We were talking the other day about girls’ movies. It’s not something that gets talked about a lot, I think in part because people resent how many princesses there are in the canon. But one I brought up that hadn’t been mentioned was The Journey of Natty Gann, a movie that seems to have mostly disappeared from people’s recollections but one which seems to have played a lot on the Disney Channel of my memory.
Natty is short for Natalie. Meredith Salenger was fifteen at the time she played the role of headstrong, independent Natty. Her mother is dead. Her father, Sol (Ray Wise), is out of work, because it’s 1935, and a lot of people were out of work. Also, Sol is a bit of a rabble-rouser. He’s a union organizer who gets tarred with the label Communist. Which also makes it harder to get work. However, he is lucky and manages to get a government job in the timber country of the Pacific Northwest. He pays his landlady, Connie (Lainie Kazan), to watch Natty until he can afford to send for her. Connie doesn’t much like Natty, and she decides to report the girl as an abandoned child. So Natty runs away, determined to get across the US and reunite with her father.
The movie makes it clear that a lot of kids are crossing the US in one way or another. Some are orphans. Some are abandoned. Some are runaways. Many come from families that cannot afford to feed all their children. On the road, Natty most famously meets Wolf (Jed), whom she rescues from a dogfighting ring, but that’s not all. There is Harry (John Cusack), who lost his father in a crush when they were both trying to be considered for two jobs available that hundreds were trying for; his father was trampled. Parker (Barry Miller) leads a band of children like Natty in thieving raids to scrounge food. Twinky (Hannah Cutrona) is another inmate in the children’s home to which Natty is briefly sent.
Where Natty is lucky is that her father is actually waiting for her. She never loses faith that he will be, but unlike many others, she is right. He really was going to send her a ticket. Unfortunately, while she is hitching the rails to come to him, a train she was on is derailed in Colorado. Her wallet is found under the wreckage, and though there is no body, Sol believes his daughter to be dead. With his wife and daughter both gone, he has nothing left to live for and accepts the most dangerous jobs a lumber camp has to offer—and those are some pretty dangerous jobs. So the question for the audience becomes whether Natty will reach his father before his suicide attempts are successful.
This isn’t something that occurred to me as a child, but as an adult, I began to wonder about the Ganns. Sol, after all, is a name with a pretty specific ethnic tag. Was Solomon Gann Jewish? Does that tie in to why he’s labeled Communist? No one ever says so, but would they, in a Disney movie? The movie already has a lot to explain to kids watching, and frankly, it’s not a kids’ movie anyway. This is a young adult movie. But even there, it takes some work to explain anti-Semitism in the US in the ’30s to YA audiences in 1985.
Natty is who she is in part because her father doesn’t know how to raise her as anything else. Her mother was implied to have been more of a lady, but Sol doesn’t know how to raise a lady. Natty runs around with the sons of her father’s friends, and she dresses like them. She gets into a fight early in the movie, and it’s clear that it’s far from the only time that has happened. She has no problem with hanging out with her friends in a men’s bathroom. But when, on her journey, she encounters a pregnant woman, there is a sense of wonder to it—this is not something she has familiarity with.
The romance between Natty and Harry feels genuine. It’s a little awkward to think about, because John Cusack was nineteen at the time and an adult, but I think it works as well as it does onscreen because Natty is so adult in so many ways. And because it’s the ’30s, and even though statistics don’t bear this out, it feels as though a fifteen-year-old in the ’30s was closer to adulthood and marriage than a fifteen-year-old today. The average age for a first marriage in 1930 was twenty-one, which is I grant you five years younger than it is now but nowhere near as young as we tend to think of it. Still, Natty wasn’t really given much chance to be a child, because there was no one around to treat her as one. So she’s emerging into adulthood early, and there’s Harry.
I’ll also grant you that one of the reasons to watch this movie is the scenery. Much of the movie was shot in British Columbia and Alberta, in the gorgeous panoramas of mountainside you’d find therein. It’s not enormously similar to most of the country Natty would be traveling across to get to her father, but never mind. It’s still lovely, and the movie gives you enough time to appreciate that before moving on to plot.
The cast is pretty good, too; Meredith Salenger didn’t get enough of a career, in my opinion, and I’m definitely on the list of people who pine for when John Cusack made good movies. Ray Wise is so, so good. You might recognize Barry Miller from Fame or Saturday Night Fever. And the worldly wise old street vendor Natty has befriended in Chicago is played by Scatman Crothers in his final film role.
Basically, this is an obscure movie that doesn’t deserve to be. It’s got a strong plot, a great cast, and gorgeous scenery. The filmmaking itself is pretty good. It’s a slice of American history that doesn’t get touched on much. And it’s clearly on the side of labor—the film pulls no punches about how much management is taking advantage of the low wages to exploit workers as much as possible. When Sol Gann tries to get a better life for himself and his daughter, he’s called a Communist and blackballed. So much of the movie is unnecessary if only people could get decent work, and the handful of WPA jobs are the way out for several of the characters. Not bad for a movie from a studio that did its own share of union-busting, really.
