New Picture

Kon-Tiki (RKO Radio) is the documentary record of a true adventure that even Hollywood might hesitate to offer as fiction: the epic 4,300-mile voyage of six men from Peru to Polynesia on a rope-lashed raft of balsa logs. Technically almost as amateurish as home movies, the film is no less engrossing than the best-selling account (TIME, Sept. 18) of the Scandinavian crew's proof-by-experience that winds, currents and primitive craft may have enabled ancient Peruvians to float colonizing expeditions to the South Pacific.

Thor Heyerdahl and his companions shot the bulk of their movie with a 16-mm. hand camera, working 1 1/2 feet above sea level on the pitching, wave-swept deck, and from an inflated rubber dinghy which once threatened to part company with the raft. The task of keeping afloat and alive cheated them of a chance to film the 101-day expedition's best cinematic material: two storms and the wreck of the raft on a Polynesian barrier reef.

Despite these handicaps--and partly because of them--the picture realistically catches the heave and shudder of the little craft, the vastness of the lonely Pacific, the hugeness of the risk. It is full of details of the self-styled ancient mariners' ingenious adaptation to life in midocean. They find substitutes for ink and drinking water in the innards of strange sea creatures; they rig up a crude automatic pilot and a net enabling them to inspect the clutter of marine life on the bottom of the raft. They swim for recreation, fend off sharks for survival, watch in suspense while whales--and a monstrous whale shark--plunge playfully beneath them.

Ethnologist Heyerdahl explains the theory behind the expedition and pieces the story together in narration touched with modesty, quaint academic humor and a rich Norwegian accent. But Kon-Tiki speaks for itself as a rare adventure in courage, resourcefulness and the spirit of inquiry.

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