THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS

Director Nicholas Ray’s lifelong interest in isolated cultures and outsider souls finds full expression in every frame of this fascinating late film about an Inuit hunter. When Inuk (Anthony Quinn), who has had little contact with white men, goes to a trading post he accidentally kills a missionary and finds himself being pursued by the police. Assigned to bring him to justice is a naïve lawman, played by Peter O’Toole in an early screen appearance, who is pulled dangerously deep into the Arctic winter.

A return to Ray’s perennial theme of a search for home, THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS represents his first - and, in many ways, most ambitious - attempt to break free from the Hollywood studios and forge an independent route. The CinemaScope frame throws up images of an often startling, even surreal beauty: polar bears diving from the ice-flows become a rhapsody in blinding whites and brilliant blues, and the sound of a jukebox screaming out over the empty, snowy wastes is a withering, wicked symbol of man's destructive influence on nature.

“An outsider's view of outsiders, harsh and enchanted. Cinematic coups abound: A colony of walruses disbands as the camera bobs toward them in an unbroken take, one trooper is propped up soaking wet in the middle of the blizzard-swept widescreen and morphs into a gelid statue in under a minute. NANOOK OF THE NORTH is the mandatory starting point, but this is actually Ray’s THE RIVER.” - Fernando F. Croce