Those Calloways

Release Date: November 10, 1964

Watch Date: July 17 – July 18, 2024

“Cam Calloway (Brian Keith) is a man with a dream: to one day establish a sanctuary for the geese that fly overhead during their long migration. Unfortunately, Cam lacks the money to buy the necessary property-until his son Buck (Brandon de Wilde) embarks on a project that will guarantee success…unaware that greedy hunters are manipulating the Calloway family for their own selfish gains.”

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   This movie should have been perfect for Bob and I. Mostly because it’s American dreaming with Canadian geese. A perfect blend of our two countries.

   But it’s really boring.

   I don’t know why Cam Calloway cares so much about the geese. He has ethics and morals, sure, and there’s something about him being raised by an indigenous tribe, and at one point he references that when a geese dies a member of that tribe does, but it’s a one off line I happened to catch, not something that’s particularly advertised in the film. Of course, this is based off of a novel, so maybe it’s explained there, but it’s not a novel I’m going to read any time soon.

   There’s not a lot of chemistry between any of the characters who are mean to have a romantic interest in each other. Bridie and Buck, Cam and…his wife. Maybe it’s the time period it’s depicting, when men were men and didn’t express their feelings well. Maybe it’s just the cast. But everything feels flat. To be fair, even the relationship between the father and son feels flat. The only thing that’s talked about with any sort of passion is the geese. Passion for killing the geese, passion for saving the geese, being passionately angry because your partner seems to only care about geese.

   And it’s all odd anyways. You can’t hunt Canadian geese, at least not that I’m aware of – or at least not in my part of the world. And then they’re notoriously terrible animals. We avoid them like the plague. Vancouver is currently trying to make it so that we have less of them. So an entire town being defined on whether or not the geese land on a lake seems a little odd to me. It’s a goose. A really, really mean goose.

   This isn’t a film I’d ever purposefully choose to put on, but it’s not a bad movie. It’s dry, sure, but it feels kinda…classic? I could see people that grew up with it really loving it, but not me. I’ll tolerate it.

   For the geese.