drawn by 22 mules. The sight of the boat with its single, small-bore cannon and Huston's lofty figure on deck in a crumpled stovepipe hat is captivating. Unfortunately, Huston doesn't have dialogue that makes you either love or loathe him like he had in Burt Kennedy's "The Deserter." Indeed, characterization is minimal in this stark adventure. Nevertheless, composer Johnny Harris' introductory theme is gripping, but the rest of the music, like the film itself, doesn't live up to the first ten minutes. Sarafian makes the going tolerable, but neither he nor scenarist Jack De Witt, who scripted another Harris survivalist saga "A Man Called Horse," can maintain momentum. Hollywood veteran Henry Wilcoxon is believable as an Indian chief, and Percy Herbert is appropriately unsavory throughout, with "Star Trek's" James Dohan as one of the trappers. "Young Frankenstein" lenser Gerry Fisher proved that he was adept both in a studio as well as out in the hinterlands. Fisher's widescreen cinematography is gorgeous, especially when you realize that "Man in the Wilderness" was photographed on location in Spain.

The movie opens with the following exposition preceding the credits. "The Captain Henry Expedition has completed two years of fur trapping in the unexplored Northwest territory. Determined to reach the Missouri River before the winter snows the trappers and their boat, towed by 22 mules, struggled through the wilderness. Once on the Missouri they could sail south to the trading posts and sell their precious cargo. What occurred on this expedition is historically true." Of course, it is the trappers versus the Native Americans. Through flashbacks, we learn that our never-say-die protagonist was an atheist who had no use for God after his compassionate wife perished and left a son behind. Trouble with "Man in the Wilderness" is it's a contemplative movie that shows the leading man adapting to the perils of the treacherous environment that he has to live off. Boy Scouts would love this movie, especially when Harris builds fires. The ending amounts to something of a letdown. After a full-scale Indians on horseback attack on the boat in a shallow river bed, Zachery Bass—who survived a brush with the Indians, too—marches up to an apprehensive Henry (John Huston of "Chinatown") and appropriates his rifle and then tramps off to see the son that he refused to bring up in his youth. For all practical purposes, Leonardo DeCaprio remade this movie as "The Revenant."