Big Bad Wolf

The Legend of Lobo. In 1897, according to one educated estimate, about 500,000 head of cattle and sheep were slaughtered by wolves in the U.S. West. Understandably, the ranchmen waged all-out war against wolves, and toward the end of the last century thousands of the bloody brutes were trapped or shot or poisoned every year. But no matter how many were killed, there was always the big one that got away. In New Mexico his name was Lobo, and Lobo was a brute half again as big as he had any natural right to be, with a roar like a lion and a paw like a bear and a cunning that made hunters old before their time. His legend still lives in the great Southwest, lives in every boy who ever read Lobo, The King of Currumpaw by Ernest Thompson Seton. Now it lives in something more than full color and something less than full credibility in this True Life Adventure by Walt Disney.

To hear Disney tell it, wolves aren't so bad, and if they are it's because people make them that way. Take Lobo. Why, when he started out he was just the cutest little pup you ever saw, but along came a bounty hunter and shot his mother, and poor little Lobo was forced to become a lone wolf. Naturally, he killed a few cows now and then, and why not? Man had eliminated the buffalo, and Gro-Pup doesn't grow on trees. But his private life was exemplary. When he grew up he fell in love at first bite and became a thoroughly respectable meat-winner.

The story is just plain silly, and the singer feller on the sound track ("Lobo, Lobo, remember this day/Man's bullets have taken your mother away") is. even harder to take. But the film was shot in Arizona, and frame after frame is crammed with some of the most magnificent scenery on the planet. What's more, the hunting scenes--notably one in which an old wolf elegantly cuts a calf out of its herd and then leaps in savagely to slash its hamstrings--have the beauty and the horror that inevitably attend a blood rite.

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