Boys' adventure story has youngster from Wyoming visiting his estranged trapper father in India, who lives on a dilapidated animal compound. The teenager, unhappy at home in the States, announces he plans to stay on permanently (after his cold, detached father fails to even meet the boy's train, I'm not sure why he'd want to remain). Rejected by his parent, he runs away; after going over a waterfall in a basket-raft and nearly drowning, he's befriended by the Hindu boy who saved his life. Adaptation of Jalal Din's novel, handsomely filmed by cinematographer Günther Senftleben in the jungles of India, features an assortment of fascinating and amusing animals, but nothing else of interest in the foreground. Jay North (TV's "Dennis the Menace") and Sajid Khan as North's friend Raji are both disappointing; petulant North's line readings are wooden, and when he panics it looks like he's having convulsions. Both teenagers are very poorly directed by John Berry, who doesn't do much better by the adults in the cast. Both North and Khan reprised their roles for the brief television series which followed the next year. *1/2 from ****