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I read the novel when I was a lad but was never able to lay hands on the film until recently. The movie is far worse than I had imagined it could be. The acting is very bad - the female lead, played by producer-writer-director Cornel Wilde's wife - is among the worst actresses I've ever seen. She's right up there with Mrs. Tom Laughlin in the horrendous "Billy Jack" movies. The rest of the film is also poorly cast - though it was fun to see one or two familiar faces pop up, among them a prominent actor from "Citizen Kane." The film seems to have been so badly under financed that Wilde was forced to pad the film with stock footage of belching smokestacks, polluted rivers and dead animals. The garishly colored flash forwards are a miserable idea, as is Wilde's narrowing of the frame in scenes of childbirth and particularly gruesome animal carcasses.

It's important to note there are TWO versions of this film. Jacques Perrin's original runs 104 minutes and is narrated by Perrin in French. Disney bought the film, cut 20 minutes (much of it critical of human activity endangering the oceans and animal habitats), junked Perrin's spare narration, which lets you wonder at the sights on view, and substituted a gabby but emotionally chilly commentary by Pierce Brosnan.

Perrin's original version is not available in the US, per contract with Disney. The original is available in Europe on DVD and Blu-Ray (but unplayable on most US machines) but it seems to lack English subtitles. So you're pretty much stuck with Disney edition.

The original, however, is to my mind better and much more in line with Perrin's "Winged Migration" than the Disney version. The best that can be said for the US edition is that plays down the "humanizing" of animal life that was an annoy hallmark of Disney's True-Life Adventures of the 1950s.

I can't imagine anyone but Broadway babies much liking this film more than 50 years after its release, but it offers a unique slice of American theater history and I am glad it's been preserved. "New Faces of 1952" was the most successful of Leonard Sillman's Broadway shows and introduced a raft of talent - Eartha Kitt (who became an overnight sensation), Paul Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Ronnie Graham, Robert Clary and Carol Lawrence (five years before "West Side Story"). Mel Brooks was one of the writers and Sheldon Harnick ("Fiddler on the Roof") contributed to the score. The skits on contemporary events (a spoof of hip music and the Senate, a sketch on "degenerate" Southern writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams) are, naturally, pretty flat these days. But some of the musical numbers are very nice and it's great to see some old familiar faces when they were young and starting out. The show ran more than a year on Broadway and did a short tour to the West Coast. 20th Century Fox was still eagerly showcasing its CinemaScope format and decided to film the show, rather hastily, in Hollywood. The film is a rarity in that it is one of the few films made from a Broadway with its original cast intact and perhaps the ONLY revue ever filmed pretty much as it was on B'way, though shortened (and somewhat revised to play up Kitt's fame - she didn't sing "Santa Baby" in the original show but does here). Regrettable, Fox didn't preserve the film and let its copyright lapse a number of years ago. The present DVDs, and there are several, all seem to stem from a worn print discovered God knows where. The transfer, washed out and fuzzy but widescreen (at least), seems to have made with a camera photographing a screening (and not quite getting all of the image in). I saw the film when I was very young and don't remember it being this disjointed, leading to suspicions that some short pieces are missing.