Line’s Programs-Sheep, Stars, and Solitude

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.

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“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.