MOVIE. “Bless the Beasts and Children.” A 1971 film adaptation by Stanley Kramer of the novel of the same name written by Glendon Swarthout. I first saw this movie when I was 12 or 13, and immediately inspired or motivated me to form a sort of “secret brotherhood” of high school buddies modeled after the “misfits” in the movie.
The central characters in “Bless the Beasts and Children” are six adolescent boys, whose preoccupied parents send them off to the Arizona Box Canyon Boys Camp for the summer. I didn’t read the book. I was simply into what the movie as it was.
Those years, when I felt like I was “abnormal” or a freak doing other things. Boys my age would normally savor the easy frolic of childhood abandon. I’d read and read and read, encyclopedias and books of knowledge, magazines and newspapers, experiment on a few scientific theses, zoological shenanigans (!) and quiz my grandpa about the mysteries of existence.
The movie was about a bunch of "discards" who are all, to varying degrees, emotionally or psychologically disturbed. Nicknamed "Bedwetters," the boys are constantly demeaned and ridiculed. So they had to bond together to seek their own peace.
A highlight of the film was the American buffalo. Almost predictably, the “Bedwetters” set out to free a large herd of the bison after they witnessed their perverted macho camp counselor shot the animals in a rowdy western lottery. The boys' pilgrimage to free the buffalo is also an allegorical search for their own freedom.
A companion movie that you may want to watch with your youngsters, if they can sit through almost two hours of a feature movie without the iPhone, is 1986’s “Stand by Me.” 🎬🎭🎬
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