Louisiana Story

Another of my recent DVR watchings was the quasi-documentary Louisiana Story.

Joseph Boudreaux plays The Boy, a kid of about 11 who doesn't seem to go to school at all, living with his parents (Lionel Le Blanc and Mrs. E. Bienvenu) on a bayou in southern Lousiana, hunting and fishing to help support the family. One day, he hears some sort of industrial stuff going on.

It turns out that Dad has signed a lease with one of the oil wildcatters to lease out a small portion of their property to try drilling for oil. The oil company's activities, moving in the equipment by boat, threaten to tip over The Boy's small flatboat in their wake, but as the derrick gets built, The Boy becomes fascinated by it as a lot of boys get fascinated by industrial machinery.

As the drilling goes on, the oil rig workers actually let The Boy hang out on their derrick, which frankly seemed incredibly dangerous to me what with all the moving parts threatening to impale, decapitate, or strangle people. (Not quite related, but in The Enemy Below which I reviewed a few weeks back, the moving equipment on the deck of the destroyer actually does injure one of the sailors and necessitate the amputation of several fingers.) The workers, for their part, treat The Boy as a sort of mascot.

But the drilling isn't so straightforward, as the rig first blows rather than gushing thanks to a buildup of pressure. The workers eventually plug it and come back, becoming successful and making the family a little less poor thanks to the royalties they're going to get.

Louisiana Story has an interesting provenance. Standard Oil funded the production, obviously trying to create either propaganda or promotion depending on your point of view about the good work that oil drilling was doing in producing energy for a still-growing country. They hired director Robert Flaherty, who had made not-particularly-true documentaries like Nanook of the North, to film the story. Since Flaherty introduces the main actors silent film style where it was more common to identify a character and the actor portraying that character in intertitles, it seemed more clear to me that this was trying to be a fictional story told in documentary style and not an actual documentary.

As for the movie, it's visually quite good, thanks to Flaherty's knack for composition and the cinematography by Richard Leacock. There's not much to the story, and thankfully little dialogue, as Flahery hired non-professionals for the three family members (and I'm guessing Standard Oil employees for the oil rig workers). Most of the story is told through the visuals, and that works quite well here. Filming was done on location, in a bayou just south of New Iberia, LA (home of McIlhenny tabasco sauce so you might have seen the name), which is roughly halfway between New Orleans and the Texas border.

Alpha Video released a DVD some years back, although everything I've read says that's an old print that is quite bad compared to the restoration print that TCM showed. There's also a streaming copy at Amazon Prime Video, but I don't know about the copy of that print. Amazon's reviews mix up various formats and releases -- if there are multiple DVD releases it'll be tough to figure out which one the reviewer is reviewing. But at least they mention the format, and the reviews all seem to be for the DVD and not for Prime Video.

I can certainly recommend Louisiana Story, but be aware that you might get a crappy print.