Louisiana Story

1948 fake documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A boy and his pet raccoon ward off alligators on an otherwise idyllic Louisiana bayou. Things change when an oil company rolls in and sets up its equipment.

Note: There were better poster choices than the one I picked. That makes Louisiana Story look like it could be a love story between a boy and his raccoon, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea. It's not.

A thrill-packed, fun-packed masterpiece from Nanook of the North director Robert Flaherty, a guy who, rather than document reality, manufactured his own artificial realities. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this one is a real mix of positives and negatives. On the one hand, the narrative part of this narrative documentary is intriguing, and just like in Nanook, Flaherty's filmed in a location that 1940s audiences would find oddly exotic. The black and white bayou is shot beautifully, and I really liked watching the innards of the oil derrick. I also enjoyed watching the peaceful picturesque existence of The Boy (played by Joseph Boudreaux but apparently Alexander Napolean Ulysses Latour in the film) as he sloshed along fishing and talking with his pet raccoon. Boudreaux, like the rest of the ragin' Cajuns in the movie, is a non-actor. Although that lends a bit of authenticity to the proceedings, it also is one of the main problems with the movie. Whenever the characters interact with each other, it seems so staged and unnatural and kind of annoying. This would have been a lot more effective as a silent film. I imagine that Nanook would been pretty goofy if he was filmed in an era where we could hear him talk, too. The part of the movie that makes it "thrill-packed" enough to let them use those words for the poster above involves a heart-stopping battle with an alligator. Or crocodile. Whatever lives down there. Flaherty uses some exciting movie music and alternating shots of the menacing alligator and the boy swinging a stick. The scene goes on and on, and it's pretty silly, even for the 1940s. Speaking of the exciting movie music, composer Virgil Thomson actually won a Pulitzer Prize for the work. I'm not Joseph Pulitzer (or Crocodile Pulitzer or whoever that award is named after), but I actually hated the music. It was just too much, clashing with the simple scenes of the boy in his boat. I would have preferred some simple Cajun music. Or even some complicated Cajun music. Or some crocodile music, simple or complicated.