Joseph Boudreaux is a Cajun boy living in the bayous. When a wildcat rig starts to drill near his home, he makes friends with the crew.
It's directed by pioneer documentarian Robert J. Flaherty. Flaherty for decades was considered the model documentarian. This was in large part because his NANOOK OF THE NORTH was wildly successful. Nowadays, the admiration has died down.He imposed story lines on his movies, and directed scenes to support them, as opposed to the modern ideal of shooting a tremendous amount of footage of things happening, and then editing the results to bring some sort of coherence to the resulting film. You can see his story-telling technique in the sequence where Boudreaux captures an alligator. In addition, the presence of the drillers is portrayed as completely benign, with no impact on the local wildlife. Modern understanding of global warming and the impact of oil spills and the Deepwater Horizon disaster makes this seem naive. However, Standard Oil underwrote this movie, just as NANOOK had been underwritten by furriers.
The resulting movie is a warm and idyllic one, with amusing details of Cajun superstition and the beauty of the local setting. Although not as informative as modern documentaries try to be, it's beautifully shot and well put together. Virgil Thomson won the Pulitzer Prize for best composition, the only time a movie score has achieved that distinction.
It's directed by pioneer documentarian Robert J. Flaherty. Flaherty for decades was considered the model documentarian. This was in large part because his NANOOK OF THE NORTH was wildly successful. Nowadays, the admiration has died down.He imposed story lines on his movies, and directed scenes to support them, as opposed to the modern ideal of shooting a tremendous amount of footage of things happening, and then editing the results to bring some sort of coherence to the resulting film. You can see his story-telling technique in the sequence where Boudreaux captures an alligator. In addition, the presence of the drillers is portrayed as completely benign, with no impact on the local wildlife. Modern understanding of global warming and the impact of oil spills and the Deepwater Horizon disaster makes this seem naive. However, Standard Oil underwrote this movie, just as NANOOK had been underwritten by furriers.
The resulting movie is a warm and idyllic one, with amusing details of Cajun superstition and the beauty of the local setting. Although not as informative as modern documentaries try to be, it's beautifully shot and well put together. Virgil Thomson won the Pulitzer Prize for best composition, the only time a movie score has achieved that distinction.