Cinema: Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

Island of the Blue Dolphins. She is a legend: a ghostly aboriginal known as the Lost Woman of San Nicolas. She is also a historical fact: an Indian girl, left behind when her tribe abandoned an islet off the California coast, who for almost 18 years (1835-53) subsisted there in solitude. She is furthermore the subject of a 1960 novel by Scott O'Dell. And she is now the heroine of this intelligent and tasteful little film, the very model of what children's pictures ought to be but seldom are.

In the film as in the book, the heroine is a maiden named Karana, the daughter of a Chumash chief. When the chief and most of his warriors are slaughtered by a treacherous fur trader, the discouraged remnant migrates to the mainland. But Karana's little brother misses the boat. "He will die!" Karana screams as she leaps from the ship's dory and strikes out for the shore.

He dies despite her loving care—torn to pieces by a big yellow mongrel trained by the treacherous fur trader. In grief and fury Karana tracks the mongrel down and puts an arrow through him. But the brute, though deeply stricken, hangs onto life; and Karana, though rightfully revenged, begins by pitying and ends by nursing him. By the time he is well, she has come to love her enemy. Together they assail the seasons of their exile cheerfully, and make a life of what might otherwise have merely been a fate.

Blue Dolphins was made by a team (Producer Robert Radnitz, Director James Clark, Scriptwriter Ted Sherdeman) that in recent years has turned out two other children's classics: A Dog of Flanders (1959) and Misty (1961). In all three pictures Radnitz & Co. have provided sentiment without sentimentality and a moral without a lecture. This time they also provide some smashing scenery—the Anchor Bay country of northern California—without too pointedly stopping to stare at it. And they provide two remarkably attractive performers. Celia Kaye, in her first film, makes the most charming Indian maiden since pretty Red Wing. And the actor who plays the mongrel—his name is Junior, and he is the son of the dog who played Old Yeller for Walt Disney—possesses a distinction rare in cine-mutts: he is a dog who is just plain dog.