PG | 1 h 35 min | Drama, Adventure | 1966
You could say that this story about lions is a very human story, because it’s told with traits you’d hardly expect in lion country. It’s told like a fairytale, to be savored by children and adults. It’s told with respect for the unspoken, but indisputable, dignity of wild animals. It’s told with humor and, above all, with a sensitivity that’s alive to the sacred uniqueness of each animal.
Stationed in 1950s’ Kenya, wildlife warden George Adamson and wife Joy (played by real-life showbiz couple Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna) shelter a lion cub after George is forced to put down her man-eating parents. Charmed by her playfulness, the couple impulsively take the cub and her siblings into their care, without realizing what they’re getting themselves (and the cub) into.
As they name her Elsa and nurse her to adulthood (her siblings end up in zoos), she teaches them hard lessons about the wild and its untamable essence. Alongside the wonder of rearing her, comes the pain of seeing her domesticated, and then struggling to readjust to the wild.
Attached as they are to her, the couple face a choice: Should Elsa also end up in a zoo where bars and barricades will doubtlessly kill her free spirit? Or should she return to the wild, where her still kittenish nature might turn her into prey before she regains her stature as predator?
Filming in the Wild
Many modern-day crews filming in the wild typically overuse slow motion, frenetic cuts, agitated zoom-in-outs, souped up soundtracks, and fevered voiceovers to sensationalize mundane animal activity: predators walking or stalking, prey balking. With none of these gimmicks and George Adamson on the set as consultant, the cast, director, screenwriter, editor, and cinematographer of “Born Free” bring out the hilarity (and horror) of raising a lion, as a pet. For all their power and cunning, animals caught in human-like situations, such as a sudden scare, betray a childlike innocence and fragility.
There’s fabulous footage of lion cubs playing with bedsheets, pawing each other in a basket, goofing around with sofa cushions, tearing down a clothesline, or being startled by a garden-sprinkler fizzing to life. There’s astounding footage of a grown Elsa, frolicking with the Adamsons in ocean waves, playing ball on a beach, stirring up an elephant stampede, being headbutted by a wandering warthog, and stopping Joy from strolling into a cobra, coiled to strike in tall grass.
Extreme wide shots show the sprawling Kenyan plains teeming with wildlife (wildebeest, giraffe, zebra, bison, rhino). John Barry’s score lends majesty to the storytelling, every scene a riot of raging color, movement, hot breath, and dust.
Animal handlers used not one, but several cubs and grown lions to capture a range of moods, from anticipation, delight and contentment to boredom, frustration, and fury. They replaced trained with relatively untrained lions to secure the unschooled feel that the story requires, while the crew stayed safely behind wire cages.
The film so moved the actors that they turned conservationists through their “Born Free Foundation,” devoting their lives to ensuring that wild animals stayed wild, and discouraging the rearing of animals in captivity. Their point? Freedom’s so essential to the wild, that any creature caged, no matter how roomily, ceases to be itself; captivity robs it of its very nature.
In interviews, McKenna has said that it’s hard to empathize with animals if you see them as a bland, blurred collective: a pride, a herd, a horde. But interact with an animal as an individual, at any depth beyond the superficial, and you can’t bear to see it suffer. As Joy in the film, she says of the cubs, “Even as babies, each had a different character.”
In a tragic, sobering, twist, the actors lived to old age, dying of natural causes, but the Adamsons, so faithful to saving lives, were in, separate random instances, both murdered. Makes you wonder, sometimes, doesn’t it? Who’s wild?
