Elephant Boy

Lots of actors make debut film appearances with roles that perfectly match their skills and charisma, but Sabu’s role here is a piece of alchemy and serendipity captured on camera. Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s “Toomai of the Elephants,” one of the many stories in the Jungle Books, Elephant Boy provides Sabu with the first of his enjoyable, charming adventure stories.

Elephant Boy tells the story of Toomai, a ten-year orphan who dreams of becoming an elephant-handler, but is told this dream will not come to pass until he sees the elephant’s dancing. As luck would have it, while looking for a child to play the title role, producer Alexander Korda and director Robert Flaherty found Sabu, the son of an elephant-handler.

In many ways, the story of Elephant Boy is reflective of Sabu’s own journey to international movie stardom. Sabu’s mother died while he was young, his father passed away a short time before being discovered, but all of the stuns and tricks that Sabu performs with the elephants in the film are real. If you switched out Toomai’s dream of becoming a respected mahout (what the Indian’s call an elephant driver) for international movie-stardom, you’d have the exact same story reflecting back and forth between character and actor.

Elephant Boy is not a perfect film, as the two directors and their respective directions often times come into awkward dramatic conflict. Zoltan Korda was hired to direct the dramatic tissue connection the various location-specific footage of animals in the wild shot by Flaherty. The film needs a strong center to hold it all together, and Sabu provides this in spades.

His naturalism before the camera makes some of the stiff, affected line deliveries of the various British cast members appear more tin-eared and false than before. Naturally exuberant, Sabu’s sense of fun and adventure is infectious. His joyous nature and mega-watt charisma begin to overtake you as the film goes on. He elevates the entire thing by his sheer strength, even if his phonetically learned English is often times shaky.

In the end, Elephant Boy may be slight, but it’s a rousing adventure story nonetheless. The best moments are ones in which the narrative takes a backseat to enjoying the moment. The relationship between Sabu and the elephant is a unique spin on the boy-and-his-dog narratives of other films. And the various bits of animal footage is wondrous to watch, it might not add anything of importance to the plot, but the gives the film a sense of truth in location and narrative that is important. After watching this thoroughly enjoyable Saturday matinee adventure, it’s very easy to see why Sabu would go on to become on the strangest, but most charismatic of movie stars in the forties.