Sabu gives fantasy adventures an unforced, physically assured young presence. We value the ease of his acting; the frustration is how often he was asked to play another version of the same resourceful boy.
Fi1m perspective
Sabu looks comfortable in the jungle, and he does not seem to be working hard to persuade us of it. That physical ease is a substantial acting gift in films built around youthful resourcefulness, animals and adventure. We value the directness, though the repeated casting can make it harder to distinguish the actor's limits from those of the parts. Black Narcissus (1947), with Sabu as the Young General, is the film we would start with: a strong ensemble gives that ease a less familiar setting.
The early sequence runs from Toomai in Elephant Boy (1937), cast by Robert Flaherty, through Prince Azim in The Drum (1938) to Abu in The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Producer Alexander Korda put him under a long-term contract, and the adventures made youthful resourcefulness his regular business. By Jungle Book (1942), in which he plays Mowgli, the combination of boyish charm and ease around animals was firmly established. These parts reward an actor who can make fantastic circumstances seem ordinary enough to get on with.
Black Narcissus gives us a useful chance to see him without making the whole film a test of his appeal. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger place the Young General within their drama of religious repression, where his unforced presence suits the larger ensemble. We were unsettled by the film's colour and music, which make the women's distress difficult to keep at a comfortable distance. Its Himalayan setting sometimes invites an outsider's simplifications, a reservation worth keeping in view when considering an actor so often cast in exotic fantasies.
His return to Britain also included The End of the River (1947), following Hollywood films opposite Maria Montez. The later work was largely confined to undistinguished European and Hollywood productions, with the familiar exotic parts still restricting what he could do. His naturalness is worth watching, but it cannot make every repetition interesting. Nor does the repetition give us much evidence of what a less cautious casting director might have found. Follow Black Narcissus with The Thief of Bagdad, and leave the completism until later.
Biography
Sabu, also credited as Sabu Dastagir or Selar Sabu, was an Indian-born actor who worked primarily in Britain and the United States. He was born on 27 January 1924 in Karapur, Mysore, in the Kingdom of Mysore, British India, and died on 2 December 1963.
Discovered by Robert Flaherty, he made his film debut in Elephant Boy (1937). He is known for roles including Abu in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Mowgli in Jungle Book (1942), Ali Ben Ali in Arabian Nights (1942), and The Young General in Black Narcissus (1947). He became a United States citizen in 1944 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
