Island of the Blue Dolphins (1964)

This is less about the actual movie, and more about the actual events that inspired the story.

I was amazed to find out that Island of the Blue Dolphin was made in to a movie, even more so, that the movie was made in 1964, so I have gone 50 years without hearing about this movie.

I read this book as a child, and I am pretty sure I was assigned to read it in school.  At the time, I didn't have a great interest in native Americans and I kind of wondered why I was reading that story.  It seemed odd, as she was trapped on the island all alone, and I expected little would happen over the course of the story, so I was waiting for her to be rescued the whole time.

The movie is a faithful adaption of the novel, as far as I remember.  I read that the actress who played Karana, Celia Kaye,  was awarded for being an upcoming actress, but it seems that her career never took off.

One thing that bothers me about this story, is that after reading up on it, while it is based on a real story, it is much like the story The Perfect Storm (the movie, not the book) where no one knew what took place at all, so the story was just a made up account of events that could have taken place.

Sadly, I read that the woman who was stranded on that island for 18 years, died of dysentery 7 weeks after being rescued.  At the time she was rescued there was no one left who could speak her language, so on one was even able to find out what her real name was.  I am kind of appalled that she died of dysentery, as it seems like the cure to that affliction is just to drink more fluids.  While other factors come into play with dysentery, it merely exists in severely impoverished counties these days.

One other thing is that after checking the location of the island she was trapped on, it is merely 72 miles from Los Angeles.  When I read the book, I though she was trapped on an island hundreds of miles from shore, it turns out, she was close enough the she could have potentially paddled in her canoe to the mainland (though I don't think she was aware of the location, or perhaps the existence of the mainland.

I was also a bit surprised to hear that the hunters were hunting otters, as I didn't recall that from the book.  I know there was a huge otter massacre around the time of these events, which nearly drove the otters into extinction, but I didn't know that at the time I read the book.

Stranger still, not a single otter appears in this film.

Also, I read that some one had gone back to the island and found some artifacts that were mostly likely used by the woman, though a number of those items were lost in the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906.  And her cormorant cape, which was sent to the vatican, appears to have been lost.