The Savage Innocents
Starring: Anthony Quinn, Yoko Tani, Peter O'Toole
Director: Nicholas Ray
The film: 'When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna jump for joy', sang Bob Dylan and later Manfred Mann in tuneful admiration of one of popular music's more obscure subjects. They were in fact referencing Anthony Quinn, who plays Inuk the Eskimo in The Savage Innocents, Nicholas Ray's bizarre, little-known and fairly brutal homage to our Arctic cousins.
Presented in pseudo-documentary style, the film's first half sees Quinn procuring himself a wife (Yoko Tani) in between kayaking trips around icebergs and hurling his harpoon into anything that moves. Deciding that a gun would make life easier, he kills 100 foxes for their pelts, which can be exchanged for a rifle at a distant Canadian trading post. While there, he offers the short-term loan of his wife (as was, and in some remote areas still is, the Eskimos' singularly generous custom) to a missionary, who declines. Outraged at this social faux pas, Quinn proceeds to beat the man's head against the ice (more cultural demonstration), accidentally killing him.
Two policemen chase Quinn, the most recognisable being Peter O'Toole in his first film role (his voice was later dubbed by an American, so he removed himself from the credits). The police, however, are out of their element in the snowy wastes and it's up to the mighty Quinn to try to save them.