10 Films to Watch If You Like: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the cult favourite, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973). In addition to recalling the making of this remarkable film, Cinema Paradiso will also look back at some of the other memorable bird movies that have delighted audiences young and old.

Written by Richard Bach and illustrated with monochrome photographs by Russell Munson, Jonathan Livingston Seagull had been rejected by several publishers before being issued with little fanfare in a limited edition of 3000 copies in 1970. An allegorical account of a young seagull's fascination with flight and freedom, the novella steadily acquired a following through word of mouth and, in 1972, it topped the New York Times Bestseller List.

Never one to mince his words, film critic Roger Ebert sniffed that the book was 'so banal that it had to be sold to adults; kids would have seen through it'. Among the grown-ups who appreciated Bach's musings on belonging, discovery, and self-realisation was Hall Bartlett, who felt he had been born to bring the book to the screen.

Over Troubled Water

Starting out as a writer-producer with Norman Foster's two-time Oscar-nominated documentary, Navajo (1952), Hall Bartlett had an intriguing career. None of his early directorial outings is currently available on disc, but there is much to commend the prison drama, Unchained (1955); the Korean War saga, All the Young Men (1960); and the mental health study, The Caretakers (1963), which President John F. Kennedy insisted became the first film ever to be shown on the floor of the United States Senate.

These pictures attracted stars of the calibre of Alan Ladd, Sidney Poitier, and Joan Crawford, while Bob Hope headlined A Global Affair (1964). Yet, Bartlett is probably best known for the fact his 1957 adaptation of Arthur Hailey's bestseller, Zero Hour!, inspired Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker to make the hilarious disaster spoof, Airplane! (1980).

With the United States divided over the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, Bartlett hoped that Jonathan Livingston Seagull would encourage people to come together. 'I felt I had to make this film,' he told one interviewer, after having discovered the book in a barbershop in the San Fernando Valley. 'I feel very strongly that we're in an age in motion pictures, in all the arts and in life generally, of negativity. People feel that the cards are stacked against them personally so that no one can win. I think Jonathan Livingston Seagull has been such a tremendous success as a novel because it is very positive on terms that any human being can relate to. It says that inside every person is the potential to be something more. By looking into yourself and knowing yourself and reaching for the best within yourself, you or I or anyone can have a different kind of life. That to me is the most needed thing of our time.'

Armed with such noble intentions, Bartlett invited Richard Bach to write the screenplay and commissioned Neil Diamond to write a song score that would amplify the text's message. He also asked Mark Smith to build some radio-controlled gliders that resembled seagulls from a distance in order to coax the specially trained birds into performing on cue for Jack Couffier's camera. Moreover, Bartlett persuaded Ray Berwick, who had worked on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), to come out of retirement and wrangle the gulls.

However, the production ran into problems from the get go. Four-man teams had visited rubbish dumps in Oxnard, Berkeley, and Monterey and fired a giant net from a Navy cannon to capture 2700 birds. Only 300 were retained, but they refused to allow their handlers to clean them and the crew had to wait around until they did it themselves. Five of the gulls were diagnosed with emotional exhaustion by the on-set vet, who recommended that birds could only be used every other day.

Having served with Naval Intelligence, Bartlett used his contacts within the service to obtain research into seagull behaviour. He learned that they always face into the wind and rigged up a system of wind machines and chutes to get the birds to face each other, to give the impression they were conversing. Persuading them to flock for aerial shots proved more complicated, however, as they refused to be led by the guiding helicopters and a month's worth of effort yielded no usable footage. In order to solve the problem, Bartlett had 10 seagulls trained to swoop as he wanted in a wind tunnel at the Lockheed aircraft factory.

Seventy more birds were taken to Death Valley to film the Heaven and Hereafter sequence. Other locations included the High Sierras, Big Sur, Yosemite National Park, Mount Whitney, all of which caused the budget to rise to $1.5 million. Adding to the expense was a special high-speed camera that filmed the head movements of the gulls at a sufficiently slow speed to stop them from seeming too jerky. Ultimately, editors Frank P. Keller and James Galloway were left with 700,000 feet of film to shape into the story of how Jonathan comes to discover he is not alone after being ordered to leave his flock for dedicating himself to speed flying.

