By the time you read this I will be… camping. (Well, by the time most of you read this, assuming that you’re reading this past 6pm Eastern time, 3pm Pacific time.) Let me back up a bit. It isn’t widely known that I am a trained Cub Scout leader, a Tiger Scout den leader, the Johnny Friendly of Den 5, Pack 190 right here in Sherman Oaks. I never thought, having crossed the threshold to 50, that I would be one day climbing into an adult-sized Scout uniform but that’s what’s great about life. Scouting has been a wonderful thing for my son and wonderful for me, forcing me out of the dark, where movies live, and into the sunshine and fresh air… and, on occasion, into a tent. I never camped as a kid, even as a Cub Scout. I wanted to… but my family were not campers. We were TV watchers. I remember my Dad talking me out of the idea of camping when I was very young with the wisdom “You all sit around and then somebody opens a can of beans and ehhhh–” and his voice trailed off there. (I think he was mixing hi-balls.) End of discussion. To compensate, my parents bought me a tent for our backyard, a big 6 person blue canvas job, and I spent a lot of summers in that baby while growing up. Watching TV, courtesy of a 60 foot extension cord. But I digress. To celebrate the experience of camping, I’m going to provide you with my Top Whatever list of movies about camping or with camping scenes. To keep this grouping manageable, I’m going to eliminate all FRIDAY THE 13TH and SLEEPAWAY CAMP movies and sequels and also MEATBALLS (1979), though I do love it. I’m not talking about summer camping, in a cabin, with a mess hall and sing-a-longs… I’m talking about tents and sleeping bags and Coleman products and starting fires with a flint and batoning logs for firewood and wearing neckerchiefs and all that good stuff. And where better to begin…
… than with Peter Carter’s Canadian RITUALS (1977), which got a brief, botched US release under the title THE CREEPER and earned, IIRC, “Dog of the Week” status from Siskel and Ebert, rest their souls. Now, the words “DELIVERANCE ripoff” get bandied about pretty freely in these circles and I don’t mind jumping up to stop that bullet. I don’t know if the success of the 1972 John Boorman movie prompted said Canadians to try their hand at a wilderness survival movie and if so it doesn’t matter because RITUALS is entirely its own animal. American actor Hal Holbrook leads the pack in this tale of a group of middle-aged doctor friends whose annual getaway brings them to a high country corner of the Great White North known as “the Cauldron of the Moon,” a crater-like declivity surrounded by dense forest and “225 air miles from the nearest cathouse.” Tensions within the group (upwardly mobile sawbones Lawrence Dane wants angry loner neurologist Holbrook to join his swank “institute,” an MCO-sounding consortium of the variety that would begin to dominate the healthcare industry in the 1980s) lead to verbal sparring and the opening of old wounds, setting the stage for a string of pranks that beset the group after they have made camp. Boots disappear, a stag head Caduceus springs up where one wouldn’t expect to find a stag head Caduceus, and a nest full of very angry bees drops into the hikers’ laps, sending them scrambling for the sanctuary of a stream… loaded with bear traps. Yes, somebody’s out to get the docs… but who? And why? RITUALS falls in an intriguing junction between THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) and HALLOWEEN (1978)/FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980). Unlike the clueless teens of the nascent slasher subgenre, the protagonists of RITUALS aren’t mindlessly high on life but tired of it — it takes the cunning and cruelty of the shadowy predator hunting them through the woods to give these sadsacks a reason to live… but for most of them that reason comes way too late.
Michael Apted’s CONTINENTAL DIVIDE (1981) holds up really well for a movie that only a few of us old (80s) timers seem to remember. It was John Belushi’s penultimate film performance prior to his unexpected 1982 death and a fitting tribute to both his skills as a film comic and as a tenable romantic leading man. Belushi plays an irascible Mike Royko-style muckraker sent out by his editor into the Colorado brush for his own safety when he exposes a crooked but influential Chicago councilman. While forced into the wild he meets naturalist Blair Brown and falls in love, learning to see the good in people instead of only what is crooked and compromised. The camping portion of CONTINENTAL DIVIDE makes up very little of its running time but the sequence has the film’s best laughs and good terra stamping, with Belushi probably not having to act very hard to play a city guy unaccustomed to roughing it. The script is a winner — no surprise, as Lawrence Kasdan did the writing as a lead-up to THE BIG CHILL (1983), so the dialogue is loose and lived-in and the Colorado (and Washington State) landscape is reliably spectacular. One doesn’t hear this phrase much anymore — and it probably doesn’t sound like much of an enticement nowadays — but CONTINENTAL DIVIDE is a nice movie, and one to which I never tire of returning.
