The Blonde Captive

The title makes it sound like it is a Tarzan-like jungle movie. Not at all. It is a non-fiction travelogue, but not a "dull one" as another reviewer said. It has very close-up intimate footage of tribes which the exploring party encountered (and lived with) in remote parts of Australia. The racist and superior attitude can easily be ignored and chalked up to the old prevalent way of thinking. The film is very educational. You will learn a lot about these peoples and this land and its wildlife. The exploring party had courage to travel to these remote tribes---they were perhaps some of the only white men ever seen by the tribes-people. There is also intimations of cannibalism. So the party bravely went in there and brought back this priceless footage. I bet any professor of anthropology would agree with me that this is a valuable educational film. It also has funny witty narration (which is also a little corny). All in all, it is a worthwhile unusual film.

For the first 5 minutes of this one we have Lowell Thomas (the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous) running on about Neanderthals to a group of nameless men in a sort of round table discussion. At this point I was seriously considering turning the movie off since it didn't match the description I had read at all. But I stuck with it and what followed after was a bland travelogue, narrated by Lowell, about various tribal cultures around the world. For those interested there was a lot of National Geographic-type female nudity. The story of a white woman and her son living with an Aboriginal tribe in Australia doesn't get underway until the last ten minutes. It's completely fabricated and not worth the wait. If you're expecting something campy or titillating, look elsewhere. Overall I think this film would only be enjoyed by people with an interest in history and anthropology. There were quite a few unintentional laughs for me, particularly Lowell's use of the word "gigolos" in a couple of instances. It's pretty racist as well, as might be expected given the time period. Ultimately I found it pretty boring and had I not been killing time at 2AM I wouldn't have subjected myself to it.

This bizarre, exploitive documentary is typical of its time with narrator Lowell Thomas making racist wisecracks and other inane jokes throughout. A quasi-educational travelogue peppered with frequent views of semi-clad native girls from Bali to Australia.

And what about the so-called blonde captive? In the last few minutes we meet a semi-clad blonde lady and her son living with an Aboriginal tribe. She is not a captive so the title makes no sense. She was supposedly marooned there many years ago and has no desire to return to civilization. However, this segment feels fabricated. Either way, this is an interesting and peculiar curio from the past that reveals more about archaic Western attitudes than native culture.