Brilliant and touching

A different way of telling a story

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

One of the stupidest most inaccurate movies I have ever seen! From a real live "raw meat eater". We didn't kill female babies, females are just as important as a male babies. And the part about sharing wives is such BS, culture had some wife swapping and to the Inuit people sex was something that happens not a taboo, people have sex that's how babies are made even we savages knew that.It's a MYTH that the elderly were left on ice flows or in a snow drift. In the Atomic age even us savages knew what a gun was and golly gee we even saw those metal birds a flyin over head. Ugh.Someone wrote "far northern natives that lived almost exclusively on the arctic ice". How stupid. Do you suppose we all lived in kayaks and Umiaks during the spring thaw and summer months? We hunted on the ice sometimes when we weren't hunting caribou deer and moose we are MEAT EATERS. No hunter would kill a dog to warm someones' hands', he would have never let the trooper get that bad to start with. A live dog would have warmed a person as well as pull you to a place you could get help. Or we would have eaten the animal should the need arise. Hunt a polar bear alone, ridiculous!And giving the dead seal a drink of fresh water. Unbelievable! Yes we would surely have given thanks to the animal spirits. Sea mammals don't drink fresh water, they get all the liquid they need from the foods they eat. Look it up. The clothes were authentic for sure but from different cultures of Inuit.All in all the reviews praising this movie for "culturally authentic" are from people who have no idea what they are talking about and believe all the things that they see in movies. It's a movie not a documentary. Par for the times they didn't hire real Inuit or even American Indians to play the parts Anthony Quinn and Japanese Chinese played as Inuit's is funny. Too that nobody would bother to hire on a real Inuit as a consultant was standard for the times.Entertaining maybe, insulting to THE MEN absolutely.

This movie is based on a book called "Top of the World" by author Hans Ruesch. The book is not very well known today, but it is a very entertaining look at the life of the Eskimos and their view of life (reportedly, author Ruesch has never seen an Eskimo before writing the novel). Set during the time that western ways were encroaching into the Eskimos natural habitat, and spanning several generations, it has a main character, who gets into trouble with the law, becoming a fugitive, basically out of his ignorance of western customs (he killed a white man when he offended him by rejecting an invitation to lie in bed with his wife). I read it as a classroom assignment during high school, more than twenty years ago, and it is probable I would have never read the book if I wasn't assigned to do so. Likewise, the movie based on that novel is not terribly known either, though it is sometimes shown on television (at least in my country). It is a passable film, and the more interesting feature of it is that it has Anthony Quinn playing an Eskimo (how many characters of different ethnic backgrounds did Quinn play during his career?).

I saw this movie in its original release, ca. 1960, while living in Canada. We didn't see it so much a drama as an exposition of Eskimo (now Inuit) culture, behavior, and mores that used the story line as a vehicle to help in that process. And, of course, it is visually stunning.A story I heard at that time claimed the reason the secondary roles are not played by Eskimos was that they didn't have the concept of lying in their culture, and acting -- pretending to be another person, as opposed to taking on the role of, say, a seal in a story-telling activity at a communal gathering -- requires that one, essentially, lie. That is, the claim was that the casting staff could not find an Eskimo that could act.There are episodes in the portrayal that seem over-acted, but that opinion may be a result of my not having personal experience with how Eskimos would actually behave in the activity being portrayed in those scenes. But the scene of death and survival after the sled breaks through the ice is, to coin a phrase, chilling. Asked for help to save the soaked Mountie, Quinn, in the lead Eskimo role, responds, "That man is dead." And then you watch the Mountie freeze to death in under two minutes. Very powerful.Highly recommended.

I saw and heard Anthony Quinn in a television interview about his autobiography which had just been published. He said that there were only three films out of the many that he had made in his life that he was truly proud of. The Savage Innocents was one of the three. (Guess what the other two were. Right! Zorba and La Strada.) This estimation puts this movie in with some very select company. And this film deserves it.It is NOT a documentary. There is a story here, an exciting story, at times edge of your seat--or maybe I should say, a number of stories, all interesting, all moving. The photography, sound, scenery, acting, all were excellent.What struck me most, out of a long list, was the way the point of view of these Inuit people was gotten across. For instance, the missionary butts his head into the igloo and says, "God be with you." Quinn looks puzzled, glances at his wife and says, "No, there's nobody here but us." When the missionary goes on preaching at them, trying to convert them to the "true" faith, Quinn whispers to his wife, "I think he needs to laugh with a woman. Make yourself beautiful." In other words, the guy needs to get laid. The Freudian insight implied by these simple remarks is staggering. And this is only a small sample.Perhaps the fate of this movie had a lot to do with the advertising. The picture at the top of this page suggests that this is a "savage" movie. It isn't. The title itself is unfortunate.Yes, when oh when will we get to see this movie again? When will the savage and not-so-innocent moguls deign to put this beautiful film onto DVD?