Movie Thoughts: Born Free (1966)

• Released: June 22, 1966
  
• Directed by: James Hill, Tom McGowan 
• Running time: 1 h 35 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

Based on a true story, this movie tells the tale of Elsa, a young lion cub who is taken in by a husband and wife and eventually successfully re-introduced into the wild, where she would go on to have a pride of her own.

My Thoughts

This movie I watched because it's somewhat adjacent to the famous story of Christian the lion, a pet lion from London who would later be "rewilded" by the Adamsons in real life. This movie, while fictionalizing events, tells the story of Joy and George Adamson as they try to set free their own lioness, Elsa, which did really happen prior to Christian's story.

The movie itself, however, I don't care too much about. It's decent but honestly I preferred watching the documentaries about Christian compared to this fictionalized version of events regarding Elsa. It's a decent and heartwarming story, but at the same time deviates a lot from real life. It portrays George and Joy as a happy couple, when in real life they went so far as to spent the final years of their lives apart. Joy also treats her workers very well in this movie, when in real life she was a bully to the point it may have been part of the reason she was eventually murdered. Elsa's story also doesn't end happily, with her dying of Babesiosis in the wild.

The acting and writing in the movie were all decent and they got the lions to behave pretty well, but overall it's just not a very great movie or anything. I'm not too fond of the changes framing this as an inspirational story about two great lovers successfully rewilding a lioness. While Elsa did live in the wild for a while, she died years before this movie was made. If this fact had been included in the movie, it could've been a more thought-provoking tale about the ethics of both keeping exotic pets and releasing a captive-reared animal into the wild. Neither are exactly great.

Other than that, I don't really have anything to remark on in this movie. It feels bland and forgettable. The only scene that stuck in my head is where they couldn't get any of the lionesses playing Elsa to lay still and pretend to sleep, so they just lay a taxidermied lion in a sleeping pose instead. Looked kinda funny, especially when it was obviously a dead animal with some snoring effects played over it.