The Man from Snowy River

Another recent movie watch was the 1982 Kirk Douglas movie The Man from Snowy River.

Tom Burlinson plays Jim Craig, a young man living in the isolated mountains of the Australian state of Victoria in the 1880s back when the place was even more isolated than it is today. He lives with his father Henry, making a subsistence existence farming the land and logging. About the only one else up in the mountains is old Spur (Kirk Douglas), a miner prospecting for gold. Unfortunately there's a band of wild horses, and those have been known to spook the Craigs' horse. One day while they're out hauling logs, the horse is spooked again, to the point that he breaks his chains and runs off. That's bad, but worse is that this sends one of the logs crashing down the mountain, killing Dad.

Jim goes down to the lowland to find a job, and eventually he's ble to get a job as a farmhand to Mr. Harrison (Kirk Douglas; he's got a dual role). Harrison is a widower with a daughter of about 18, Jessica (Sigrid Thornton). Jessica is old enough to go off to college and Dad wants to send her away, but Jessica is a budding women's lib type, or at least what passes for women's emancipation in the 1880s, and is a willful child who wants to make her own decisions in life.

Now, with a young man and a young woman that age, you can probably guess what happens next, which is that they begin to fall in love. For fairly understandable reasons, Dad doesn't want Jessica to be in a relationship with Jim. After all, he's looking to live as a hill farmer, which isn't much of an existence considering the fact that the Harrisons have a lot of land and offer a lot of opportunity. Plus, there's a lot of unfinished business between Mr. Harrison and Spur who, as it turns out, is Harrison's brother.

Things get worse when Jim takes it upon himself to try to break a horse for Jessica, and the horse escapes off with the wild horses. Jim has to redeem himself by catching the horse; and perhaps he can get his old horse back too.

The Man from Snowy River is a well-made movie. There's not much new going on here, as it's a coming of age story with a lot of plot points you'd see in other movies. There's Jim's becoming a man; the love angle with a disapproving father; the search for gold in an out-of-the-way location; and the feuding brothers. The one difference, and it's not that much, is that it's set in Australia. But it all comes together for easy-to-watch entertainment. If there's one problem I had, it's that since this was made in the 1980s, technical advances led to some camera shots that look pretentious and artificial. But that doesn't take away from the story.

The Man from Snowy River is available on a modestly-priced DVD, and I can heartily recommend the movie for anybody.