An Elephant Called Slowly
Dir: James Hill
1970
***
An Elephant Called Slowly follows on from Born Free and Ring of Bright Water but not as a mostly fictitious film, rather husband and wife team Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna playing themselves in a not quite factual sort of documentary. The script is awful as is much of the humour. Indeed, the bits with the humans in it aren't worth watching, it's the animals that make the film watchable. Once you get over the odd structure of the film and the humans have stopped being stupid the film turns into an informative and quite hypnotic nature film. Highlight are the baby Elephants, Orphaned Rhinos eating lollipops and cuddly Lions. I have to say though, for life-long conservationists they spend an awful lot of the film plundering and polluting the land in their big Land Rover.