April 4: Elephant Boy (1937 -- Robert Flaherty and Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I should concentrate on the child actor Sabu here, but it’s Robert Flaherty’s contribution to this film that I respond to.  I enjoyed the ethnographic elements here far more than the hackneyed dramatic elements and the Kipling storyline.  Many of the images from Elephant Boy are lush, black-and-white picturesques of an India that’s hard to find now: ornate temples framed in vegetation and compressed to fill the frame by a long focal length lens, lines of elephants walking over an old bridge, small towns whose streets teem with life, a beautiful water tank.  These parts of the film look like an artistic anthropology film.  And Elephant Boy pauses for animal shots like those of the baby elephant playing in the river, shots that recall the animals of other Flaherty projects and other non-narrative details like the horn summoning the drivers or nighttime storytelling lit by campfires in this film.  These are the sorts of ethnographic documentation details that give me a frisson--the same little thrill I got many times in Flaherty’s Man of Aran and the more famous Nanook of the North--when I recognize a cultural truth in this fictional work.

In this breakout role, Sabu plays a dynamic child, and there’s clearly a bond between boy and animal as he scampers over his pachyderm, both using the animal and caring for him.  Elephant Boy shows the closeness of that relationship the way we’d be more familiar seeing the relationship of a boy and his dog or his horse.  And I think I read somewhere that Sabu didn’t speak English and was just making the sounds he was taught to make when he spoke.  If that’s so, his performance here is doubly amazing because the bulk of his speaking is quite easy to follow.  As child actors of the era go—and I’m thinking of Shirley Temple here—Sabu manages more authenticity than most.

I enjoyed this film.  Some of the restored b/w images are spellbinding, and the little jewels of ethnographic truth in this Flaherty project give unexpected sparkles when the Kipling story starts to get dull.