The white Dawn

IMDb

• In 1896, three whalers are stranded in the Arctic North Canada and seek refuge with an Eskimo tribe. Gradually they gain control with the Eskimo village and introduce gambling, booze, theft and their special variation of sex. In the beginning, the Eskimosaccept it but slowly the cultural tension starts growing.
  - Written by Frank Christensen <fch@post4.tele.dk>

NYtimes

"The White Dawn," an adaptation of James Houston's novel, is reportedly based on a true story about three New England whaling seamen who, in the spring of 1896, became separated from their ship while on an Arctic hunt and whose lives were subsequently saved by a small tribe of Eskimos living on Baffin Island, below the North Pole.

The movie, which opened yesterday at Loew's Tower East, is earnest, cold and apparently authentic. It was filmed on Baffin Island, under the direction of Philip Kaufman ("The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid"), with Warren Oates, Timothy Bottoms and Lou Gossett playing the marooned sailors and with Eskimos playing Eskimos.

As an Arctic travelogue it is sometimes so striking that I spent much of the time wondering how certain scenes were photographed: long shots of men walking across ice-flows, the killing of a polar bear, a walrus hunt, the capsizing of a boat that sends the actors into icy water.

Because such things are difficult to stage, one's mind is likely to be on the production problems as often as on the film itself, which, as drama, is almost as bland as the Eskimos appear to be to the three sailors.

I would think, too, that the difficulties of filming in such a location, with a mostly amateur cast, had as much to do with the style of the finished film as did the initial intention of the director and the writers.

Mr. Houston's novel is told in the first person by an Eskimo narrator, which allows the author to provide all sorts of documentary details as well as idiosyncratic portraits of the individual Eskimos. The book is a simple, moving account of a little-known people and of the inevitable confrontation between two civilizations.

Aside from the exotic beauty of its landscapes, the film offers no comparable pleasures and not even much information. It's the story of how the three sailors have the bad judgment to be so rude and boorish to their hosts that they invite a fate they would never understand. The movie is more a story of poor luck than of characters experiencing culture shock.

Warren Oates plays the mean-tempered sailor, Lou Gossett the gentle one and Timothy Bottoms the philosophical one. They are fine.

Some of the hunting scenes (polar bear, seal, walrus) are probably too bloody for small children but I suspect that the film received its R rating because of a couple of shots of bare female breasts and because the movie suggests that the sailors slept with Eskimo women. This rating is absurd and a waste.

"The White Dawn" could have been the sort of movie that a child could go to, with or without parent or adult guardian.

Just to say the book is always better

Full Movie on Kinoband