I penned a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen last week in response to their almost three-quarter page article on the death of Margot Kidder. All the mainstream media, including CBC, failed to mention in their long obituary of Margot Kidder that her film debut was in the 1968 National Film Board of Canada presentation of The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar.
The Canadian dramatic film was directed by Peter Pearson and written by Joan Finnigan. The 49-minute drama won eight awards at the Canadian Film Awards, including Film of the Year.
The film is an account of an itinerant bush worker living in the rural area of the Ottawa Valley who can’t make enough money to feed his large family but nevertheless rejects government handouts. Many of the scenes were filmed around Calabogie and in Renfrew.
Kidder plays Rosie Prometer, the oldest daughter who leaves home to find work and a better future.
The film also stars Chris Wiggins and Kate Reid.
I recall when the movie was shown on CBC in 1969 it got bad reviews from area folks. The interesting thing is that the screenplay was written by someone very familiar with the Ottawa Valley. It was written by Joan Finnigan who was a Canadian writer and poet and who lived in Ottawa. She wrote over 30 books, many of them oral histories of the Ottawa Valley. Her final oral history Life along the Opeongo Line was published in 2004.
Renfrew Advance columnist Margaret Hamilton slammed the movie as trash. I looked up her column on the film of March 26, 1969 in her book Countryside Musing. She wrote: One scene showed a rabble of young’uns having their Saturday night baths collectively in the family washtub, before being dressed and handed out, one at a t time, to be packed into a modern panel truck and driven off to a community square dance. You would have thought to substitute a horse-drawn sleigh or a farm wagon in place of a panel truck, as more in keeping with the family washtub bit. Following what seems to be CBC’s idea of country dances, there was much flowing of whiskey from the bottle and a rip-roaring fist-fight to wind up the event up in approved style. But from the beginning to the end of the whole film, so help me, I saw neither hide nor hair of that “best damn fiddler”.
Margot Kidder was born in Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, to Jill, a teacher, and Kendall, a mining engineer and explosives expert whose job demanded that the family relocate regularly. She attended 11 schools in around 12 years and suffered emotional problems as a teenage.
I’ve only seen the film once and some evening I’m going to watch it on the Internet.
