The Criterion Collection

Sabu didn’t have to learn how to handle a pachyderm to play the lead role in Elephant Boy. When he was discovered during location scouting for the film, he was a mahout (elephant handler) for the maharaja of the kingdom of Mysore.

Documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) pitched to producer Alexander Korda a movie about the relationship between a Mexican boy and a bull. Korda changed the bull to an elephant, and the film became Elephant Boy, based on his favorite Rudyard Kipling story, “Toomai of the Elephants.”

When he made Elephant Boy, Sabu spoke only Urdu and had to learn his lines phonetically. The producers added Sabu’s film-opening monologue, shot later in London, to show how far the boy had come in his study of English.

Shortly after Sabu’s arrival in England, director Zoltán Korda gave the boy a mini racing automobile (or midget car), which he would drive around the Denham Studios lot.

Alexander Korda tried to legally adopt Sabu, but his application was rejected by the British government (for reasons that are unclear).

RKO Studios asked to borrow Sabu from the Kordas for the title role in the 1939 Kipling adaptation Gunga Din, but Alexander Korda refused. Sam Jaffe, ultimately cast in the role, later said he modeled his performance on Sabu’s mannerisms.

It was Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, then working as a Hollywood screenwriter, who suggested to Alexander Korda that he adapt Kipling’s Jungle Book into a film.

During the filming of Jungle Book, the black panther cast as Bagheera grabbed a member of the prop crew and carried him up a tree. Second unit director André De Toth (later to direct House of Wax) then used a slab of meat to distract the feline while the crew member dropped to the ground and animal trainer Louis Roth carried him to safety.

Author Rumer Godden was unhappy with Michael Powell’s selection of Sabu to play a refined Indian general in his adaptation of her Black Narcissus, calling the actor a “thickset, snub-nosed South Indian coolie boy.”

In his early twenties, Sabu accepted an offer to perform in an elaborate elephant routine with the Harringay Circus in London.

Michael Koresky is staff writer at the Criterion Collection.