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The Arctic ocean reflects the sky in the opening shot, a polar bear swims through until a spear adds red to the white and blue, the first of Nicholas Ray's instinctive effects. Anthony Quinn as the roaming hunter is no noble primitive but a thick survivor, just the axis for the filmmaker's blend of ethnography and artifice. The Inuit here are easy laughers and casual wife-swappers, prone to negotiating conflict with head-bashing and not above mother-in-law jokes. The search for a consort (Yoko Tani) has the physicality of Hot Blood's gypsy courtship, the oneness with "Nature's eternal tragedy" has the aged materfamilias (Marie Yang) exiling herself to the tundra, the one serene death in Ray's oeuvre. "Civilization" is a trading post in the far horizon, Quinn has a good chuckle over those pale weirdos ("The white man has no liking for old meat and frozen fish!") but decides to give bartering a try after seeing a rifle blow off the side of a Technirama composition. The jukebox bewilders and delights, a missionary (Marco Guglielmi) comes proselytizing and ends with a cracked skull, a pair of Mounties (Peter O'Toole, Carlo Giustini) are soon on the trail. "When you come to a strange land, you should bring your wives, not your laws." Nanook of the North is the mandatory starting point, Ray cites it in the seal hunt and goes his own way—this is actually his The River, an outsider's view of outsiders, harsh and enchanted. Cinematic coups abound: A colony of walruses disbands as the camera bobs toward them in an unbroken take, one trooper is propped up soaking wet in the middle of the blizzard-swept widescreen and morphs into a gelid statue in under a minute. Little Big Man and Dersu Uzala flow from it. With Kaida Horiuchi, Lee Montague, Andy Ho, Anthony Chinn, and Anna Way Wong.
--- Fernando F. Croce |