All westerns that spend any appreciable time out of Dodge are like camping movies. You often hear at some point in most “oaters” somebody say “We’ll make camp here for the night,” and that’s when things get cozy — I always thought, growing up: the horses get tied up, the bedrolls come out, a fire is made and coffee is put on while some animal gets stuck on the spit and invariably someone busts out the Hohner… man, this kind of living always looked so good to me, as a Connecticut preteen growing up in the velour groin of suburbia. I can’t even pick the best camp out scene in a western but the first one that came to mind was from William Wellman’s THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943). I had read the Classic Comics Illustrated adaptation of Walter van Tilburg Clark’s still-sobering indictment of vigilantism as a boy and the panels showing the protagonists (or are they?) hunkering down for the night (“Make the coffee strong, Sparks.”) are still vivid in my memory. Mind you, THE OX-BOW INCIDENT is hardly the feel-good movie of any year and even the 10th, 11th, 12th viewing is devastating and infuriating — boy, mankind hasn’t changed a lick at all. The self-righteous townsfolk who detain, condemn, and lynch a trip of innocent men for a crime they have only heard about will remind you of about 95% of the creeps you find trolling the comments section of any online news story with a fervid Bible-based intolerance that proffers mercilessness as the cure for this nation’s ills. But anyway. If you have a distractible mind, as all men do, you will enjoy, as I do, the scenes in THE OX-BOW INCIDENT that make you want to ride out onto the range and sleep under the stars… if maybe with one eye open.
Hollywood tends to be, as it is with nuns and lawyers, reliably unkind to Boy Scouts, whom it reduces to idiot savant status. For that reason, Wes Anderson’s MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012) was a nice surprise, a movie that doesn’t fob off scouting as outmoded or wrongheaded (however the nabobs at BSA LLC continue to drag their feet towards tolerance, acceptance, and progressive adaptation) even while it shows how certain aspects of the lifestyle can empower the psychotic and weird. (Hey, I like those odds!) As any camper worth his weight in tinder can tell you, camping is all about the gear… and MOONRISE KINGDOM is, among its many other attributes, a tone poem to stuff… our most cherished possessions, the stuff we carry, the stuff we’d bring to our desert island, our ideal EDC. (Google it.) My instinct is to resist Wes Anderson and yet I’ve liked every Wes Anderson movie I’ve seen… but still, the combination of postmodern whimsy and Boy Scouts was off-putting to me when this movie came out and I waited a while to see it. Big mistake. It’s just delightful and poetic and, yes, even wacky, and it shows you how kids can be complete outcasts and losers on the one hand and total masters of their domain on the other. I really related to the central character played by Jared Gilman and I loved most the scenes in which he makes camp with girlfriend Kara Hayward and they define the specifics of their runaway romance. Even if it had no other charms, MOONRISE KINGDOM achieves the primary goal of a good camping movie… it makes you want to camp.
Camping is all about getting back to basics and if you reduce any survival movie to its core elements you will find a camping movie buried in your pack. There are so many, it’s hard to pick just one: FIVE CAME BACK (1939), THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON (1957), SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON (1960), FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX (1965), THE NAKED PREY (1966), ALIVE (1993), CASTAWAY (2000), THE GREY (2012) are all worthy titles… but I’m going with SANDS OF THE KALAHARI (1965). The setup is identical to a number of the titles just mentioned: a disparate group of strangers is forced into common cause when their plane goes down hundreds of miles off the beaten track… in this case, sub-Saharan Africa. (That reminds me: Zoltan Korda’s SAHARA is also a camping movie.) A cave stands in for a tent here but all the other elements are present and accounted for, including the campfire, scavenged tools, bushcraft, and people getting on one another’s nerves. It’s about one of my favorite movies ever and as good a cinematic example as I can think of of working with what you’ve got. A good life lesson. As is “don’t mess with baboons.” And those things in the desert that look like Leggs panty hose containers? You can drink them like Capri Suns. These things I know.
I’m not an 80s action movie fan. As such, I have no use for Chuck Norris or Rambo… but I do prize FIRST BLOOD (1982), the movie that set Rambo loose in this world. I read the David Morrell source novel when I was a teenager (I saw Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall in the Sylvester Stallone and Brian Dennehy roles) and think Ted Kotcheff’s film adaptation is pretty good. It catches John Rambo before he became the Jason Voorhees of the Three Percenters — he’s palpably human here and far from perfect. Bullied by the local PD for his hippy hair and nonconformist attitude, Rambo goes native and is chased into the very inhospitable-looking northwest woods by Dennehy and his surviving deputies and the movie becomes a kinda-sorta MOST DANGEROUS GAME (resolved: also a camping movie) tale of Rambo keeping one step ahead of his pursuers and setting traps and stitching up his own wounds and living off the land. Of course, one of the tough things about being survival-minded in the New Millennium is that you tend to cast a jaundiced eye back towards the way they used to do things. A lot of old school camping gear looks, to modern eyes, way too heavy and water absorbent… and can we talk about Rambo’s celebrated survival knife? Sure, it looks impressive but that blade isn’t full tang (Google it) and could snap right off the hollow handle at any moment! That’s a high price to pay for having a little bit of needle and thread and a compass. I’m sure Rambo could navigate by the skies anyway and could probably make his own sutures out of animal sinews. So, you know, to get the full enjoyment out of an older camping movie like this you kind of have to forgive a lot.
I could go on all day but I have packing to do so I’ll just leave you with what is to my eye (and ear) the best camping scene in the annals of movie history:
See you out on the trail!