LGM Film Club, Part 551: Elephant Boy

1937’s Elephant Boy is a strange, fascinating, and to my mind somewhat sad film. It’s strange and fascinating because it is one of the few films that combine the ideas and methods of two directors into a coherent film. Based on Rudyard Kipling’s “Toomai of the Elephants” story from The Jungle Book, it’s an exercise in pure imperialist orientalism, something that one wonders what George Orwell thought of it. The two directors seemingly had nothing in common. Robert Flaherty basically created the idea of the documentary, the nature film, and the anthropology film through early movies such as Nanook of the North, Moana, and Man of Aran. Zoltan Korda was a major action/adventure director who worked a ton in the orientalist fantasies of the 30s and 40s. So the combo works–Flaherty handled most of the nature shots, of which there’s a lot, and Korda the action.

It is also the film film starring Sabu, then a kid and later the first Indian star of English language film. He’s a boy who wants to be a hunter. There’s an English elephant hunter in the employ of the British government there (a brief appearance by his boss, played by Wilfrid Hyde-White makes you go, hey that’s the colonel from My Fair Lady!) and he wants to find a lot of elephants to tame and bring into work. The story goes along and Sabu remains the main character. The sad part is… can’t the leave the fucking elephants alone? I know that’s not the story and that’s not the history of India either, but the footage of the hundreds of elephants being caught and herded into a giant cage is just depressing. I imagine those particular elephants were in fact already tamed, it would be too hard to pull that off in a film if they were really wild. But still, imperialism is so depressing.

Whole thing is available on YouTube.