A short movie from Lupino Lane, who was the most famous of the English Lupino family, until eclipsed by his cousin Ida Lupino, one of the only female filmmakers working during the 1950s in the Hollywood studio system, and the first woman to direct a film noir with The Hitch-Hiker in 1953.
Lupino Lane stars in this short silent movie with his brother Wallace Lupino, who plays an older authority figure, despite being some years younger than Lane. The Lupino brothers later shot to fame with a show called Me and My Girl in the 1930s, which inflicted the song “The Lambeth Walk” onto an unsuspecting public.
Lane is a cabin boy, shipwrecked with Wallace on an island, where they come across the obligatory foot print (think Robinson Crusoe).
Lane sets off to find signs of civilisation. Various animals cross his path – a chimp, a lion, a leopard, even an elephant, none of which he notices, until he is frightened by a rabbit. Wallace is captured by cannibals (male) while Lane is accosted by the females, who takes a bite at him.
He is captured by the male cannibals and taken to the – yes – cooking pot that was so much part of the myth of primitive cannibalism.
In fact, the trope of the sad-eyed missionary or sailor in a cooking pot surrounded by fierce savages with bones in their noses is perhaps the first image most people conjure up when (if) they think about cannibalism. There is, of course, no evidence that this ever happened anywhere, but there is some speculation that the story was spread by missionaries, as it did wonders for their fund-raising efforts.
Lane is rescued by the love of the chief’s daughter (think Man from Deep River) – and dressed for the wedding, while Wallace is fattened up for the feast. In fact, there are many precursors to the later cannibal movies in this absurd little piece.
This is a very early celluloid version of the white man in the cooking pot, which is why I have included it here. The movie is mostly very silly, but funny in parts, in that early Chaplin-esque slapstick way.
But there is a sinister aspect – this dismissal of ‘savage’ races as unquestionably cannibals was useful not just for mission fund-raising but also as a pretext for the invasion, conversion, subjugation and often extermination of the indigenous peoples of the lands that Europeans wanted to exploit. The uncritical acceptance by Western audiences of this image of the native as cannibal construed colonised peoples as racially degenerate, and made the appalling atrocities of colonialism somehow less bothersome, particularly to its beneficiaries.
This Youtube link below is actually not a trailer, but the complete movie.
The Cannibal Guy 