"The title refers to hunger. The film (shot on location in Canada) is an impeccable reconstruction in story form of Ojibway Indian life as it was before the white man came. Conceived and produced in full awareness that the Indian and the wilderness were both rapidly vanishing, it was made for the purpose of leaving a visual record for the America that was to come of the America that used to be. Douglas Burden, a young explorer, had been painfully impressed by the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest Schoedsack film Chang, and with his partner William Chanler, director H. P. Carver, and a team of Hollywood professionals, independently financed and produced the picture for release by Paramount." --Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness