Roar (1981)

Film: Roar (1981)

Stars: Noel Marshall, Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, John Marshall, Jerry Marshall

Director: Noel Marshall

Oscar History: No nominations...I honestly don't think it was eligible as this was a straight-to-video release in the United States initially despite Hedren as a star & the film's extravagant budget.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Tippi Hedren-click here to learn more about Ms. Hedren (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Tippi Hedren would spend much of the late-1960's & early-1970's struggling to find a foothold in Hollywood.  After working with Hitchcock & Chaplin, she never again would get lead roles from directors of that caliber, and would talk later about how she was upset she couldn't make a lot of major movies as she moved into her early 40's.  This is where Roar comes into place for Hedren.  Filmed over a five-year period, Roar is maybe Hedren's best-known role outside of Hitchcock, and it certainly is a film she's well-associated with today.  Hedren and her husband Noel Marshall started living with an actual lion in the early 1970's, and when there were complaints from neighbors, they moved their family to a ranch where they raised myriad big cats.  This is the setting of Roar, our film today, and one of the most infamously troubled film shoots in Hollywood history.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is weirdly short on plot, but I'll try to ground you in what it attempts at least.  Hank (Marshall) lives in a giant "preserve" which is really a giant house filled with lions, tigers, panthers, cheetahs, & leopards.  He is trying to stop a local ordinance that would allow local hunters to kill these animals, as they are viewed as dangerous even though Hank believes in them.  While he's battling this, his family, including his estranged wife Madeleine (Hedren) and his precocious daughter Melanie (Griffith) show up, and are stunned to find a house filled with ferocious beasts, ones that they assume will kill them.  The remainder of the 98-minute film is largely just a litany of encounters between the animals and the real-life actors, fighting regularly with them (for those curious about the plot, the hunters are killed by the animals, and the family lives happily ever after).

The plot is not the point of Roar, even if it might've been for Hedren & Marshall at the time.  Roar is instead a truly bizarre film where we see dozens of big cats, each able to take down a grown man, maul at screen icon Tippi Hedren and her daughter Melanie, who within a few years would become one of the most famous actresses in America.  Watching this happen in real time is like watching a snuff film less than a horror film (it plays like a horror movie in my head, but it's meant to be a fun action-adventure movie as directed).  There's no real plot, just the family fighting these lions & tigers...before in the end deciding they love them despite them putting each other in mortal danger the whole film.

Roar was not a CGI fest like it would be today, nor is it a feat of a slew of well-trained animals creating grand illusions on set.  By most accounts at least 70 cast-and-crew were injured on the set of Roar, including Marshall, Hedren, & Griffith, all of whom had to have surgery done at some point to repair injuries.  This makes scenes like Tippi Hedren literally having honey licked off of her by a panther feel all the more shocking, knowing that she was doing this at great personal risk.  It also makes the film next-to-impossible to give a grade to-it's certainly entertaining in a morbid sense, but also you cringe the whole runtime.  I'll go with two stars as it's not a good movie even if it's an engaging one.

This film was not a success.  Self-funded and made with non-union crew (with the exception of cinematographer and future director Jan de Bont), Hedren & Marshall couldn't get it into theaters domestically, and it wouldn't be seen in theaters in the United States until 2015.  The movie did, however, spark a lifelong love of animals for Hedren, who would create the Roar Foundation/Shambala Preserve and is still the president of this animal sanctuary in California which is home to a number of large cats that are at least partially tame (discarded animals from circuses or private owners who no longer want to house animals, such as Michael Jackson's two Bengal tigers).  Hedren's legacy therefore is one of animals rights in the years that have followed, and outside of Hitchcock's films with her, this is what she's best known for today.  However, Hedren did keep working (almost exclusively in the decades that followed to fund her preserve), and we will get to one final performance from her next Saturday as we close out our Tippi Month.