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Beyond the Gates of Splendor Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some violent content and thematic elements) Genre: Documentary by Every Tribe Entertainment DVD release: October 04, 2005 Directed by: Jim Hanon Runtime: 1 hour 36 minutes Cast: Steve Saint (Himself), Dayumae (Herself), Elisabeth Elliot Gren (Herself), Mincaye (Himself) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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The myth of the noble savage lives on in the popular imagination. This myth holds, of course, that indigenous tribespeople live in harmony with nature and with one another. A corollary, promoted by some anthropologists, says that the pristine cultures of such remote people groups should remain undisturbed by modernity—and especially by missionaries, who are seen as meddling cultural imperialists.

If this wishful fairytale is important to you, don't watch Beyond the Gates of Splendor, newly released on DVD. This documentary, telling the true story of five American missionaries murdered on a remote sandbar in Ecuador half a century ago, explodes the myth of the noble savage. But it doesn't stop there, showing through interviews with the five widows, two anthropologists, and numerous Waodani Indians the spiritual and social transformation of a murderous "stone age" tribe.

Steve Saint, son of one of the martyrs, narrates the documentary

The film begins not with the missionaries, whose plight captured a shocked nation's attention through stunning coverage in Life magazine, but with the indigenous Waodani people, known derisively as the "Auca," which (loosely translated) means "naked savages." This small but feared group unwittingly did its best to live up (or down) to the stereotype.

At the time, the tribespeople killed not only hapless outsiders who crossed their territory, but one another, with a ferocity worse than anything seen in the slums of Chicago or Los Angeles. Beyond the Gates of Splendor, while not gory, relentlessly conveys through interviews with tribe members the pitiless culture of the Waodani, who would kill each other for what we might call the most insignificant slights. An estimated six in every ten adult deaths were homicides.

The documentary is noticeably short on evangelical clichés. In it, anthropologists Clayton and Carol Robarchek state that the Waodanis' main problem was not a scarcity of natural resources leading to vicious competition, but a dysfunctional culture that valued egalitarianism and autonomy to their logical conclusions. These uncomfortably familiar values to Americans, good when balanced by others such as mercy and by adequate social structures to adjudicate between competing claims, were a recipe for self-inflicted genocide among the Waodani, for whom blood feuds and sudden murder had been a way of life for at least five generations.

Jim Elliot was one of the five martyred men

By the time the missionaries showed up, the Waodani were in danger of extinction from within and a rapacious form of capitalism from without. The documentary then turns to the missionaries, tracing their academic careers, their marriages, and the decisions that brought them to the Amazon Basin. It mixes fresh comments (but occasionally confusingly) from the missionary wives with old footage from the early years to bring these martyrs to life in a way that books and yellowed newspaper clippings simply cannot. The contrast between the idealistic, smiling American missionaries, who looked as if they just stepped off the set of Happy Days in the flower of their youth, and the pitiless and hunted faces of the Waodani is striking.

Then the documentary, based on widow Elisabeth Elliot's classic account, Through Gates of Splendor, moves inexorably but tastefully to the slaughter of missionaries Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming. Their grisly deaths are conveyed mostly through suggestion and interview, but viewers will see some corpses from a distance in the old footage.

Interestingly, Beyond the Gates clarifies for viewers who have only a hazy memory of the fatal encounter of January 8, 1956, why the Indians speared the missionaries to death. The day before, after numerous flights over Waodani territory, pilot Nate Saint secretly flew the five men in a small plane to the remote sandbar, where they made what seemed to be friendly contact with the locals, whose language was mostly incomprehensible to them. One of the Waodani, a man the missionaries called "George," would play a big role in their murders the next day. While the missionaries for some reason carried guns, they didn't intend to use them in self-defense, saying that they were ready to die, but the Waodani weren't. (This is about a close to a clear gospel presentation as the film gets.)

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Before recently, Mart Green had never been in a movie theater, but he's the driving force behind two new films about the 1956 missionary martyrs in Ecuador—and the tribe that killed them.