Year: 1972
Language: English
Format: 16mm Colour
Runtime: 88 min
Director: Bill Mason
Producer: Bill Brind
Writer: Bill Mason
Cinematographer: Blake James, Bill Mason
Editor: Bill Mason
Sound: Don Wellington
Music: Larry Crosley
Narration: Budd Knapp, Bill Mason
Production Company: National Film Board of Canada

This feature-length documentary, one of the most successful and popular films ever produced by the National Film Board, was an unexpected box-office hit in the United States, where it grossed more than one million dollars in its opening week of release.

Cry of the Wild is a vivid account of the two years Bill Mason spent shooting Death of a Legend (1971), a film about the many unfounded myths surrounding the northern timber wolf that have caused it to be hunted to the point of extinction. Cry of the Wild is not only an intimate and loving account of the nature of wolves – how they live, the social structure of the pack, the way they breed and raise their young – but also portrays the evolving relationship and understanding that Mason developed with them.

More personal than Death of a Legend (Mason also filmed three wolves that he kept at his country home in the Gatineau hills of Quebec), Cry of the Wild’s cinematic interest lies in its double dimension: it is a film not only about wolves, but also about filming wolves, in a manner somewhat comparable to the work of Pierre Perrault.