BOOTLEG FILES 953: “Adventure in the Bronx” (1941 Academy Award-nominated short).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: There may be a rights issue holding it up.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: It doesn’t seem likely.
Question: When is a documentary not a documentary? In concept, a documentary is a nonfiction film that captures real life in an unscripted reality. In practice, however, documentaries have often involved staged and scripted sequences. That occurred in Robert Flaherty’s seminal works and it is still occurring in that Nathan Fielder thing now in theaters.
The 1941 short “Adventure in the Bronx” was among the 11 films that were nominated for Best Documentary Short Film when the category launched in the 14th Academy Awards competition. But it shouldn’t have been nominated in that category because this scripted and staged work is not a documentary. Nor should it have been considered for the Oscar category for live-action short films because, quite frankly, it is not a good film.
The eponymous adventure takes place entirely within the Bronx Zoo, which gave the independent Film Associates production company access to its grounds. The film’s protagonist is Sweeney, a small boy who sets out from his Bronx home with his stuffed toy elephant Bumbo on an adventure. During this foray, the child finds a hole in a fence and climbs through it, winding up in the zoo.
But this film’s version of the zoo is highly peculiar in that the boy freely interacts with the animals. He is initially chased by elephants, then encounters an orangutan sitting on a bench, and later feeds a bread roll to a giraffe.
In the course of his zoo rambles, Sweeney loses Bumbo. After a relatively brief search, he locates the toy in an enclosure with a large shoebill. He is initially uncomfortable about retrieving Bumbo with the strange looking bird standing over the toy, but after the animals in the zoo berate him for cowardice he retrieves Bumbo and leaves the zoo just as a security guard is opening the venue’s front gate.
Okay, I need to backpedal for a minute. The animals don’t directly trash talk Sweeney for wanting to abandon Bumbo. Instead, writer and radio personality John Kieran tells us they are unhappy with the boy. Kieran narrates the production, appearing briefly at the beginning and end in the only sound film segments of “Adventure in the Bronx.” Otherwise, the whole film is shot as a silent, with neither Sweeney nor the animals never making a sound while Kieran describes everything that is happening.
I wanted to like “Adventure in the Bronx,” since I am a Bronx native and I have a fondness for anything related to my hometown. But, damn, this is one of the weakest and dullest things ever put on film. Even if you overlook the idiocy of having a child walking around animal enclosures, there is nothing in this work that is even vaguely interesting. Even the zoo animals look bored.
After the film snagged an Oscar nomination, Warner Bros. picked up the theatrical rights and changed the title to “Sweeney Steps Out.” Writer/director Joseph Krumgold would adapt the film into a children’s book with the title “Sweeney’s Adventure.”
Sweeney is played by young Michael O’Connell, who has no other credited roles in his Internet Movie Database entry. He is dressed in overalls and a striped shirt that make him look like a forerunner of Dennis the Menace – and one has to wonder whether Hank Ketcham was aware of Krumgold’s film or book when he created his mischievous comic strip tyke.
Today, “Adventure in the Bronx” is only available in an unlikely format – there is an unauthorized upload to YouTube taken from a faded German-dubbed 16mm film version. YouTube’s subtitle translation feature helps non-German-speaking viewers understand what is going on.
If you’re the type that needs to see every film that was ever nominated for an Oscar, you can cross “Adventure in the Bronx” off you list via the link below. But if you want to see a real documentary short, don’t put this film on your list.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
Listen to Phil Hall’s award-winning podcast “The Online Movie Show with Phil Hall” on SoundCloud and his radio show “Nutmeg Chatter” on WAPJ-FM in Torrington, Connecticut, with a new episode every Sunday. You can also follow his book reviews at The Epoch Times.