The Eskimo

Picture, if you can, a howling monochrome tundra where every cliché ever peddled by Paramount or First National is lashed by an arctic gale of derision: here trudges Edgar Kennedy’s ‘Great White Doofus,’ a pith-helmeted explorer whose moustache droops with more frost than conviction, determined to annex the North Pole for the greater glory of his own ego. Sybil Seely, draped in fox furs that look suspiciously like last night’s feather boas, sashays after him as a flapper lost in the wrong decade, her Charleston kicks sending avalanches of lampoon across the ice. Clyde Cook skitters sideways like a crab on skates, a klutzy trapper who mistakes every polar bear for a dance partner. Together they collide with cardboard igloos, rubber walruses, and a sled dog who is clearly a terrier in wolf’s clothing, while intertitles hurl malapropisms hotter than the coffee they’re too frozen to drink. The film stitches every trope—starving prospectors, fur-clad vamp, ethnographic hokum—into a crazy quilt of slapstick, then yanks the thread until the whole parka of pomposity unravels. The result is a kinetic cartoon carved from live-action ice, a feature-length raspberry blown at the solemn snow-sagas that once sold parkas to palm-frond audiences.