Walking Thunder Is a Family-Friendly Frontier Film

A little while back, I rented the movie Higher Ground, a made-for-TV film from the 1980s starring John Denver and featuring two of his songs. When I saw that Netflix also had Walking Thunder, another John Denver movie, I was eager to give that a shot too.

Written and directed by Craig Clyde, Walking Thunder is a movie of comparable tone and quality. It’s a family-friendly film involving father-son conflict, explorations of the wilderness and interactions with indigenous people. Unlike Higher Ground, this movie is mostly set in the 1800s, though it is framed in the present as a boy reads the journal of one of his ancestors.

The movie has a bit of a Little House on the Prairie feel to it, except that the children in the McKay family are boys rather than girls. Patriarch John (Denver) is restless and rugged, not content to remain with a steady job when it means he has to be employed by someone else. His wife Emma (Irene Miracle) tries to be patient, but her frustration with his choices becomes apparent after an accident leaves them stranded in the mountains for the winter. To make matters worse, she is expecting their third child in just a couple of months.

To Jacob (David Tom) and his younger brother, this is all a grand adventure, especially once they cross paths with mountain man Abner Murdoch (James Read) and his elderly companion, the mystical Dark Wind (Ted Thin Elk). These are the two most engaging characters in the movie. Abner is an exotic outsider who instantly has the adulation of Jacob, though he tries to discourage it. Meanwhile, though Dark Wind doesn’t speak English, he becomes an invaluable asset to the rest of the family when Jacob joins Abner on a trip to the trading post.

This is a wholesome, family-friendly movie, and it features some spectacular landscapes, not to mention a number of scenes involving Walking Thunder (Bart the Bear), an enormous bear with a strange connection to the land where the McKays have decided to settle for the winter. The pace is a bit plodding; it’s an hour and a half long but feels considerably longer.

There’s something a little wooden about most of the acting and dialogue, and Denver is no exception to that, though John does share some nice moments of vulnerability with Jacob. He has a very serious air about him throughout the movie, rarely smiling and looking especially solemn with his jumbo-sized mustache. And, most unfortunately, he doesn’t do any singing at all. The setting seems very fitting for him, though.

I’m not sure how well this movie would hold the attention of most children. Jacob is reasonably engaging, and there are some bad guys who blunder in partway through to provide a mix of menace and comic relief. On the whole, though, the comedy quotient is pretty low, and the story tends toward the excessively didactic at times. For kids interested in frontier times, this would probably be a good choice, however. A kind of throwback to some of the old live action Wonderful World of Disney movies, Walking Thunder is also John Denver’s last movie, having been completed the year he died. While it’s not the most thrilling frontier saga I’ve ever seen, I think he would be proud of the results.