Sheep, Stars, and Solitude
This has for several years been the leading color motion picture of the
American lecture platform. Depicting a vast trek of sheep through the
wilderness of Arizona and having as its theme the heroism of a simple
herder, it achieves a greatness that has seldom been equalled in
productions of this kind.
Indians are encountered, a “lost village” is found, there are amazing
sequences of wild animals and insects. The desert comes to life in all
its beauty. Human interest and humor are abundant. But it is something
deeper than these things which makes the film great.
James Pond, Editor of PROGRAM MAGAZINE, rates it an an epic, and says:
“When Francis Line was recently in New York his fellow-lecturers went
from one showing of his to another, to drink in while they could the
fragile quality of this film of loveliness. They talked about it for
days after Line had gone, trying to analyze why this film was in a class
by itself. They analyzed it to the nth degree, and then finally
concluded that it was great because it had an idea. One might almost say
a soul.”
SHEEP, STARS, AND SOLITUDE has not only been presented on nearly all the
leading lecture courses of America, but on many of them it has been
repeated time and again. The Columbia University Travel Series has
presented Line on four separate occasions with this one film. He has
shown it five times before the Fullerton, California Forum, each time to
a capacity house of two thousand. The noted St. Louis “Y” Series used
the film two separate years on all their various citywide showings. Line
traveled twice to the Hawaiian Islands to show it on repeat performances
by popular demand. So it has gone in many cities of the land. Line’s
story and pictures of the sheep trek appear in the April, 1950 National
Geographic Magazine.
* * *
“There are very few documentary-travel pictures that will stand the test
of a repeat engagement. Indeed, I know of only one— SHEEP, STARS, AND
SOLITUDE.” Dr. Russell Potter, Columbia University.