THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN (1985) - Andy's Flashback Review

[AndyDursin]

JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN
7/10

Smoking, drinking, kids saying "s---t" -- yep, this one would never get made today, but as Disney live action kids flicks from the mid 80s go, this is a decent film. Not great -- the story is somewhat haphazardly constructed, Natty's episodic adventures aren't always that interesting -- but the cinematography is gorgeous and the period sense believably rendered as well. I liked Meredith Salenger and John Cusack is quite good also. Interesting the "growing attraction" they kind of develop and the movie is able to push this subtly in their last scene together just with Cusack's glance and a quick kiss before he leaves for California. It's a movie that has some strong scenes -- like that one -- but you wish it had more connective tissue that worked, the picture feeling like it was "assembled" in the editing room and trimmed down from something much longer.

The score is pleasant -- and the last shot is lovely -- though I found a lot of this particular James Horner score to be mostly unmemorable. Horner was by '85 overworking himself on a lot of projects and this one benefitted from his dramatic scoring sense, but I think thematically, it's not very captivating.

Obviously we all know it was a rescore of Elmer Bernstein's rejected offering, and my guess is they wanted something with "energy" like SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. This score feels like that outing, but it's not as effective from a thematic standpoint.

Funny though, I am pretty sure a minute or so of Elmer's music remains in the film -- there's a scene where Natty's Dad is sawing a tree and there's a big "musical stab" that sounds like Elmer. On balance though, this is another place where Elmer's approach -- while making for a perfectly listenable, pleasant soundtrack on its own -- was just out of its era. It was too broad, too obvious, like it was written for a western back in the '60s.

When Elmer's scores were rejected, especially typically later in his career, it seemed it was nearly always for this reason. Other veteran composers were better able to dial back their approach at times -- look at all the electronic scores Maurice Jarre wrote -- and while there were a lot of instances where his music still perfectly fit certain films, when it was "off," it was because the score overpowered the material. Elmer seemed unable to do it another way when that happened. THE SCARLET LETTER was another example of this, the music is just "too much", and it needed something more soulful and introspective -- which John Barry was able to provide (and yet, when you hear Elmer's score, it's a superbly written score on its own terms. It just "didn't fit").

While not one of Horner's best efforts -- again, I think it was because he was scoring just too many movies by this point -- his Natty Gann score better supported the film emotionally and gave it something more "contemporary" musically speaking.

BLU-RAY - Disney's Movie Club Blu-Ray looks great and has a pleasantly stereophonic soundtrack. No extras but it's well encoded even if the source could benefit from a 4K remaster.