James Franciscus was cast as the lesser black-backed hero, while Richard Crenna and Dorothy McGuire voiced his parents. Hal Holbrook played the elder who disciplines Jonathan, while Juliet Mills guested as his sweetheart, Maureen, and Philip Ahn signed up for Chiang, the gull who helps Jonathan discover himself and the meaning of his life. However, Richard Bach (who had sold the rights for $100,000) was so dismayed by Bartlett's approach that he petitioned the Los Angeles Superior Court in October 1973 to issue an injunction against the public screening of Jonathan Livingston Seagull because the screenplay had been altered without his permission and no longer faithfully reflected his book.

Furthermore, Bach contacted the critics who had attended the press show in a series of what Bartlett dubbed 'emotional, preposterous telegrams'. Bach also demanded that 40 minutes of footage was added to bring the running time to 157 minutes, after Bartlett had trimmed it to 117 minutes after test screenings in California. As Paramount stood to lose a significant sum by delaying the film's release, the court allowed screenings to commence with an on-screen notice stating that legal proceedings were ongoing. These ended in November, with Bach's name being removed as screenwriter, while 23 pages of changes were to be incorporated into a new cut to maintain the integrity of the book's philosophical musings.

Adding to Bartlett's problems, Neil Diamond also sought to block the film's release by claiming that five minutes of his score had been cut and replaced with 12 minutes of other music. The episode didn't dissuade him from venturing back into movies, however, when he took the title role in Richard Fleischer's The Jazz Singer (1980), a part that had changed cinema history when Al Jolson had spoken unscripted dialogue between songs in Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927).

Nine years after the talkies had arrived, Ovady Julber had made an avant-garde film entitled, Le Mer (1936). On seeing Jonathan Livingston Seagull, he became convinced that Bartlett had copied plot strands and visual passages and sued for $1 million in 1974. However, the suit was dismissed before coming to court.

By this time, Jonathan Livingston Seagull had been nominated at the Academy Awards for its cinematography and editing. In addition to racking up almost three million album sales, Diamond also won a Golden Globe and a Grammy for his soundtrack. Irish actor Richard Harris also won the latter award in the Best Spoken Word category for his reading of the book. This remains in print, although it now comes with an extra 14 pages, which were added in 2014. Bach is still going strong at 86, but Bartlett died in 1993. One of his later films, Love Is Forever (1983), is available to rent on high-quality DVD from Cinema Paradiso.

Chekhov the Gulls

The great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov knew a thing or two about human nature and the foibles are all present and correct in Michael Mayer's adaptation of The Seagull (2018), which explores the impact on the naive Nina Zarechnaya (Saoirese Ronan) of fading actress Irina Arkadina (Annette Bening) coming to stay with struggling playwright son Konstantin Treplyov (Billy Howle) and bringing famous author Boris Trigorin (Corey Stoll) with her. Close proximity also transforms Gene Tierney's life when she finds herself sharing Gull Cottage with the ghostly Rex Harrison in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947).

Circling gulls look down on Patricia Gozzi, as she walks on the beach in John Guillermin's Rapture (1965), which brings fugitive Dean Stockwell to her father's remote farm in Brittany. Seagulls also play their part in generating the unsettling atmosphere in Roman Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (1966), which is set in a hilltop castle on the Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne.

The Knights Templar return to a fishing village for seven nights every seven years in order to demand sacrifices from the villagers in return for their safety in Armando De Ossorio's Night of the Seagulls (1975). Kehaar (Zero Mostel) is the black-headed gull who is nursed back to health by Hazel (John Hurt) after he's attacked by Tab the farm cat in Martin Rosen's animated take on Richard Adams's Watership Down (1978), while, in the realms of mythology, Poseidon (Jack Gwillim) disguises himself as a gull to follow the coffin in which Danaë (Vida Taylor) has been dumped into the sea and flies to Mount Olympus to inform Zeus (Laurence Olivier) of developments in Desmond Davis's Clash of the Titans (1981), which boasts stop-motion effects by the peerless Ray Harryhausen.

