Arctic Fury

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!

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

"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!

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 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.