Louisiana Story and Separation Between Humans and the Natural World: Reviewers' Take

 

Contemporaneous reviews of the film support the claim that the film’s source of financing does not detract from its success as a work of art. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times asserts that the film “is not a submissive nod” to technology; yet, “it is recognition that the machine can be a useful friend of man, no more rapacious, in some way, than primitive man or nature themselves.” Crowther declares the scenes highlighting the oil drilling operation “the most powerful and truly eloquent phases” of Louisiana Story. Despite the sympathetic portrayal of the oil drillers, however, Crowther doubts money supplied by Standard Oil encouraged Flaherty’s perspective. Instead, Crowther asserts, “the ring of sincerity is clear in Flaherty’s film.” 

Variety calls the film “a documentary-type story told almost purely in camera terms.” The Variety review mentions that Standard Oil of New Jersey funded the production only in passing, asserting instead that Louisiana Story “has a slender, appealing story, moments of agonizing suspense, vivid atmosphere and superlative photography.” Instead of valorizing either the Cajuns or the oil drillers, the review suggests that “there are no real heroes or villains” in the film. According to Variety, “the simple Cajun family is friendly, and the oil-drilling crew is pleasant and likable.” The stylistic choices deserve the most kudos, the review asserts, with “long sequences being told by the camera, with eloquent sound effects and Virgil Thomson’s expressive music in the background” rather than through concentrated dialogue-driven scenes. 

None of these contemporaneous reviews suggest that financing by Standard Oil in any way skewed the rhetoric of Louisiana Story, even though the offshore drilling on display here is shown from the perspective of a Cajun boy. Instead, the reviews and biographical overviews of the film agree with and substantiate the message on display in the film: offshore oil drilling, even in a fragile bayou, will have no affect on the pristine wild nature around a well or on the innocent Cajuns who are enriched by mineral rights contracts and lease payments received from the drilling company, a company that enters the bayou and then all but disappears by the end of the film.