ESKIMO (1933)

Mala, member of a Northern Alaskan Eskimo tribe, is a husband and father, and the best hunter in the tribe. When a stranger with two wives shows up, having lost contact with his tribe, Mala takes him in. One of the wives is constantly grinning and chuckling, but the other one, Iva, is younger and sexier, and looks longingly at Mala. Numaka returns from a visit to Tjaranak, an inlet where trading ships dock, in possession of a gun. Mala decides to take his family there to trade for goods. Along the way, they run into Urajak, who lost his wife in a bear attack, and Mala offers him his wife Aba for a night of intimate company. At Tjaranak, trading occurs, and the captain talks Mala into leaving Aba in the ship overnight; he then gets Aba drunk and sleeps with her. The next day, while Mala participates in a whale hunt, Aba is dragged back on ship by drunken sailors and the captain rapes her. When she stumbles out onto the ice, she is shot and killed by a hunter who mistakes her for a seal. In revenge, Mala impales the captain with a harpoon and leaves. Back home with no wife, the stranger offers Mala his wife Iva as a wife and mother to his children. During a caribou hunt, Mala has a vision of the dead captain and is advised to pray to the gods to give him a new name so the captain's ghost cannot find him. He takes the name Kripik. Meanwhile, a couple of Canadian Mounties go after Mala for the captain's murder. They wind up almost dead in the snow and Mala (as Kripik) nurses them back to health. The men form a bond, but when the Mounties discover he is really Mala, they reluctantly do their duty and arrest him. That night, bound in handcuffs, Mala struggles mightily and painfully (and bloodily) to escape and sets off on a grueling journey back to his tribe, forced to slaughter and eat all of his sled dogs. Knowing he's being pursued, he and Iva leave the village via an ice floe just as the Mounties arrive. Sgt. Hunt is torn between his admiration for Mala and his duty as upholder of the white man's laws. Will he shoot Mala or let him float off to an uncertain future?

This was mostly shot on location, using footage of an actual Alaskan tribe as the backdrop for the story (fiction but based on two adventure travel books by Peter Freuchen, who also plays the captain). All the dialog delivered by the Alaskans is in their native language, translated by title cards. The film was touted as a partial documentary, probably the reason they got away with a brief shot of a native woman breastfeeding. Scenes of real seal, whale, and caribou hunts are interesting, though there is some obvious use of rear projection shots for some of the more exciting moments. An onscreen note at the beginning of the film says that the cast is all native and the only actors in the movie are the Mounties, but that’s not quite true. The man playing Mala, also named Mala (pictured), was born in Alaska, but had been involved in the film business in Hollywood since 1925. He went on to a fairly long acting career (see LAST OF THE PAGANS). Similarly, Lotus Long, who played Iva, was of Japanese and Hawaiian background but was born in New Jersey and went on to a solid career in B-movies. The film's director, W.S. Van Dyke, has a small part as the chief Mountie inspector. The actor with the most English dialog is Joe Sawyer as Hunt; Sawyer made almost 200 movies, always in support, usually as a cop or a henchman or a comic relief sidekick, and he's fine here as the conflicted Mountie. At 2 hours, it's a bit too long in its middle sections, but it remains watchable after all these years, both as a novelty and as a unique adventure film. [TCM]