(4 of 4)
Principal difficulty in making Eskimo were the three hunting scenes. The seasons for whale, walrus and caribou are the same but Alaskan Eskimos hunt them in different places. Director Van Dyke hustled from one hunting ground to another by plane. Mala is an Eskimo but not a wild one. He turned up two years ago in Hollywood to be a cameraman, joined the Van Dyke expedition as guide, photographed so well that Van Dyke decided to make him the hero. Most of the whites in the cast are members of Van Dyke's technical crew. The fur-trader is Peter Freuchen, who wrote the book on which Eskimo is based. Van Dyke himself is a police inspector. When he came back to Hollywood last spring with 600,000 feet of film, Director Van Dyke brought along a dozen Eskimos for interior sequences. They endured Hollywood for six months, hurried North when their supply of canned reindeer meat gave out.
Blood Money (Twentieth Century), contrived as a vehicle to bring George Bancroft back to the screen after an absence of 18 months, is a mildly exciting little treatise on the bail bond racket. Its hero, Bill Bailey (Bancroft), is a bluff bondsman who gets into difficulties with his underworld associates when, to pay back a bank thief for stealing his girl, he makes less sympathetic arrangements than usual. It is notable less for Bancroft's contribution than for its villainess (Frances Dee), a pretty, well-mannered debutante who is also a masochist, a kleptomaniac and an exhibitionist. Good shot: Miss Dee hurrying off to investigate an advertisement for models, in the hope that the advertiser will attack her.