White Dawn

Surprisingly good
This story of three sailors marooned on the ice who were rescued and taken in by the Inuits reminded me of something I read in my cultural anthropology class in college, and was one reason I was interested in the movie. In the readings for the class I came across a statement that occasionally sailors on whaling ships in the 19th century would jump ship and go to live with the Eskimos, where, except for the rigors of arctic living, their new lives among the Inuit seemed far preferable to what they had left. Many of them took Eskimo wives and stayed the rest of their lives with their adoptive tribes. So I was interested to see how the movie might portray such a story.

The three sailors in this story, however, aren't so lucky. After their good fortune of being rescued and taken in by the generous and well-meaning Eskimos, things gradually turn sour from there. In contrast to the innocent and generous-to-a-fault Eskimos, the sailors are exploitative, deceptive, and manipulative of their...

A film lost in time
The White Dawn was a film both ahead of and behind its time. In the early 70s a film about the fatal culture clash between three stranded whalers (Warren Oates, Lou Gosset and Timothy Bottoms) and a tribe of Inuits at the turn of the 20th Century was too early for the eco-friendly green lobby and far too late for either the hippies or the slew of early pseudo-documentary adventures like Nanook of the North and Men of Two Worlds, although a fight with a polar bear did manage to infuriate animal rights activists despite the animal being rather too-obviously unharmed. The film made barely a ripple at the box-office or with the critics before quietly disappearing and causing Paramount to cancel Philip Kaufman's intended follow-up for the studio, a Star Trek movie spin-off

Being a Kaufman film, the emphasis is on an alien, more spiritual way of life rather than high adventure as the trio of "dog-children" bring their saviors nothing but bad luck, their not necessarily hostile...

Extremely interesting tale of the acrtic
In the late 1800s three whalers are marooned in the far north. They are rescued by a migrating Eskimo community that provides them with food, shelter, and friendship. However the whalers never give up the idea of returning to their own civilization. They attempt to be rescued by stealing an Eskimo boat and their food supply for the coming winter. However they capsize and once again are rescued by the Eskimos, even after they had stolen their boat and food stores. But eventually the negative impact of the whalers upon the Eskimo reaches a climax that ends tragically. In reality the Eskimo culture has not thrived after contact with our modern civilization and they have a very high suicide incidence and excessive alcoholism rate. Perhaps this film can be looked at as a metaphor of the problems the Eskimo culture has encountered with their contact with Western culture in the modern world.

The performances, photography, and music are excellent. It is a fascinating film to watch, never...

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