Popular reviews

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  Review by Mark Kaiserman ★★★

  Not as good as Nanook of the North but also not nearly as bad as you might imagine it.

  The film won the first Oscar for Best Editor - a mess 90+ years later, but impressive for 1933.

  Oscar History Challenge 2025

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  Review by PUNQ ★★★★

  W.S. Van Dyke was truly a unique director being able to direct non-actors like boxers to excellent performances in The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) and here he's doing a exotic ice-cold movie about Eskimos using a lot of inexperienced Inuits along with some Eskimo lookalikes with limited screen background to a another wonderful experience.

  
  Eskimo is a long and sometimes slow movie, which is what works against it. For a movie that won Oscar for 'Best Film Editing' it sure is a movie that would have benefited from more tight editing. Because there is a lot of gold in this movie, but in a way it gets stretched out over long periods where little happens except living like a…

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  Review by AntoniusBlock7 ★★★½

  A film with a lot to unpack. I was really put off at the beginning of the film because of the lowlights below which soon become apparent, and it wasn’t possible for me to overcome the conflicted feelings they gave me entirely, so I can’t recommend the film without at least some reservations.

  Highlights:

  - W.S. Van Dyke transported film audiences of the 1930’s to the Arctic, and some of the scenery he presents is outstanding. The caribou herd being stampeded out into a river during a hunt comes to mind, as do various shots of the swirling winds over a harsh snowscape.

  - The film’s heart is in the right place, showing the native people in a positive light…

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½ 1

  More blatantly fictionalized, more "Hollywood" than Nanook Of The North, but the fiction is padded out with valuable documentary footage of Inuit daily life, including a lot of hunting activity... and it's hard to fault a fiction that turns on a rape/revenge "kill Whitey" subplot and the culture clash surrounding it -- this is essentially the same plot as The Savage Innocents, but with a more classical-Hollywood presentation. A nearly perfect little movie.

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  Review by Karl Janssen ★★★★

  The 1933 film Eskimo is really a unique and fascinating viewing experience. Filmed on location amid real Inuit villages, the film used Native Alaskan nonactors for most roles. In his first film, Native Alaskan actor Ray Mala plays a romanticized version of himself in the lead role. He would later go on to a successful Hollywood career playing characters of many Indigenous races, from Eskimos to Polynesians, like a Cliff Curtis of the 1930s and '40s. The female lead of Mala's wife is played by Japanese/Hawaiian actress Lotus Long. The film also includes English-speaking white characters in the form of Scandinavian whalers and Canadian Mounties, but Mala is clearly the hero of the film.

  Though this is a scripted story,…

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  Review by Adam Waldowski ★★★½

  For all its shortcomings, it’s extraordinary there was a pre-Code studio film shot largely in Alaska in the Inuktitut language. It seems ripe for rediscovery for its critical approach towards white characters and its frank sexuality. God help that lady who does vegan trigger warnings if she ever finds this!

  60/100

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  Review by Matthew Wilder ★★★½

  I've long suspected that One-Take Woody had more under the hood than even sympathetic critics were noting. This tragic epic saga of an Inuit man is as sober as THE REVENANT, and twice as novelistically complex. All non-actors (except for the briefly glimpsed Canadian Mounties), all terrific performances--and Van Dyke discovered a brilliant formula for getting them to do what he wants: he captures a glance or a grimace in a short fragment, which gives the editing a hyper-brisk, forward-leaping, hotfooted style. I have an inkling one might find what I discovered in a Mitchell Leisen retrospective several years back: three or four absolutely first-rate movies nobody knows.

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  Review by Neil Steffens ★★★½

  Best Film Editing Winners, RANKED

  Conrad A. Nervig won the first ever Best Film Editing Oscar for his work in this, an excruciatingly difficult-to-shoot film about natives in the Arctic and their interactions with "White Men."

  I'm assuming the editing accolades come from the extremely intense hunting scenes. These sequences are all real and I assume there was so much footage to parse through to tell a story within the hunts. Sometimes, I felt like the drama was constructed to fill in the gaps so these hunts could be showcased - they really are that good. However, every now and then there is some silly moments in which the characters are clearly in front of a projection of other footage…

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  Review by David Burgess ★★★½

  CAREN FELDMAN MOVIE NIGHT

  A much more dramatic and moving film, compared to Trader Horn the movie Eskimo follows the idealic life of Mala an Inuit hunter as he first encounters white traders plying their goods in the far north. The interesting question arises.. was it fair to inflict white man's laws to these people who had been living under their own morale code for centuries prior to the arrival of the white man. Eskimo is a lot less racist than the previous movie and depicts the inuit with alot more respect and reverence than even how they portray the white men in the movie. It is the white men who are the fools and the Eskimo, the enlightened ones and at the end of the movie this point is driven home in the vary last scene. A much more pleasant movie to watch.

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  Review by Jessica Pickens ★★★½

  Fascinating film and production history.
  And I randomly love to see Joe Sawyer appear in any film.

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  Review by Kendoval ★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Topher Thompson ★★★

  Of course there are always going to be problematic elements when white people create a film about Native people (e.g. the "noble savage" depiction), but it was pretty cool to see a film made in the 1930s using (mostly) non-actor Native Alaskans speaking Inupiat. As for the story itself, it started off fairly strong with some interesting shots/editing, but by the middle it just kinda dragged on.

  List: Oscars - Best Film Editing Winners (88/88)