Born Free (film)
| Born Free | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | James Hill |
| Produced by |
Sam Jaffe Paul Radin |
| Screenplay by | Lester Cole |
| Based on |
Born Free by Joy Adamson |
| Starring |
Virginia McKenna Bill Travers |
| Music by | John Barry |
| Cinematography | Kenneth Talbot |
| Edited by | Don Deacon |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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95 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $2 million |
| Box office | $3.6 million (est. US/ Canada rentals) |
Born Free is a 1966 British drama film starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as Joy and George Adamson, a real-life couple who raised Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood, and released her into the wilderness of Kenya. The movie was produced by Open Road Films Ltd. and Columbia Pictures. The screenplay, written by blacklisted Hollywood writer Lester Cole (under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley"), was based upon Joy Adamson's 1960 non-fiction book Born Free. The film was directed by James Hill and produced by Sam Jaffe and Paul Radin. Born Free, and its musical score by John Barry, won numerous awards.
When George Adamson is forced to kill a lion, after the lion scares a native villager, and then George kills a lioness out of self-defense, he brings home the three orphaned cubs she had been trying to protect. The Adamsons tend to the three orphaned lion cubs to young lionhood, and, when the time comes, the two largest are sent to the Rotterdam Zoo, while Elsa the Lioness (the smallest of the litter) remains with Joy. When Elsa is held responsible for stampeding a herd of elephants through a village, John Kendall, Adamson's boss gives the couple three months to either rehabilitate Elsa to the wild, or send her to a zoo. Joy opposes sending Elsa to a zoo, and spends much time attempting to re-introduce Elsa to the life of a wild lion in a distant reserve. At last, she succeeds, and with mixed feelings and a breaking heart, she returns her friend to the wild. The Adamsons then depart for their home in England; a year later they return to Kenya for a week, hoping to find Elsa. They do, and happily discover she hasn't forgotten them and is the mother of three cubs. The Adamsons made an agreement not to handle the cubs, in contrast to the way they did with Elsa.
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Wikipedia