Born Free

Even though it's the Independence Day holiday in the United States, this being a Saturday TCM is continuing with the Two for One programming in prime time. Tonight's guest is songwriter Diane Warren, and the first of her selections is Born Free, at 8:00 PM.

Born Free is one of those movies where you probably know the basic plot synopsis already. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot more going on in the movie beyond a basic synopsis. In the 1950s in what is now Kenya, George Adamson (Bill Travers) works as a game warden working to keep the national parks safe from poaching and keeping the locals from being harmed by wildlife rampagaing outside the parks. He lives in one of those well-appointed lodge-type houses together with his wife Joy (Travers' real-life wife Virginia McKenna) and a bunch of people working together with the responsible department for wildlife management.

One day out on patrol, George and some of his crew are attacked by a lioness and are forced to shoot in self-defence. Unfortunately, they discover the reason the lioness attacked was because she was a mama lioness defending their three cubs. It would be inhumane to shoot the cubs, so they take the cubs back to the lodge and start caring for them in the expectation that one or more zoos are going to come along to take the cubs when the time comes.

Everybody becomes attached to the cubs, whom Joy has named, with Joy becoming most attached of all. And then a zoo does come, but can only take two of the cubs. So the Adamsons keep the youngest and smallest cub, named Elsa, and continue to raise it. Elsa is relatively tame, but the freedom that the Adamsons give Elsa is the sort of thing that's bound to cause problems of mistaken identity. Worse, Elsa's lack of interest in hunting the other wild animals is going to disrupt the local balance of nature such that the wild animals can predate against the villagers.

After one such incident where Elsa more or less incites an elephant stampede, the government really starts to tighten the screws on the Adamsons giving Elsa over to a zoo. That, and there's policy that George is supposed to take a mandatory sabbatical away from his current posting. The fact that he's already survived a bout of malaria is another indication that the government policy might in fact be the right one. But in any case, it puts a pretty hard deadline on the question of what to do with Elsa.

Joy is horrified at the idea of Elsa in a zoo, so she comes up with the crazy idea that Elsa can be taught to hunt in the wild, and dammit, she and George are going to do just that so that Elsa can be integrated into a tribe. This is pretty much what the entire final third of the movie deals with.

Born Free is, as you probably know, based on a true story, with the book and movie coming out before the end of the Adamsons' story, which doesn't quite have a happy ending. The movie was filmed on location, which is a big plus, as the cinematography is mostly quite lovely apart from a few insert shots of wildlife on stampede. As for the story, a lot of people have called Born Free a family movie, a designation with which I'd largely agree. But at the same time, the story feels like one of those things that's clearly simplified like a young person's guide to history. Some people will find the story in Born Free to be a bit too pat and simple, although those people will probably not be children. Well, that is the children who can handle the fact that there are predator and prey animals and that this is shown about as explicitly as one could do in a mainstream movie of the 1960s.