Since the book is no longer in print, you'll need to look for it at a local library or buy a used copy. The author is the father from this family and he recounts the story of how they all made it to shore and survived in the Alaskan wilderness in 1981.
An HBO release.Years after recovery, some real-life wilderness survivors choose to share their story as a means to inspire and help others. Jesse Jackson, Joseph Califano, Xerona Clayton, and (via archival footage) Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.Ĭredits: Directed by Peter W.
Into the wilderness the movie movie#
Kunhardt and HBO have made a film that’s not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.Ĭast: Andrew Young, Marian Wright Edelman, Xernona Clayton, Harry Belafonte, Rev. In King and his last days, Kunhardt has found a rich subject, one that could only be illuminated by that shrinking few still around who remember the highs and lows, fifty years later. What we forget is the grace and dignity his widow, Coretta Scott King, displayed hours after his death, her touching visit with Jackie Kennedy the day of the funeral and a funeral caisson, a simple wooden wagon drawn by mules, surrounded by thousands.ĭocumentaries more than any other genre of film sink or swim due to their subject matter. What’s new here is Young recalling King’s first college love, with a white woman who would never have earned the approval of King Sr., how even that pointed him towards his work on equality in America, of goofy pillow fights with his staff in the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, the day before he was gunned down.
Into the wilderness the movie series#
Much of that material is familiar, collected in other documentaries (PBS’s “Eyes on the Prize” series is the definitive filmed account of The Civil Rights Movement). Kunhardt found shots of King playing pool with poor folks in Chicago, there to help the push for better housing and economic opportunity, a recording of him calmly haggling with LBJ over the phone over Vietnam, and close friends like the singer Harry Belafonte, Marian Wright Edelman and Xernona Clayton talk of an exhausted man who told them, “It doesn’t matter how long you live, but how well you live.” His lawyer Clarence Jones calls this period “the most difficult time of his life.”
“The nation had turned against him,” his closest aid, Andrew Young remembers. The giddy high of 1963’s “I have a dream” had, “at many points” King told TV’s Sander Vanocur, “turned into a nightmare.” But the Vietnam War was escalating, economic injustice and the futility of the inner cities was leading to summer riots. In late 1966 King, the Atlanta “co-pastor” of his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, could look back as he said, “on a solid decade of progress in the South.” His non-violent strategy of marches, protests, boycotts and speeches had paid off in sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation, in a zeitgeist that had turned the tide of historical discrimination and injustice. Kunhardt, known for directing films about Nixon and Gloria Steinem and for producing the Ben Bradlee “Newspaperman” film, assembles the faithful - King’s inner circle and surviving members of the Johnson White House - one last time to summon up 18 months of turmoil, frustration and fatigue.
“King in the Wilderness,” director Peter Kunhardt’s fine, moving documentary for HBO, remembers those troubled final days on the 50th anniversary of King’s murder. He was a leader struggling to keep his 12 year-old movement relevant, straining to get divided America to embrace his more inclusive “Poor People’s Campaign,” arguing with the otherwise supportive President Johnson about the Vietnam War and hoping just to be heard in a country and a community that he felt was tuning him out. He was eulogized at his funeral as a man “sent out as a Moses into the wilderness of this nation’s injustice.”īut the last year and a half of his life saw him in his own personal wilderness. was often introduced, as he was in his final “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech in Memphis the night before he died, as “a Moses for our times.”
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