Audient Authentic: The Living Desert

This is the fifth installment in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" (pre-1990) documentaries, in chronological order.

In May, I watched a movie that was on my radar for reasons I didn't even remember.

As I moved into the 1950s, I was all set for On the Bowery, Lionel Rogosin's 1956 look at down-and-out (i.e. homeless) people in New York's skid row. But because I'm going in chronological order, I thought I should first look to make sure there was nothing to watch before that in the 1950s.

So I consulted the list I've been keeping on Letterboxd every time I find a new candidate for this series, and saw the 1953 movie The Living Desert on there. I didn't remember putting it on there, and in fact, I went to the location where I'd culled a number of choices back in January, the Wikipedia page on the history of documentary filmmaking, to see if I could find it mentioned, since I didn't imagine it rose to a level of prominence to be featured in such an article. It doesn't appear there, so the mystery remains.

But I'm glad I decided to push On the Bowery to June and rent this from iTunes, because it made quite a nice way to wile away my last hour of work on Friday afternoon. If you can't occasionally keep one eye on a movie for the last hour-plus of your work week, when everyone has mentally packed it away for the weekend, what's the point of working from home at all? I expected to be able to keep only one eye on it, but pretty quickly, it had my full attention.

The Living Desert is Disney's first feature-length nature documentary, in what would ultimately come to be known as its True-Life Adventure series. I suppose it might have been on my radar since it won the best documentary feature Oscar in 1953, but I did not scour that list of winners for this series, and if I had, it would have produced a lot more candidates than I have now.

I should also say there is a very good chance I have already seen this movie. This is just the kind of thing they would have shown us in school -- in science class, I suppose, though who knows how careful they were about making sure the material they showed us fit the subject matter of the class in question. Then as now, teachers were undoubtedly looking for some way to wile away the end of their own work weeks, without having to plan a whole lecture.

Anyway, The Living Desert gave me a real sense of nostalgia for watching this and films like it back in elementary school and middle school, though I suspect by the time I got to high school they would have moved past this kind of thing. The basic setup of a narrator visiting multiple animals in the desert and whimsically dictating their thoughts and the little dramas of their lives, accompanied by a lively orchestral score, felt like something I got a lot of back then, but haven't seen in more than 30 years now.

I guess that's kind of a backward way in to talking about what this film is actually about. Indeed it is shot in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, as the camera captures not only panoramic vistas and impressive rock formations, but intimate cracks between rocks and scrub brush. The subject is of course the animals of this "living desert," from arachnids and insects to mice and bobcats and birds.

I was frankly amazed at how sophisticated this is for a first foray into this type of filmmaking. N. Paul Kenworthy, a doctoral student at UCLA, had shot ten minutes of footage of a wasp battling a tarantula, which is this film's central action set piece. That's what got Walt Disney's attention and prompted him to commission the entire film, which Kenworthy also worked on, sharing DP responsibilities with Robert H. Crandall.

I'm not sure how they got their cameras in so close to these battles, but the battle between the wasp and the tarantula seems totally unaffected by the presence of onlooking eyes. And in case you thought they just set down the camera and hoped the creatures would walk into range, the camera actually moves to keep the action centered as it spills out of the frame. I'd like to watch a making of feature sometime.

Anyway, watching a wasp repeatedly sting a tarantula until it kills it -- the proof of the victory being that the wasp then drags off the tarantuala's body, with no small amount of effort -- has a sort of elemental fascination for me. I suppose this is not uncommon now as all manner of nature documentary would contain similar material; maybe I just don't watch enough of them. But they may have all been chasing The Living Desert in terms of sheer profundity of the footage captured.

And there are other great battles, like a bobcat being chased by warthogs, as seen in the poster above (finding its respite at the top of a cactus), and a small rodent trying to ward off the attack of a snake by continually flicking sand into its eyes. See, snakes have no eyelids, so getting sand in the eyes is a pretty good deterrent to prevent an ambush.

What I love also about The Living Desert is its era-appropriate wholesomeness and its also era-appropriate willingness to be corny. A lizard eating ants with little whips of his tongue is accompanied by quick trills on a piccolo, and two scorpions having a mating ritual which is scored to hoedown music. It's a very trademark approach to music for Disney from this period, which would have also been present in films like Bambi and Fantasia. (Those films are a decade earlier, of course.)

The narrator is probably the corniest of all, but I had to say I really appreciated the writing. Both can be attributed to a man named Winston Hibler, who both narrates and serves as co-writer with director James Algar. I laughed out loud a couple times as a particular turn of phrase perfectly captured the look on the face of a gila monster or roadrunner. Even though there are human traits, so to speak, being ascribed to the insect and animals in these scenarios, they are universal enough to seem as though they are probably accurately describing the drama at hand. The whimsy of the orchestral score is an indispensable element in conjuring the necessary mood.

As you can see my instinct is to keep going on and on about this 70-minute film -- I didn't even talk about the male turtles battling for a mate, and the drama of whether the overturned loser will get back on his feet before dying of sun exposure. So obviously I really liked this. In fact, as my 48-hour rental window still has a good 30+ hours remaining in it, I'm inclined to show this to my kids. My only concern is that since they didn't have that same experience I had of watching it in science class in the mid-1980s, the corniness will outweigh the nostalgia. Of which there will be none, I suppose. But hopefully the basic interest of watching small animals fight each other will win out.

Okay, it's on to On the Bowery in June if you want to watch along with me ... or even if you don't.