(3 of 4)
Eskimo (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a report of goings-on in the snowfields, some naive, some sophisticated, but almost all unusual, spectacular, disturbing. Most enthralling sequences are those which exhibit: its hero, Mala, engaged in hunting a whale, which nearly upsets his boat with it's tail; dignified walruses which almost succeed in gnashing him with their tusks; caribou, of which a herd stampedes through a valley, over a hill, across a beach and into the water, where Mala and his companions harpoon them. There are, also, less healthy exercises to be seen in Eskimo—lust, murder, polygamy. Mala makes the mistake of lending his wife to a Nordic fur-trader who gets her tipsy, rapes her and then allows her to shuffle off across the snow where his assistant shoots her under the pardonable delusion that she is a seal. For harpooning the fur-trader Mala becomes fair prey for two members of the Canadian Mounted Police. They inveigle him to their outpost by treacherous subterfuges. Mala breaks out of their handcuffs, starts home to the two new wives a friend has lent him, eating the members of his dog team as he goes. The police finally catch up with him but are by this time so impressed by Mala's. fortitude that, instead of shooting him, they let him escape on a cake of drifting ice. They are under the impression that the ice cake will reach some port of safety but to U. S. audiences it seems that Mala is headed directly for what the picture calls "the last Igloo." At once an exciting travelog and a threadbare melodrama. Eskimo is typical Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer nature lore, solemn, lively, expensive. Most exciting shot: Mala, when he has eaten his last husky, lying down on the snow in order to attract a hungry wolf, which he chokes to death, tears apart for supper.
William S. Van Dyke (Trader Horn, White Shadows of the South Seas, Tarzau the Ape Man, The Prizefighter and the Lady), is the director whom Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer assigns regularly to nature stories or, by analogy, pictures with leading men like Johnny Weissmuller or Max Baer. For Eskimo, he and a staff of 42 assistants including Chef Emile Ottinger of Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel spent $1.500,000 and nine months on location at Teller, Alaska, 100 mi. below the Arctic Circle. Less courageous than they appear to be in the picture, the Eskimo extras whom Van Dyke hired at $5 per day ran away after seeing their first cinema. It showed a fight and they thought that if Director Van Dyke had been as sympathetic as he pretended, he would have helped instead of taking pictures.