Scuttle (Buddy Hackett) is the seagull who claims to have humans sussed in John Musker and Ron Clements's The Little Mermaid (1989) and he returns in Jim Kammerud's The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea (2000). Celtic folklore has its own shapeshifting creatures and selkies prove central to both John Sayles's The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) and Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009), as well as lots of gulls and some spectacular Irish scenery. And a flock of seagulls flap along at just the right time in Henry Sellick's adaptation of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach (1996) in order to rescue our adventurous hero from a mechanical shark.

The sound of gulls sets the tone for Alan Rickman's The Winter Guest (1997), as Phyllida Law tries to reconnect with her recently widowed daughter, Emma Thompson. Gulls are a given in films set by the sea, so we won't go into detail about them all. But they crop up quite a bit in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which is made up of The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Dead Man's Chest (2006), At World's End (2007), On Stranger Tides (2011), and Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017).

In Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo (2003), the seagulls are self-centred scoffing machines, whose sole word is 'mine'. Consequently, Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Dory (Ellen De Generes) have to be rescued by Nigel the Australian pelican (Geoffrey Rush) when the hungry hunters swoop down for a feed. Thom Lu's Back to the Sea (2012) is the story of a flying fish named Kevin, but there's also room for comic characters called Short Seagull and Fat Seagull. A seagull crew hangs around Burger Beard's van in Bikini Bottom in Paul Tibbitt's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015), while the eponymous polar bear (Rob Schneider) is pals with a wise seagull named Socrates (Bill Nighy) in Trevor Wall's Norm of the North (2016).

The gulls are plentiful in Christopher Menaul's Summer in February (2013), which recalls the Newlyn School of Artists in Cornwall before the Great War. While we're in this neck of the woods, keep an ear out for the gulls harmonising in Chris Foggins's Fisherman's Friends (2019) and Meg Leonard's Fisherman's Friends: One and All (2022). Oh and the gulls are also in fine fettle in Mark Jenkin's Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022), which were also filmed on the Cornish coast.

Blake Lively's stranded surfer gets some much-needed help in resisting a circling shark from an injured gull she calls Steven Seagull in Jaume Collet-Serra's The Shallows (2015). The director considered Sully to be 'the Marlon Brando of seagulls' and there's more brooding gull acting on show, as keeper Robert Pattinson is attacked by a feisty bird in Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse (2019). His response is brutal in the extreme, but it's the seagulls who throw their weight around in Peyton Reed's Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), as they keep pecking their beaks into places they're not wanted as Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) helps Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily) find her missing mother, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Enrico Casarosa's Luca has the sea monster hero and his pal Alberto ride a bike through a sky filled with seagulls, as they enjoy an idyllic summer in the Italian village of Portorosso. Staying on vacation, Jamie Dornan sings about his misfiring love life to an audience of seagulls in Josh Greenbaum's Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (both 2021). And, coming right up to date, Sofia the Seagull (Lorraine Bracco) befriends Jiminy Crickett (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in Robert Zemeckis's Pinocchio (2022). Let's hope Cinema Paradiso users are able to enjoy this version on disc soon.

Getting Pigeonholed

Tales of brave adventure kick off our survey of pullastrine pictures, with Melville Shavelson's The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962) seeing American soldiers Charlton Heston and Harry Guardino use carrier pigeons to convey messages while under cover in the Italian capital in 1944. The same year also provides the setting for Gary Chapman and Marshall Efron's Valiant (2005), an animated tribute to the Royal Homing Pigeon Service that centres on five pigeons who step up to do their bit and take on the feared German peregrine falcon, General von Talon.

Inspired by true events, this fine film should really be joined on disc by Miquel Pujol's The Aviators (2008), the true story of Cher Ami, a pigeon who flew messages between the trenches of the Western Front during the Great War. As this isn't currently available, Cinema Paradiso users could do worse than to check out Yankee Doodle Pigeon's brushes with four flying fools in Hanna-Barbera's Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (1969), which was a spin-off from Wacky Races (1968-69).

Homing pigeons help expose a case of industrial espionage in a Sheffield factory in Gilbert Gunn's Wings of Mystery (1963), which stars Judy Geeson and Arnold Ridley and can be found on Volume 2 of the Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box. Pigeon fancying became something of a cliché in films set 'oop north' during the Kitchen Sink era. So, Michael Palin and Terry Jones had Reg Lye keep racing vultures in 'The Testing of Eric Olthwaite' episode of Ripping Yarns (1976-79)

Young and old alike will know the song 'Feed the Birds' from Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins (1964), as the Banks children pay tuppence a bag to the Bird Woman (Jane Darwell) in order to feed the pigeons on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral. The ramifications of this encounter loom large in Rob Marshall's Mary Poppins Returns (2018), as not only are the pigeons still flocking around St Paul's, but the two pennies that Michael didn't spend on seed get to pay handsome dividends.

