The Fox and the Hound (Art Stevens, Ted Berman, Richard Rich, 1981)
The story of two different animals, friends at first, but both destined to take separate paths as they grow up. In the beginning, both are essentially orphans, being brought up by people who are not their first family, and so, when they happen upon each other one day, they form a natural bond.
The story has dark undertones, with the death of the mother, and the constant threat of death for Tod, the young fox. For the hound, Copper, the price of his existence is duty to his master, which eventually turns into a realisation that even his friendship with Tod needs to come to an end. When the widow is forced to abandon Tod in the game preserve, Tod also realises that there is alternate existence for him as well, a life in the wild.
The opening sequence of the film harks back to the primitive beauty of
Bambi, traveling through the dark woods, passing through a foregrounded, glistening spider's web, and following a mother fox with a pup in her mouth, fleeing the baleful barking of the hounds out of the woods and into the clearing of a farm. At the fence, she leaves her young one, and flees over the hill where she is lost to gunfire. Great stuff. It's a pity that the characters never really live up to such an exciting beginning, especially the supporting ones, but the voices of the young Tod and Copper are great, especially Corey Feldman's howling.
The big, big negative for me is the voice of the grown-up Tod, belonging to Mickey Rooney. Every time he opened his mouth I cringed. Rooney sounds old, and drew me out of the film with every line. It ain't the 30s and the female fox he meets is certainly no Judy Garland. Simply baffling.
Still, the scenes in the game preserve are evocative, and at times, gorgeous. The final act really picks up the pace, the Mickster doesn't say very much at all in the last 15 minutes, and the climax is really quite exciting.
Sub-par Disney, overall, but one with a nice undertone of sorrow and mortal danger.
Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)
Great opening to this film, too, with the elegiac score of Georges Delerue welling up as we focus on a plane, it's belly disgorging painfully young men, fresh meat for the war. The next shot is of body bags lined up, ready to be loaded on for the trip back. A mournful elegy for American imperialism, perhaps.
Sheen, with his Rolex watch is the volunteer from the richies, and the narrator. He notes that the men he fights with are the bottom of the barrel, but they're the best he's ever see, the heart and soul. The African-American quips back, "you gotta be rich in the first place to think like that… the poor always get f*cked over by the rich, always have, always will…"
The real problem for me is that I just didn't care. The scene in the village, with the talk of retribution spewing forth from the angry soldiers was mostly flat, with only the genuine fear and terror of the villagers bringing me back into the dramatics. Then the final battle, with death and destruction pouring forth, just devolved into man after man chewing through the scenery, or completely missing the mark. Charlie Sheen in both of these scenes is particularly disappointing, his terror, his screaming, his anger, just falls completely flat. There is no life beyond the expression, and the film seems to wither with it.
Only Dafoe -
really only Dafoe - gives us something. As a crusader, sure, he gains the interest and sympathy of the audience, but he also seems to grasp the iconic while still keeping the character on the ground. He was fascinating, and when he's onscreen everything seems a little keener, and a little sharper.
So yeah, it's not really that good a film. The dialogue has its moments, but more often than not it borders on crass. The imagery and cinematography is functional, but really, apart from the Dafoe moment™, I'm struggling to come up with anything else. A big disappointment all round.
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Verdict: it's been a long time since I've seen either film,
Platoon 15 years,
The Fox and the Hound over 25 years. I would have thought
Platoon would be moving forward before the match-up, just based on general notions of
importance and
meaning, but, Dafoe aside, it's mostly just hokum and smoke. Then again, Mickey Rooney drags the Disney film into a pit of stink from which recovery seems unlikely.
On balance, it'll have to go to
The Fox and the Hound, with little real enthusiasm for its future. Who knows, though?