Kipling, Sabu, and Goldie Hawn: Reflections on Elephant Boy, a Forgotten Film of Robert Flaherty's

Perhaps Robert Flaherty's most insignificant film, Elephant Boy [ 1937 ] was made during a commercial partnership with Alexander Korda in the Mysore jungles. It starred Sabu and countless elephants, and was reminiscent of Cooper and Schoedsack's Chang [ 1927 ]. Both films are unmentioned i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inVisual anthropology (Journal) Vol. 27; no. 1-2; pp. 191 - 196
Main Author Hockings, Paul
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Taylor & Francis Group 01.01.2014
Subjects
19th century
Elephants
Flaherty, Robert
Hawn, Goldie
Historians
Kidnapping
Visual anthropology
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Summary:Perhaps Robert Flaherty's most insignificant film, Elephant Boy [ 1937 ] was made during a commercial partnership with Alexander Korda in the Mysore jungles. It starred Sabu and countless elephants, and was reminiscent of Cooper and Schoedsack's Chang [ 1927 ]. Both films are unmentioned in visual anthropology textbooks. Only the two film historians, Calder-Marshall [ 1963 ] and Rotha [ 1983 ], discuss this Flaherty film. It is based on a short story by Kipling, which in turn was based on a 19th-century autobiography of an elephant-catcher. Little could Flaherty have imagined that half a century later the forest locale where he filmed was to be the haunt of a notorious brigand who successfully kidnapped a top Canarese filmstar.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
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ISSN:0894-9468
1545-5920
DOI:10.1080/08949468.2014.852939