User Reviews

Andre Baruch narrates this RKO Sportscope short about the joys of fishing for salmon in New Brunswick. It features ace angler Lee Wulff, who demonstrates how to catch a salmon ounce an ounce-and-a-half rod.

THe visuals are quite good, with some nice shots of Wulff casting, and salmons leaping out of the water. Despite the insistence that the pleasure of fishing for salmon is the sport of it, I'd like to taste some of that salmon, cleaned right out of the water, planked and cold-smoked for five days. Yum.

Salar, the Leaper (1957)

** (out of 4)

This Sportscope short from RKO is pretty much in line with the other films in the series. We go to New Brunswick, Canada where Lee Wolf and Twitty Palmer show us the most popular places to fish for salmon. This short runs just under 9-minutes and like many of the Sportscope series it offers up an interesting idea but the execution is rather bland and boring. If you're looking to learn something about the fishing then you're going to be disappointed as the dialogue written for narrator Andre Baruch is pretty weak and just gives you standard information that even non-fishermen would know. Another problem is that we're often given bits of information that are just too boring to be entertaining including one sequence where we're told how to lure a fish. The one benefit of watching the film is for some of the scenery, which at times is quite beautiful but you then have to wonder why they were shooting a short like this in B&W. It's common knowledge that RKO was in poor shape by the time this short was made so perhaps this is the reason. Considering what MGM was doing with their TravelTalks series this here just seems rather old-fashioned even for 1957.