Sabu!

Sabu, born Selar Shaik, was a maharaja's young elephant driver when he was cast as the lead in the 1937 adventure drama Elephant Boy—based on Rudyard Kipling's short story “Toomai of the Elephants”—produced by Alexander Korda and co-directed by his brother, Zoltan Korda, along with pioneering documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, who shot all the location footage. The casting was perfect, with the 12-year-old Sabu riding and clambering over the full-sized pachyderm with effortless ease, displaying an exotic beauty, authenticity, and unselfconscious screen charisma that would make him a star. This boxed set features Elephant Boy and two of the other films Sabu made for the Kordas (the fourth, 1940's The Thief of Bagdad, is available separately from Criterion). In The Drum (1938), Sabu plays a young prince protected by the British colonial forces in India, while Jungle Book (1942) is a glorious Technicolor fantasy with the now-adult Sabu—a confident and acrobatic movie star—portraying the grown orphan Mowgli, who speaks with the animals in the wild. The first two films are well-mounted and exciting, although their devotion to British colonial rule in India comes across as terribly dated. Jungle Book, however, is a folk tale come to life—a visual delight sporting grand imagery, with real leopards, tigers, bears, and other creatures (the Indian landscape was actually re-created in California, where Sabu swings from the vines like Tarzan). This family-friendly boxed set of classics from a bygone era is a welcome addition to Criterion's Eclipse line, and features film notes by cinema historian Michael Koresky. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)