Pigeons play their part in the three stories starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Vittorio De Sica's Oscar-winning comedy, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963), while Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon) and Oscar Maddison (Walter Matthau) have a date with Cecily (Monica Evans) and Gwendolyn (Carole Shelley), the Pigeon Sisters, in Gene Saks's adaptation of Neil Simon's classic, The Odd Couple (1968). But you'll search in vain for an early turn from Sylvester Stallone in John Dexter's The Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker (1970), which seems to have been largely forgotten.

Pooping pigeons have intruded upon many a movie. But Gerald Thomas's Carry On Dick (1974) still manages to raise a laugh when a messenger pigeon targets Kenneth Williams's hat. They also make a beeline for statues, as Oscar Wilde pointed out in the story that gives Rupert Everett's The Happy Prince (2018) its title. Henri the pigeon (Christopher Plummer) oversees the construction of the Statue of Liberty in Don Bluth's An American Tail (1986), which follows migrant mouse Fievel Mousekewitz (Phillip Glasser) from Russia to the United States. The same year, a passionate pigeon fancier from Kazakhstan set out to find a rare white dove in Sergei Solovyov's Wild Pigeon.

We're back in the Big Apple for Chris Columbus's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), where homeless Brenda Fricker and a bucketful of seed help Macaulay Culkin get away from Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, as they are turned into a pigeon buffet. Fortunately for Jane Horrocks, Scarborough telephone engineer Ewan McGregor keeps his racing pigeons under better control in Mark Herman's Little Voice (1998). Although not quite as gentle a soul, hitman Forrest Whitaker still dotes on the pigeons he uses for communication and, thus, he seeks revenge when his birds are killed on the order of mobster Henry Silva in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).

As Franco Zeffirelli recalls in Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), St Francis of Assisi had an affinity with the birds of the air. Video game mogul Issey Ogata similarly charms a pigeon to fly into an office block and sit on his shoulder in Edward Yang's masterpiece, A One and a Two (2000). Showing equal sensitivity, Jean-Louis Trintignant captures a pigeon that has flown through Emmanuelle Riva's bedroom window and sets it free in Michael Haneke's Amour (2012).

The pigeons on the rampage in Jon Amiel's The Core (2003) don't wait for windows to be opened, as they hurtle into the glass plates of the offices and shops surrounding Trafalgar Square during a frenzy that causes a red bus to overturn. Dive bombing is also the order of the day for the pigeons and their feathered accomplices in James Wan's The Conjuring (2013).

Emotions are stirred in a more measured way in Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Bench Reflecting on Existence, in which the eponymous bird is stuffed and mounted on a branch inside a museum exhibition case. A pigeon named Wittekop is equally prized in Dominique Deruddere's Racing Hearts (both 2014). However, Belgian owner Jan Declair is unimpressed when Jamie Dornan arrives with an eye-watering offer from a Middle Eastern sheikh.

A generous gesture is also made by a small bear from Darkest Peru in Paul King's Paddington (2014). However, the lonely station pigeon with whom Paddington is prepared to share his marmalade sandwich has some ravenous friends and the bear winds up having to be rescued by the Brown family. Undaunted, when Paddington imagines taking Aunt Lucy on a popping book tour of London in Paddington 2 (2017), they feed the birds and the elderly relative commends one 'polite young pigeon'.

Seeing stars in more ways than one, a pigeon flies into an alien spaceship and is knocked out cold in Will Becher's A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. He can come round in his own time, but the clock is ticking for secret agent-turned-pigeon Will Smith to find a missing attack drone and get back to headquarters to take a potion to return him to normal in Troy Quane and Nick Bruno's Spies in Disguise (both 2019).

Eagley Anticipated

One of the odd things about eagles and cinema is that the bird itself appears relatively rarely, while its name is frequently appropriated for titles. For example, Michael Simpson's The Eagle of the Ninth (1977) and Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle (2011) are about the Romans in Britain, while Fielder Cook's Eagle in a Cage (1972) centres on Napoleon Bonaparte's exile on St Helena. The BBC serial, Fall of Eagles (1974), took its title from the crests of the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov dynasties that were brought down by the Great War.

Anthony Harvey's Eagle's Wing (1979) is a Western, while Brian G. Hutton's Where Eagles Dare (1968) and John Sturges's The Eagle Has Landed (1977) are Second World War adventures adapted from respective bestsellers by Alistair MacLean and Jack Higgins. Aerial heroics are to the fore in Delbert Mann's A Gathering of Eagles (1963), Kim Dong-won's Black Eagle (2012), and the four-strong franchise composed of Sidney J. Furie's Iron Eagle (1986), Iron Eagle II (1988), John Glen's Aces: Iron Eagle III (1992), and Furie's Iron Eagle on the Attack (1995). Terence Young's Valley of Eagles (1951) is a tale of Cold War treachery, while battles for independence inform Conor Allyn's Blood of Eagles (2010) and Jose Ramon Ayerra Diaz's Kingdom of Blood: Legend of the Red Eagle (2011), and terrorism is countered in Brian Clyde's The Hunt For Eagle One, Henry Crum's Hunt For Eagle One: Crash Point (both 2006), and D.J. Caruso's Eagle Eye (2008), which chronicles an assassination plot.

The emphasis is on martial arts in Mu Chu's Eagle Shadow Fist (1973), Yuen Woo-ping's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978), John Peyser's Eagle Silver Fox (1980), Eric Karson's Black Eagle (1988), and Michael Kennedy's Talons of the Eagle (1992). Despite the name, Jeffrey Lau's The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993) is a comedy that was made on the hoof to cover the over-run on Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time, which is available from Cinema Paradiso in the 2009 Redux edition.

Comedy is also the name of the game as Robert Redford and Debra Winger star in Ivan Reitman's Legal Eagles (1986) and there are also chuckles aplenty in Taika Waititi's Eagle vs Shark (2007), a delightful debut feature with Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsley excelling as a pair of lovestruck misfits. Smiles also greet the efforts of Eddie Edwards (Taron Egerton) to become an Olympic ski-jumper in Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle, although the tone is markedly more sombre in Stephen Shin's Wings of Eagles (2016), which examines the experiences of runner Eric Liddell (Joseph Fiennes) after the triumph depicted in Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981). And ex-footballer Vinnie Jones is among those shacked up at a Los Angeles hotel favoured by lowlifes in Adam Rifkin's Night At the Golden Eagle (2001).

Despair not, however. There are some eagle movies that actually feature aquiline characters. Sinister secretary Margaret Johnston convinces academic Peter Wyngarde that the giant stone eagle atop the university chapel has come to life and is swooping to attack him in Sidney Hayers's Night of the Eagle (1962). In Michael Apted's Continental Divide (1981), fearless Chicago Sun-Times journalist John Belushi is sent to the Rockies to interview ornithologist Blair Brown, who specialises in the endangered American bald eagle. Speaking of which, use the Cinema Paradiso searchline to find the various Muppet movies that feature Sam the Eagle. Why not start with James Bobin's Muppets Most Wanted (2014) ?

Despite being a mouse hiding from hawks in the house of a raven, environmental agent Steven Seagal manages to protect the eagles of Alaska in the self-directed On Deadly Ground (1994), while the theft of an eagle's egg is just one of the crimes against Nature committed by John Hargreaves and Briony Behets in Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend (1978) that prompt the attack on the former by an eagle and a possum that signals that wildlife is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

The wise old White Eagle and his chicken hawk sidekick Fluffy Wing are loyal supporters to the Powhatan chief's daughter in Disney's Pocahontas (1995), along with her pet hummingbird, Flit. Gandalf (Ian McKellen) summons Gwaihir, the leader of the Great Eagles of Manwë, in order to escape from Saruman (Christopher Lee) in Isengard in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the King (2001). And an eagle soars over Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) in Sean Penn's Into the Wild (2007). But nothing surpasses Otto Bell's documentary, The Eagle Huntress (2016), which joins 13 year-old Kazakh nomad, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, in her quest to become the first female in her family for 12 generations to hunt with eagles in the Altai Mountains.