Eskimo

The story of  how Eskimo (1933) was made is probably more interesting than what's on the screen.   That said, the movie is pretty good and, certainly, fascinating throughout.  The ethnographic imagery in the film is probably valuable today -- no one hunts or lives nowadays like the Yupik natives shown in the picture.  Eskimo was one of three films directed by W.S.("Woody") Dyke in 1933 -- the other two were Penthouse and The Prizefighter and the Lady.  (Dyke made White Shadows in the South Pacific, a picture started by Flaherty and related to Murnau and Flaherty's Tabu in 1929, directed Trader Horn in 1930, premiered Johnny Weissmueller in Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 and inaugurated the sophisticated Thin Man series in 1934.)   It's unclear how Dyke accomplished all this when the credits tell us that Eskimo was shot in the Northwest Territories over the course of two years -- presumably a second crew compiled the ethnographic footing and, then, Dyke added the complicated story using studio inserts and lousy rear-projection.  The film is politically incorrect --no one uses the name "Eskimo" anymore and the leading female actors seem to me to be Chinese or Japanese.   The hero, Mala (played by Ray Wise aka Ray Mala) was the son of a Russian Jew and a Yupik woman.  (He also operated cameras, was promoted as the "Eskimo Cary Grant", and made a number of other films, both as an actor and cinematographer.)  Although some academics have argued to the contrary, the film is not racist -- in fact, great care was taken to accurately depict Yupik life and the film was shot in Inupiak, the local language, at great expense -- the kh sound in that language caused "chopping" or the microphone to cut-off and the Asian leading ladies had to learn Inupiak to recite their lines. 

The film is pre-Code and graphic.  A woman breast-feeds her baby in close-up in an early shot and the film's subject, the Eskimo custom of sharing their women with outsiders, is exploited for all its worth -- in fact, the "weird moral code" of the North is the subject of the picture. (The film was sometimes shown under the titles of Mala the Magnificent or Eskimo Wife-Traders of the Arctic.)  The movie is, in effect, a silent picture with the works spoken by the natives recorded and, then, translated in intertitles.  The dialogue spoken by Europeans is poorly recorded, or has deteriorated with time, and is difficult to hear.  Mala is a great hunter.  In the opening scene, a sort of idyll, we see him filling up his canoe with salmon that he spear-fishes and ducks that she shoots out of the sky with his bow and arrow. He is happily married to Aba and has two sons.  An Indian from another tribe comes to village and Mala shares his wife with him, demonstrating the "weird custom" that forms the backbone of the film's plot.  Learning from the outsider that white men are nearby, Mala and his family travels across the tundra to see them and trade for a rifle.  The white men are trapped in a boat stuck like Shackleton's Endurance in the Arctic ice.  The captain of the boat seizes Aba and gets her drunk, apparently raping her. (There is a big close-up of her drunk and half-naked, giggling at the camera, and accorded full glamor treatment:  she's shot in soft-focus with rim-lighting.) She staggers back to the igloo nearby that Mala has built.  Mala is angry because the Captain "didn't ask his permission" to take his wife.  The ship captain is a vicious fellow and he abducts Aba again, rapes her, and leaves her staggering drunk.   She wanders out across the ice, collapses, and is, then, shot by a white hunter who thinks she is a basking seal.  Mala goes to the ship and kills the captain with his harpoon.  He, then, returns to his people.  Another man in the tribe has two women -- perhaps, they are his wives or daughters.  He gives them to Mala.  But the hero is still grieving for Aba and can't perform sexually.  Mala, then, goes on a vision-quest, changes his name, and takes the two sisters for his wives.  Meanwhile, the R.C.M.P. has sent two Mounties to hunt down Mala for the killing of the white sea captain.  The Mounties get lost and collapse in the snow, but are found, just in time, by Mala and his family.  They save the two men who, then, repay Mala's kindness, which presumably includes a little wife-sharing, by luring the great hunter to a miserable stick-built hut far away at a trading post.  Mala feeds everyone by hunting game and is much liked by all the white men.  A judge appears (played by Van Dyke himself) and orders Mala be handcuffed.  Mala rips his arm out of the cuffs in a disturbing and gruesome scene and flees with eight dogs and a stolen rifle and ammunition.  Unfortunately, the ammunition is 363 caliber and not 30.06, the muzzle measure of the stolen rifle.  Mala has to eat all of his dogs one-by-one and, then, is attacked by a starving wolf.  He collapses and is about to freeze when his tribe rescues him.  He returns to his two wives and children.  (They have been starving in his absence and the movie shoes the drying racks for the meat as bare scaffolds.) The white Mounties appear and Mala leaves with his senior wife, dashing across the ice pack as it roars and crashes and breaks up.  Knowing that he is doomed :   he and his wife are committing suicide -- going to the "long sleep."  The Mounties approach the ice-floe where he is trapped, aim their rifles at him, but are unable to bring themselves to shoot.  A scrap of dialogue, added to the end of the film, assures the audience that Mala and his wife will be okay, that they will simply navigate the crumbling ice-floe to the other side of the bay and escape.  But the audience would have to be idiots to believe that this optimistic scenario is possible.

The acting by the native people is very good.  By contrast, the Europeans and Canadians are wooden and unconvincing.  (The evil ship captain is played by the great Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and the movie is based, in part, on two of his novels set in Greenland.)   Some of the ethnographic set-pieces are astonishing.  There is a spectacular whale hunt and an even more impressive scene in which men in kayaks shoot and stab caribou who have been driven in a vast herd out into a sort of rocky fjord.  Modern films always assure us that no animals were hurt during the production of the movie -- lots of animals were most assuredly killed during the production of Eskimo.  We see walrus lanced, whales spouting black blood, caribou killed by the dozens, embattled polar bears, dogs being butchered, and, finally, a horrific scene in which Mala fights a starving wolf and, finally, beats the animal to death.  (The scene was actually shot with a real starving wolf and a man with a rifle poised behind the camera to shoot the wolf if it got the upper hand in the vicious wrestling match with Mala.)  The flight over the ice-pack that is fissuring apart is reminiscent of Lillian Gish's hike across a river, leaping from ice floe to ice floe, in Way Down East -- that's a terrifying sequence and the scenes with the ice-pack fragmenting are equally alarming.  The film is unflinching in its depiction of hunting and the dangers of Arctic.  The film remains worth watching despite its exploitative aspects.