The Savage Innocents (1960)

Fantastic!

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Other than Nanook Of The North from silent days the only other two films concerning the Eskimos and their culture are Shadow OF The Wolf that starred Lou Diamond Phillips and Toshiro Mifune and this one The Savage Innocents. Almost 60 years have passed since the making of The Savage Innocents and the present. Are there still Inuits like Anthony Quinn and Yoko Tani untouched by our civilization.Envying another Inuit who has gotten a rifle and bullets, Quinn and his pregnant wife Yoko Tani travel months to a trading post to trade some skins for one. An encounter with a missionary played by Marco Guglielmi ends fatally for Guglielmi who is shocked by their sexual mores and for Quinn refusing Inuit hospitality is a grievous insult. Guglielmi is dead and Quinn and Tani are on the run back over the tundra. Quinn is a Savage Innocent in our civilized ways, but he certainly knows how to survive in his environment so the Mounties learn who are sent after him, one of those Mounties being Peter O'Toole.This must have been one rugged shoot for director Nicholas Ray and his cast and crew. But the result is some spectacular location footage of the Canadian and Greenland frozen north.Some of the issues raised here are similar if not the same as those in the film Hawaii which is also about westerners and missionaries intruding on the customs of the native population of Hawaii and the other Pacific Islands.I'd really recommend seeing The Savage Innocents with Shadow Of The Wolf and Hawaii. Or by itself, just see it.

One of the stupidest most inaccurate movies I have ever seen! From a real live "raw meat eater". We didn't kill female babies, females are just as important as a male babies. And the part about sharing wives is such BS, culture had some wife swapping and to the Inuit people sex was something that happens not a taboo, people have sex that's how babies are made even we savages knew that.It's a MYTH that the elderly were left on ice flows or in a snow drift. In the Atomic age even us savages knew what a gun was and golly gee we even saw those metal birds a flyin over head. Ugh.Someone wrote "far northern natives that lived almost exclusively on the arctic ice". How stupid. Do you suppose we all lived in kayaks and Umiaks during the spring thaw and summer months? We hunted on the ice sometimes when we weren't hunting caribou deer and moose we are MEAT EATERS. No hunter would kill a dog to warm someones' hands', he would have never let the trooper get that bad to start with. A live dog would have warmed a person as well as pull you to a place you could get help. Or we would have eaten the animal should the need arise. Hunt a polar bear alone, ridiculous!And giving the dead seal a drink of fresh water. Unbelievable! Yes we would surely have given thanks to the animal spirits. Sea mammals don't drink fresh water, they get all the liquid they need from the foods they eat. Look it up. The clothes were authentic for sure but from different cultures of Inuit.All in all the reviews praising this movie for "culturally authentic" are from people who have no idea what they are talking about and believe all the things that they see in movies. It's a movie not a documentary. Par for the times they didn't hire real Inuit or even American Indians to play the parts Anthony Quinn and Japanese Chinese played as Inuit's is funny. Too that nobody would bother to hire on a real Inuit as a consultant was standard for the times.Entertaining maybe, insulting to THE MEN absolutely.

This movie is based on a book called "Top of the World" by author Hans Ruesch. The book is not very well known today, but it is a very entertaining look at the life of the Eskimos and their view of life (reportedly, author Ruesch has never seen an Eskimo before writing the novel). Set during the time that western ways were encroaching into the Eskimos natural habitat, and spanning several generations, it has a main character, who gets into trouble with the law, becoming a fugitive, basically out of his ignorance of western customs (he killed a white man when he offended him by rejecting an invitation to lie in bed with his wife). I read it as a classroom assignment during high school, more than twenty years ago, and it is probable I would have never read the book if I wasn't assigned to do so. Likewise, the movie based on that novel is not terribly known either, though it is sometimes shown on television (at least in my country). It is a passable film, and the more interesting feature of it is that it has Anthony Quinn playing an Eskimo (how many characters of different ethnic backgrounds did Quinn play during his career?).

Once again, cruelty to animals is exploited in this film when our hero, played by Anthony Quinn, after driving his sled dogs across the cold plains, decides to cut them open, alive, to keep warm. What a horrible scene that was. The screaming of the animals as they one by one were cut open so the likes of our hero can save his own skin by sticking his hands into their warm blood. Ugh!It made me sick! I saw no entertainment in this sort of film and turned the thing off. I wish the public would stop paying admission for films like this. It only encourages other producers to follow suit. A definite downer to watch. Glad it was on television so I could change channels.