In 1927, MGM sent its ace director W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke to the Marquesa Islands to film Robert Flaherty's project, The White Shadows of the South Seas; the result was an astonishingly beautiful and moving film on the white man's corruption of an island paradise. In 1931, he went to Africa (see Trader Horn, September 16) and in 1933, MGM again sent Van Dyke into Flaherty (Nanook of the North) territory, this time to Northern Alaska to film a similar protest script based on two books by Peter Freuchen. The first part of Eskimo documents the daily life of the Eskimo hunters and features superbly filmed episodes of the caribou, walrus and polar bear hunts, as well as images of more domestic activities like igloo building. The second part becomes dramatic with the arrival of “the house that floats,” with its captain who cheats the Eskimos and is therefore killed by the Eskimo hero. Then the Mounties come to expedite the white man's “justice.” The making of such location films in the late 1920s and early '30s was no easy task; Van Dyke and his crew sailed in a whaling schooner loaded with equipment to Alaska's northernmost inhabited settlement, where they spent a winter while their ship was frozen in. The cast speaks their native Eskimo on the soundtrack, which is subtitled in English. The lead actor, Mala, so impressed producer Hunt Stromberg that he was given an MGM contract.