White Dawn, The (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Oct 11, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Philip KaufmanRelease Date(s)
1974 (August 27, 2024)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: B+
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
A remarkable, unique film, The White Dawn (1974) was director Philip Kaufman’s fourth feature. Based on the same-named 1971 novel by James Archibald Houston, itself based a true story, the film follows three whalers stranded in the Canadian Arctic, where they are rescued by Inuit (Eskimos). The telling of the story, of what happens next, is unusual, unfolding in ways perhaps unique for a Hollywood studio-made film, while the physical production, shot entirely on location, yields many remarkable images.
The sub-genre of adventure-dramas about Inuit and/or the region is mostly unremarkable, and the films few in number. Robert Flaherty’s silent classic Nanook of the North (1922) has many of the same fine qualities, though as much a work of fiction, the documentary rife with staged scenes. Good moments in Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1960) couldn’t offset soundstage igloos and poor dubbing of some of the cast, including co-star Peter O’Toole. The much-later Shadow of the Wolf (1992) was laughably bad, despite its interesting late-career performance by Japanese star Toshiro Mifune as an Eskimo. The only film I can think of tackling similar material with the same basic sensibility and sensitivity is Carroll Ballard’s superb Never Cry Wolf (1983).
In 1897, whalers become separated from their schooner, their hunting boat crashing into an ice floe, leaving just three survivors: Billy (Warren Oates), Daggett (Timothy Bottoms), and Portagee (Louis Gossett, Jr.). Near death they are rescued by an Inuit tribe, who regard the strangers as dog-men, the end result of bestiality. Nevertheless, the tribe warily accepts them, despite warnings they bring bad luck from a shifty Inuit shaman, an outsider the tribe doesn’t fully trust.
Billy sees an opportunity to get rich, trading trinkets for the Inuits’ valuable furs and walrus ivory, but mostly he’s disagreeable and just wants to get back to civilization. Daggett, conversely, learns the Inuit language, participates in the hunts for food and social activities, and falls in love with an Inuit woman, while Portagee is drawn in both directions, eager to return home but happy to bed down with the indigenous women.
The deep cultural divide between the outsiders and the Inuit puts a strain on their relationship, particularly after Billy ferments berries picked by the Inuit children and some in the tribe indulge in a night of heavy drinking and debauchery, resulting in tragedy.
The White Dawn tells its story in unusual ways. The characters of Billy, Daggett, and Portagee are developed only through their interactions with one another and the Inuit, and their reactions to behavior utterly alien to them, but the audience learns nothing about their back stories. From the Inuit characters we learn even less; played by non-professional actors, their character names are listed in the credits, but don’t ask me who-plays-who. One is the wise leader of the tribe, another befriends Daggett. There’s that young woman Daggett falls in love with, and the self-serving shaman, but that’s about it. Some of the Inuit dialogue is subtitled in English, but more often it’s not.
The result of all this is that the audience learns only slightly more about where the trio stand with the partly welcoming and generous, partly suspicious and cautious Inuit, and it serves to make the compelling, consistently tense narrative uncluttered by manufactured adventure drama clichés. In a way it’s so spare one could almost read the film as an Inuit perspective, a story passed down through the generations until told to author Houston: the three strangers arrived and this happens and this happens, etc. And, strangely enough, this approach works perfectly well.
What impressed critics and audiences the most in 1974 and still impresses now is the physical production, shooting in locations so desolate Daggett has to explain to his Eskimo girlfriend what a tree is. The three leads and their Inuit co-stars are filmed doing obviously perilous, dangerous activities: creeping up to a huddle of sunbathing walruses, spearing and killing one; walking across slippery sheets of floating ice; aboard a rickety Inuit rowboat in frigid waters which the trio fall into and nearly freeze to death. What today would be comfortably filmed in front of a green screen with CGI added later, in The White Dawn cast members have close encounters with an enormous polar bear, drag heavy seals from holes cut in the ice, and on and on. The fight with the polar bear was staged (it was brought in from a Canadian zoo) but is convincing, while the other animal encounters seem authentic and not for the squeamish, especially when the tribe catches Arctic cranes (?) and celebrate by ceremonially ripping one to pieces.
Unlike sentimental, feel-good cultural anthropological pictures like Dances with Wolves, The White Dawn has more the deep-dive, nihilistic flavor of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, that the cultural divide between coarse “civilized” invaders and primitive indigenous ones with cultures dating back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years is simply too great, that never the ‘twain shall meet.
Kino’s Blu-ray of The White Dawn sources a new HD master, but like so many mid-‘70s Paramount titles (e.g., The Day of the Locust) originally processed by the long-defunct Movielab, the image is somewhat disappointing. Title elements and opticals are weak, and there’s much speckling throughout. Normally when a film has a lot of English-subtitled dialogue, the studio will retain textless original negative so that subtitles in any language can be printed for overseas markets. Nowadays, for video remastering purposes, companies normally revert to this textless film and create new video superimpositions to avoid a drop in the picture quality. Here, however, the subtitles are from the theatrical release version and the image becomes noticeably grainier and muddier every time they appear. Presumably this is because Paramount no longer has these textless elements. So, while for much of The White Dawn the image is reasonably impressive, the surviving film elements leave only so much room for improvement in high-definition. Michael Chapman’s remarkable cinematography is shot for 1.85:1 widescreen, as presented here.
Oddly, the film has a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix. What this is exactly I cannot say, but it’s hard to imagine the film had stereophonic prints back in 1974. Indeed, I didn’t even notice audio channeled to the surround speakers until near the end. Did audio engineers fiddle with an original mono music/effects track? Did they create new sound effects at some point? Beats me.
Supplements are all repurposed from a 20-years-ago Paramount DVD release. They include an audio commentary by director Kaufman, who also appears in a brief video introduction and the featurette Welcoming at Dawn, in 4:3 full frame up-rezzed from standard definition. Also in that format is A Way of Life—The World of the Inuit, an okay featurette.
The White Dawn is a remarkable, and in many ways, one-of-a-kind film, whose influence can be felt in Kaufman’s later The Right Stuff (1983), this reviewer’s pick for the best film of the entire 1980s. Highly recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV