Tusk may not have the crazed sensibility of its auteur writ large but I think the only reason it’s not as well known is because audiences were unable to accept Jodorowsky as a sentimentalist. Tusk may be a bit absentminded and have the trappings of late period Renoir (by 1980 anyone could have told you how the film ended by the midway point) but for me, a die-hard of the Spanish master, I found too much to love to simply dismiss it as beneath his more sensational films. Tusk tells the story of a girl born in India on the same day as the titular elephant who disobeys her father in every way. She falls in love with Indian culture, spends time talking to (and even touching) the Indian serving staff on their huge estate, and befriends Tusk. When her father has to let a charismatic scruffian called Richard Cairns hunt the elephant for the maharaja who wants it bad, she and her father have a falling out. Meanwhile there’s some business with some inept criminal poachers and a few minor characters who are mostly set-dressing. The story isn’t revolutionary and it was the first of Jodorowsky’s major films to be based on someone else’s work which made him kill all his darlings and for once deliver something resembling a conventional narrative. In my opinion he proved rather adept. Like some of Sydney Lumet’s commercial work, Jodorowsky spends a lot of time just admiring the scenery and there are few close-ups. The constant roving camera and mighty tracking shots are just as impressive as some of his more deranged visuals from his last films and to see someone with such an unyielding style give in to a story is actually kind of touching. Granted I’m basing this on the horrid VHS copy I’ve managed to find, but I do think if nothing else Jodorowsky cared about the story (I could be wrong, but that’s just how it feels). The story is too floppy and adorable not to love and as it’s the closest thing he ever got to conventional filmmaking, I’m glad it still had enough of him in it to feel different from most of what hit multiplexes that year. 1980 saw the last great films from a lot of Auteurs (Dario Argento, Michael Cimino, some argue Truffaut, William Peter Blatty) I’m just glad that a movie with big floppy ears didn’t signal the end of for one of the most assured voices in cinema. If anything Tusk was the impetus for Jodorowsky to add an emotional core to his next two movies, something I’m grateful for. If there’s a chance that without Tusk’s warming effect that Santa Sangre and The Rainbow Theif would have come out any different, then I’m especially pleased that he made it. It may not be perfect but it is a crucial step in his evolution and I think it’s a crime that the film languishes on poorly kept VHS. Someone please put this movie on DVD!!!!