Growing Up in New Mexico

And Now Miguel, a sturdy successor to such intelligent children's classics as Misty and Island of the Blue Dolphins, is a labor of love by the same makers, Producer Robert Radnitz and Director James Clark, who keep turning out evidence that a movie can entertain, educate and enlarge the experience of youngsters without driving their parents up the wall. Miguel refreshes the spirit like a week at a mountain camp.

Set in the sere, stunning high-plateau country of New Mexico, the movie describes an unhurried but sometimes harrowing year in the life of the ten-year-old Miguel (Pat Cardi), whose only real problem is growing up. Manly ambition has begun to stir in the boy's child body, and he aches to join the men of his family. Sheepherders for many generations, they spend every summer with their flocks in the green grazing lands of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. So Miguel waits, but not idly, for his time to come. And for the viewer, months shrink into moments full of rich detail. Miguel encounters and narrowly escapes a rattlesnake, goes with his brother on a hunt for a predatory bobcat, adopts a newborn orphan during the hectic lambing season of spring, rescues a flock of strays from a snarling wolf pack. Perhaps the most rewarding adventure of all is the boy's first day of real work when the shearers come, his triumph when he is invited to leave the waiting women and children and join the joking men at supper.

A simple story simply told, Miguel sometimes goes naive. The performances are a good cut below professional even in several major roles, and almost no tension develops between the film's human characters, who seem uniformly kind, generous, hard-working and whole. Nonetheless, the movie catches the semidocumentary flavor of Joseph Krumgold's novel, and succeeds as a feeling and poetic exploration of the mysteries that bind man to nature and boys to men.

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