This month I’m going to try this thing where I watch and review odd stuff I watched when I was a kid. I’ll discuss cartoons created by people on drugs, and movies I remember but no one else has ever heard of, and I’ll attempt to provide non-biased advice about whether or not you should give these things a watch. I’m going to call this Nostalgia November.
Tonight I will begin with The Journey of Natty Gann. I know my childhood friends remember this, because I insisted we watch it anytime they happened to be at my house when it was on TV. I can even remember one of them asking me once, like 20-something years ago, why we always had to do this. It’s because The Journey of Natty Gann is a really good movie. I just watched it again last night so it would be fresh on my mind, and I can confirm that even as an adult, it’s really fascinating. This was a Disney film made not even seven months after I was born, starring Meredith Salenger, Ray Wise, and John Cusack. It’s actually John’s sixth film credit on IMDB, and the first movie I ever saw him in.
The movie begins in Chicago in 1935. It’s smack-dab in the middle of the Great Depression, and Natty, a teenaged tomboy whose mother died when she was a baby, lives alone with her father. Jobs are increasingly difficult to come by, so when he gets one at a logging mill in Seattle, he takes off immediately, leaving Natty in the care of their landlady until he can send for her. Unfortunately, the scumbag landlady reports Natty as an abandoned child to the authorities, so she has no choice but to set off on an epic cross-country quest alone to find her father. Along the way, she befriends a tramp played by John Cusack and a wolf played by Jed the Dog of White Fang fame, and has tons of adventures, all fraught with peril.
There’s a really fantastic score by James Horner (who broke my heart a few months ago by dying in a plane crash…why, James, why?—you will be sorely missed and never forgotten). The album is difficult and pricey to get a hold of. There was a limited quantity released and as soon as they were, I scooped up a copy for about $50. Yes, for a single CD. The score alone would be worth a listen even if you never watched the movie. Lots of twangy harmonica that really captures the feel of the era.
The landscapes are spectacular. Ironically, I always think of this movie when I imagine traveling through scenic America, but it was actually all filmed in Canada. The forests, autumn-colored leaves, and snowy mountains all make me want to stow away on a freight train and make my way through the woods to the opposite coast and just take in every bit of scenery along the way. I would die, of course, and probably quite quickly, but it might be worth it.
This isn’t like the Disney of today. It’s got some grittiness, some mild language, some fighting…there’s even an uncomfortable scene where Natty narrowly avoids sexual assault by some creep. There are a couple of tear-jerk moments. This was made, like so much else I grew up with, for a generation of both children and adults with backbone, who didn’t need to feel babied or sheltered by their entertainment, and didn’t turn off their televisions in outrage over the fact that some stories reflect both the good and the bad things that happen in the world. The kids of my generation were cool with some gritty reality because we understood that the world wasn’t all kittens and rainbows—though it was the ‘90s, so we certainly loved our rainbows, too.
If you were looking for a spirited, Depression-era adventure story set on the American back roads and railways, or if you didn’t realize you needed one until now, definitely give this movie a watch! It really is quite epic.
