Arctic Fury

When talent could create a movie simply around 1 actor, in black and white, hilarious writing, and captivate your audience.

Robert Flaherty's masterpiece, "Nanook" (1922), awakened people to the harsh reality of the struggle for survival in the Alaskan wilderness. And Nanook became a household name. "Arctic Fury" revisits that world, by reworking an earlier film about the same subject, "Tundra" (1936), with a new edit and new footage. Norman Dawn directed Alfred Delcambre in both. The nature footage and animals are wonderful and the story of a dedicated and courageous doctor, risking his life, to bring medicine to native people in a remote location, is suspenseful and involving. Quibbles about narration and music cannot diminish this achievement.

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!

This film is exactly what is it supposed to be. Footage taking from other films and spliced together with a human story attached to it. It's not a lousy film yet it's not a swell film. It's what it is meant to be. Something to watch.

The viewer can get past critiquing by simply watching it. If a viewer is looking for something spectacular try a ten star film.