Maya

I remember the charm of this movie as a boy and it hasn't lost it (at least for me). Very nice elephant scenes. Very predictable coming-of-age type plot, but that's not bad! Although this was a more serious role for North as opposed to the "Dennis the Menace" TV programme & "Zebra in the Kitchen", etc., he performed it very well. If you like this movie, you'll also like "A Boy Ten Feet Tall."

The best thing about Maya is the exotic location cinematography in India, the film really serves as a great advertisement for tourism to that land. The story here though is kind of weak and at times makes little sense.

Clint Walker is the lead though most of the film concentrates on his son Jay North and Sajid Khan who is trying to get a mother elephant named Maya and her white baby elephant to some pilgrimage location. Sajid Khan was accompanying his dad on that location, the what and why of the pilgrimage is a mystery, but the father dies and Sajid has to carry on.

In the meantime young North has arrived in India where his dad who is a famed animal trapper is suffering a crisis of confidence after a nasty bout with a cheetah. Walker has no time for the kid, he's got a pretty young mistress in the house in the person of Sonia Sahni. She looks as exotic as Jean Simmons did in Black Narcissus.

Jay quarrels with Walker and leaves to go back home and then for no discernible reason jumps the train and takes off into the jungle where he meets up with Sajid and the elephants. The boys have to be real careful as the white elephant unlike in our culture is considered a symbol of good luck. Everybody wants that elephant.

North and Khan have a nice Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn kind of relationship in Maya which carries the film along with the beautiful photography. What is hard to grasp is that North is identified as having grown up in Wyoming. Now granted Wyoming isn't India, but it's pretty woodsy out there with a lot of wild animals. You'd think a kid growing up there would display more sense than Jay does.

The film was a minor success and spawned a short lived television series which became a gay classic. Walker's character was eliminated in that one and the film was about Jay and Sajid searching for North's missing dad with the elephant Maya. When they aged those couple of years as teenagers the relationship was so different. Same kind of dialog and situations, but it came out as gay.

The film is not bad and the story is timeless and a good family film if you can get past some glaring plot weaknesses.

There is no online summary, as opposed to a comment, so I offer the following:

Teenager Terry Bowen arrives in India to live with his father, a famous hunter. When he finds out that his father, who has reluctantly accepted his presence, is a supposed coward after a hunting accident, he runs away. He befriends a local boy who is on a pilgrimage with an elephant (Maya) and its white elephant offspring. They go through many travails as Terry's father searches the countryside for him.

I recently watched toy story 3 with my grandson. And having stumbled across Maya, I remembered watching this as a kid. I loved it. In the 60's when there was no animation and real tigers were used for stunts in the fight between the elephant and the tigers - as a kid I was so fascinated. Technology has progressed and amazing new movies are being made for the children. However, this is what children loved to watch in the 60's. Now, having watched it recently, I was re introduced to its beautiful music track. Good one. This movie was much before Indiana Jones and most other adventure films- MGM took its viewers on a fantasy journey of a continent far away and introduced a whole new culture and cross cultural communication. Worth watching. A classic in the genre of jungle adventure.

North was a wondrous "Dennis the Menace" on TV in the late 50's and early 60's, providing just the right mix of charm and annoyance to bring the ever-aggravating character to life. However, what worked on TV for a character based on a cartoon doesn't necessarily work for a family-geared adventure film. He plays a young boy who is traveling to India to live with his estranged father (Walker) after the death of his mother. To say that he isn't welcomed with open arms is an understatement. Walker barely bothers with him at all as North seems to have upset the balance he had achieved with a curvy live-in housekeeper who wears more jewels to the dinner table than Joan Collins! Another household staff member is downright hostile to North from the start. He gets into various minor scrapes and continues to annoy his father. When they finally send him packing back home to his grandparents, he hops off the train and tries to rough it on his own. He hooks up with an Indian boy (Khan) and the pair attempts to transport two elephants across the country at the behest of Khan's dying father. Meanwhile, Walker and his aide comb half of India trying to find North. Unfortunately, one of the elephants is white and many of the Indians want to seize it for it's good luck qualities. The film has some truly beautiful shots of the authentic Indian landscapes and locales. It's a great benefit that the film was shot on location. Praise for the film just about stops there. North's distinctive and unrealistic sounding voice mixed with his overly clumsy and fidgety body language do a lot to create more unintentional humor than identification with him. Any American plopped into the jungles of India would have trouble, but he seems to be particularly accident-prone. One sequence in a raft over whitewater rapids is screamingly funny! His gee-whiz presentation blended with his "look at me really acting" dramatic stuff is uneasy at best. Walker (perhaps the only man who could actually upstage breathtaking scenery with his own monumental physique and glorious face punctuated by two sky blue eyes) has almost nothing to say or do in the film. His ice cold character makes virtually no sense and his (and others') loyalties and motivations change on a dime with no discernible reason in sight! Either the script is horrible or massive cuts were made somewhere. Hilariously, every other character in the film except 2 or 3 is dubbed by the SAME voice-over actor who thinks he's fooling everyone by adjusting his timbre and inflection slightly. The man is good, but come on! The title refers to one of the elephants (though, oddly, the video box suggests that the story will revolve around a cheetah!) even though the story is really one of self-discovery and relationships with one another. The script is so poorly fleshed out that there is no reason for the happy ending to have occurred. It just exists that way. The seemingly innocuous film is likely to upset several groups of people. For one, the Indians are mostly portrayed as greedy, selfish and stupid. Also, the animals don't appear to have been treated very well during the course of the filming. Then there's the section where North smears mud on himself and passes himself off as Indian with no eyebrows raised by the indigenous people. (As an aside, an elephant is painted white by the filmmakers to pass as a white elephant, then washed off, but purportedly painted grey to pass as a grey elephant for part of the film......Oh forget it!) Finally, if anyone is nervous about nude kids, 15 year old North spends a little while naked from behind. If all these things aren't enough to get some sniffy PC viewers agitated, they must have fallen asleep while viewing which is entirely possible! Recommended only for those who'd like a look at the unspoiled beauties of India and the underrated beauties of Walker.