Run Wild, Run Free (1969) ****

Surprisingly absorbing, precisely because of the distinct lack of the soppiness or mawkishness associated with the genre. Nature “red in tooth and claw” scarcely puts in an appearance and even then is a good bit less dangerous than a wanton child unable to understand or control his emotions. Parents are very well-drawn, too, in an era that scarcely ran to much comprehension about child psychology, a mother rejecting her son because she is convinced he has rejected her, a traditional father who lacks the skills to convey his love for his son. And you wouldn’t get away these days with an old fellow taking more than a passing interest in a small bewildered boy with the audience immediately conjuring up images of abuse.

The film also prefigures the Gaia movement. Both the old fellow and his young charge are given to lying prostate on the grass, the better to listen to the beating heart of the Earth. And you wouldn’t think of pinning this one on director Richard C. Sarafian, best known for his biker epic Vanishing Point (1971). Far less imagine how you’d get a whole stack of actors to spend a great deal of time wading through a swamp “in camera” rather than utilizing some form of CGI or to volunteer their fingers to be bitten by a predatory bird.

If you’re searching for the kind of twist that’s so common these days, look no further than the location. Those wild moors look fantastic in the sunshine, especially for compositions that outline characters against the sky, but they’re treacherous too, when the fog comes down and you’re trapped without a signpost home, and they’re not all hard grass or spurs or rock but conceal sections of perilous swamp.

Living on the edge of the moors, small wonder Philip (Mark Lester) is attracted, even as a toddler, to the wilderness. That’s exacerbated when he’s afflicted by muteness after developing a stammer around the age of four. It’s assumed there’s a psychosomatic cause, but we’ve got no time and the parents no inclination to dwell upon that.

He develops an obsession with a wild white pony, one of a herd that runs free on the moors, and spends most of his time out trying to find it. Col Ransome (John Mills), nature lover and amateur ornithologist, befriends Philip, helping him to understand nature, and teaching him to ride – bareback – the pony. Ransome also shows him to manage a kestrel.

Scenes of characters working with horses or other animals are usually limited to  bit of nose stroking or whispering to calm said animal down, but here we go into a lot more intricate detail of how to win the cooperation of a horse, the kind of lore that nobody’s got much time for these days. So if you want to ride a horse bareback first off you need to just lie on top across its back and stroke its sides. And for a predator, you have to be willing to accept the occasional peck on your fingers while, again, you evoke a stroking mechanism. You might also be surprised to learn that the easiest way to mend a broken wing is by the use of glue.

While Philip and the Colonel and a young girl Diana (Fiona Fullerton) are happily communing with nature, Mr Ransome (Gordon Jackson) and wife (Sylvia Syms) are scarcely able to work out their feelings at being abandoned by their child. The mother tends to get angry, the father, in a very touching scene, is left desolate after Philip ignores a present the father believes would have brought more solidity to their relationship, and in another effective scene it’s the Colonel who explains that it doesn’t take much for a child to understand how devoted an apparently distant father can be.

Any potential soppiness is killed off when Philip in a wild fit of obsession nearly kills the kestrel and in another sequence of disregard almost kills the horse. Occasionally, Philip speaks a few words to the old man but refuses to express himself in front of the parents.  So it will come as little surprise that when the parents finally hear the son speak it’s at the quite gripping climax when all the adults have failed to rescue the white horse from a swamp.

And anyone expecting that cute kid from Oliver! (1968) would have their hopes dashed when Mark Lester displays all the natural truculence and wantonness of a child. He’s pretty good, I have to say, in being forced to confine his emotions to facial expression.

John Mills (Guns at Batasi, 1964) is excellent and Sylvia Syms (East of Sudan, 1964), shorn of glamor, and Gordon Jackson (The Ipcress File, 1965) as her emotionally inarticulate husband, both dump their screen personas in favor of highly believable characters. Fiona Fullerton makes her screen debut.

Richard C. Sarafian does a splendid job. Screenplay by David Rook based on his novel.

Emotionally true.