White Thunder

In 1931, a ship called the Viking exploded in Newfoundland; Frissell, who had chartered it for re-shoots on his first fiction film, was one of its victims. A child of privilege, the Harvard graduate first visited the North American wilderness in the 1920s and subsequently distinguished himself as a member of Dr. Wilfrid Grenfell's medical crusade. Frissell developed a kinship with the impoverished workers he treated and felt more at home with them than in his father's New York mansion. With a movie camera as his trusty companion, he determined to chart the wild Canadian landscape before civilization encroached. A death-defying 1925 tour of the Grand Falls netted Frissell membership in the Royal Geographic Society and enabled him to tackle his dream project: THE GREAT ARTIC SEAL HUNT (1928). The documentary was a smash hit and Frissell subsequently interned with Robert Flaherty. Emboldened by experience, Frissell persuaded Paramount's Jesse Lasky to distributing his next project, a fictional yarn about the brave sealers of the Labrador Sea called WHITE THUNDER. What Frissell didn't count on was compromising his vision with Hollywood melodramatics, and in hopes of salvaging the film, Frissell returned to Newfoundland for more spectacular footage. En route, the Viking’s store of flares ignited and Frissell's promising career came to an abrupt halt, though his unfinished magnum opus was released posthumously as THE VIKING (1931).

While restoring Frissell's reputation, King cements her own: her inter-cutting of color shots with Frissell's monochromatic treasures is flawless. This biographical documentary is an ode to the obsessiveness that fuels non-commercial movie-making, a form of expression for which Frissell gave his life. leave a comment --Robert Pardi