This film barely exists anymore. It inspired a Bob Dylan song, introduced Peter O’Toole to the world of film, has Anthony Quinn in a major role and is in essence the last fully completed Nicholas Ray film in existence. The films he made afterwards were compromised impersonal projects or incomplete personal experimental films. THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS is fairly experimental in itself. It’s really the first instance of a North-American film-maker portraying an alternative predecessor native culture through that culture’s own unfiltered perspective rather than the filter of an American living amongst them(a la DANCES WITH WOLVES). Of course, the film is in English and has non-Inuit playing Inuit and so raises seperate issues in itself but it’s still a striking unpretentious attempt. We see the customs and values of the Inuit as they see and accept them. Their lack of monogamy strikes us as natural and practical(less women, more men, so women accomodate multiple partners) as does the way Ray is able to convey his love and affection for them. By the time, civilization enters the narrative(with the sound of a gunshot), we see the white men(in effect the intended audience) as strange abberations. It’s fairly rare in cinema for a film to take this stand.

This is visually splendid, partly shot on location in the Arctic(and includes shots of glaciers that were bigger then than they are now) and as he showed in earlier films(the rodeo scenes of THE LUSTY MEN, the prologue of ON DANGEROUS GROUND) there is a documentary quality to the narrative and the approach to the landscape. It is also a deeply violent film including on-camera killings of bears and walruses, and two of the most powerful of death scenes. THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS looks forward to films like THE HORSE THIEF in the way it contrasts communal harmony and love against a harsh unforgiving land and in it’s non-manichean examination of the boundaries of civilization it has an irony and compassion worthy of Bunuel’s THE YOUNG ONE.