The Night of the Turncoat
The Wild Wild West

Huston’s Across the Pacific analyzed as science fiction along the shores of San Francisco.

Agent West, cashiered in disgrace, helps Elisha Calamander (John McGiver) obtain “St. Stefan’s Hand” for a wealthy client.

The object is actually a purloined vial of deadly gas distilled from ocean water.

Crystal (Marj Dusay) is Calamander’s favorite, West when all is said and done has dinner with Song (Bebe Louie).

The Night of the Underground Terror
The Wild Wild West

Beneath the Mardi Gras is a small band of Union soldiers blinded, maimed and crippled in a Confederate prison, they want revenge.

On the point of getting it, they stand revealed as the sadistic commandant’s former staff, now in disguise and not injured at all, only searching for the million in gold that passed through the camp at war’s end and mysteriously disappeared.

My Side of the Mountain

A lad in a tall Toronto apartment leaves his parents a note and goes to the wild to be a naturalist, Thoreau is a hero.

He is well-versed in botany, his study is algae, he bones up on falconry at the library in Knowlton, a small Quebec town, so that he may capture and train a young peregrine falcon to hunt for him. He lives in a hollow tree beside a small pond fed by a rillet, and does quite well, living off the land.

He finds a new algae growing on a turtle’s back, but none that are edible (raccoons and an otter lap up his attempts at cuisine). A hunter shoots the falcon by accident.

Miss Turner the librarian and Bando the song-collector collect him from the winter weather that halts his studies and nearly buries him in snow.

As filmed, a variant of the novel and an obscure allegory, having more in common with Tokar’s Big Red (Loach’s Kes is concurrent) than the peculiar Canadian quietude of both pictures.

An amusing scene earlier at the Knowlton soda fountain has the boy in deerskin garb with his pet raccoon mocked by older kids as “Daniel Boone”.