'White Wilderness' Opens at Normandie (Published 1958)

A SMALL army of children, with parents who looked more than willing, crammed the Trans-Lux Normandie yesterday at the beck of their favorite pied piper, Walt Disney. The kids seemed spellbound, as well they might. For in "White Wilderness," the fifth feature in the True-Life Adventure series, Mr. Disney has assembled a fine, often fascinating color documentary on animal life in the North American Arctic.Although a unit headed by Ben Sharpsteen, producer, and James Algar, director-writer, deserves full credit for this most picturesque and informative Buena Vista release, the five chief photographers, listed above, rate the biggest hand.These hardy camera-grinders, including one lady, are supposed to have spent three years scouting their prey, from the Canadian and Alaskan timber lines to the edge of the polar ice cap. The footage itself, obviously shot under backbreaking and even dangerous conditions, looks more like ten years of tough photographic sledding. Against a background of seasonal changes, and a sensible narration, the camera moves in for some marvelously revealing closeups of amphibians. mammals, rodents and birds in their life cycles and survival battles.Now with all due respect to pictorial achievement, the film is a bit redundant. On the whole, it has remoteness, rather than grandeur (that, say, of "The Living Desert"). And while it remains admirably ungory (parents will be happy to hear), the unending, ice-cold warfare is generally stimulating rather than thrilling.However, the performers—the animals—are simply wonderful, which is what really counts. All of the familiar ones are here, and then some: hordes of blubbery walrus; solicitous mother polar bears (and playful cubs); marauding ermines, jaegers, even ravens; the shaggy musk-ox, the elegant ring seal; migrant bands of caribou and reindeer. The perkiest-looking creature is an eider duck (add five young 'uns). As pretty an underwater ballet as one could imagine is swum by a school of white Beluga whales.Surprisingly, the most domestic family portrait is that of the wolf (not, we learn, the legendary professional killer). One "tuning-up" session, showing some young howlers is disarming, and typical of humor that never gets out of hand.One eerie, hypnotic sequence shows a colony of lemmings making their traditional, mysterious "death march" to the sea, where the jittery little mammals sail off a cliff like tiny parachutes. With the appearance of the meanest Arctic denizen of all, the wolverine, the picture moves toward a spectacular finale, as a wolf pack invades a pounding tide of caribou.Obviously, such a movie is worth anyone's time, young or old. If "White Wilderness" seems to be only a superior film, rather than a distinguished one, blame it on the high standards previously set by Mr. Disney. And, as a matter of fact, "Ama Girls," a Disney color short subject on the same program dealing with life in a Japanese fishing village, is well worth a viewer's time, too.

WHITE WILDERNESS, a documentary in the true-life adventure series, presented by Walt Disney; written by James Algar; narrated by Winston Hibler; principal photography by James R. Simon, Hugh A. Wilmar, Lloyd Beebe, Herb and Lois Crisler; directed by Mr. Algar; produced by Ben Sharpsteen; distributed by Buena Vista Film Distribution Company. At the Trans-Lux Normandie Theatre (Fifty-seventh Street, west of Sixth Avenue). Running time: seventy-two minutes.