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.
Review of Maya
