Arctic Fury

This is a weak movie and the actor's ripped shirt looks silly. Watch it for the animals. Lots of animal action. The bear cubs are cute.

This is a cobbled-together movie, composed of a couple of abortive semi-documentaries produced in the mid-1930s with new linking material added to produce a story.

The story is that Alfred Delcambre is a Doctor up in Alaska, flying off to deal with an incipient plague. His plane is forced down and he has to walk back home. Along the way he makes friends with a couple of bear cubs and sees a lot of wild life -- reindeer and muskoxen and otters and such, much of which is explained by a narrator while a happy score of stock music plays.

The nature photography is the best part of the movie, even if the shots of the wild life seem to have degraded before they could be matched up with the rest of the movie -- the careful observer will notice the wide variation in film stock. The story is potentially engaging in its Odyssey-like simplicity, but that narrator got on my nerves pretty quick!

According to the opening, this is based on a true story. It is the north shore of Alaska beyond the Arctic Circle. Dr. Thomas Barlow (Alfred Delcambre) is one of the few doctors operating that far north. A native band is struggling with a western disease. Barlow is alerted and sets off to find the tribe.

The story is pretty basic. I do question that he doesn't keep his coat. I do not like the light tone and having two Disney cubs join him. I would rather stress the deadly dangers surrounding him. I question a lot of this story. I do love the animals and the wilderness. I even like the cute cubs no matter how far-fetched. I like the stock footages and it is entertaining enough to watch all the way to the end.

"Arctic Fury" is a sad excuse for a movie, as it is essentially made up of old extent footage tossed together. And, to make it more comprehensible, annoying and ever-present narration is used. As a result, it's a movie that mostly stinks...though some of the old footage is nice on its own.

The story begins with dull narration about how the Eskimos respond to plagues. How much of this is true is anyone's guess. Soon, a doctor volunteers to head to the town to help these people with the outbreak. However, along the way, his plane crashes and the doctor is forced to trek through the wilderness to the eskimo village.

Essentially, the film uses footage from "Tundra" (1936)...and that film used footage from "SOS Iceberg" (1933) and I am pretty sure the airplane scenes are from that earlier American-German co-production. To fill in the gaps, there is the annoying narration as well as a bit of new footage. The overall results are less than thrilling and really show you how cynical the folks at RKO were about passing this off as a new movie. How bored and annoyed audiences must have been when they watched this. The only reason I give this one a 2 is that some of the footage looks nice...1930s nice!



By the way, the annoying narrator says that the muskoxen are the most dangerous and aggressive of the mammals in the great white north. Well, this simply isn't true. I am NOT recommending you go hug one...it will most likely kill you. But the risk from them is far less than polar bears or any other bear of the region, such as Brown or Black bears. Heck, wolves are probably more dangerous as well! So please don't take what the film says as gospel!

I was actually pretty damn shocked to discover that Arctic Fury is a Frankenfilm! Cobbled together with footage from 2 previous 1930s films. I didn't notice this. Using footage from previous films, & cobbling it together, with some newly shot footage & passing it off as a "new film", was a common tactic, or should I say trick, commonly used as a cost cutting measure, prior to the 1970s. However, this tactic was usually practiced by either indie films or poverty row studio films. They certainly weren't usually done by any big studios, like RKO, in this instance. Still, there was enough of an interesting story & breathtaking wildlife footage, that I was able to enjoy this particular, Frankenfilm. The narrator was annoying, but not enough to make me turn it off. 6 out of 10