Jungle Goddess (1948)

Reviewed on Sep 26, 2007 under Action-suspense |

Directed by Robert Edwards
Written by Jo Pagano
Starring
- George Reeves
- Ralph Byrd
- Wanda McKay
- Armida
- Smoki Whitfield

Oh well, you can’t win them all. This is the other B-movie in which George Reeves and Ralph Byrd co-starred in 1948 for Scree Guild Productions (the first one I reviewed was Thunder in the Pines). I don’t know which of the two was shot first, or released first, and for my purposes it really doesn’t matter; they’re effectively simultaneous products of a movie factory cranking out the lower half of double bills. Both are slight tales, with casts bound to soundstages standing in for their exotic locales, with generous helpings of stock footage broadening the visuals. But while Thunder in the Pines bounces along on Reeves’ good-natured demeanor and Byrd’s goofy charm, Jungle Goddess allows neither actor to play to his strengths, and simply thuds.

“I’m tired of this dress-up game. When do I get to wear a leotard?”

Byrd and Reeves are Bob and Mike, senior and junior partners respectively in a one-plane air transport company somewhere in one of the more white-friendly areas of Africa. As per their standard personas, Mike is level-headed and respectable, while Bob is both a heel and a dreamer. The latter quality is excited when the newspapers announce the death of millionaire Vanderhorn, whose daughter disappeared in a plane wreck six years ago. Now the executor of the will is offering a £5000 reward for her recovery, dead or alive. No conclusive search had been conducted earlier because of the war, now just barely over, and Bob figures they’ve got as good a chance as anyone to find some sign of the wreckage and claim the reward. And because he’s two-thirds owner of their joint plane, Mike has to agree.

A flight in a stock footage plane (or alternately, a model plane with visible strings) over stock footage Africa reveals many wonderful sights though Bob’s binoculars: Stock footage birds! Stock footage elephants! Stock footage giraffes! Stock footage rhinos! Stock footage zebras! And eventually, a broken model plane.

“Nooo!! We don’t want ot be in your stupid movie!”

As they swoop over to find a landing place, it’s easy to see why no previous searcher found the crash site, as suddenly the downed plane in stock footage beneath them looks very different than the model plane we just saw, or than the jungle set the two white men soon find themselves stumbling through. In short order (after passing stock footage lions, elephants,snakes and leopards), they’re found by natives of a tribe that has never seen a white man before. Unfortunately, Bob ruins the chances of harmonious co-existence by shooting dead the first warrior that jumps out at him, and they are immediately taken back to the village.

I said this tribe had never seen a white man, but the same is not true for white women, for Greta Vanderhorn (Wanda McKay) is here, hale and hearty, and revered by the whole tribe as their “white goddess.” Because of the laws of the tribe (and because Bob immediately proves himself to be an ass who can’t stand to see a woman get uppity, even in the middle of the jungle), she holds a trial off-screen that condemns Bob to death on the next full moon, in eight days; Mike will be free to go once the sentence is carried out.

“Bring — cue card — CLOSER!”

Of course, that’s mostly a ruse. Once Greta gets Mike alone, she drops the stilted demeanor and… continues in another stilted demeanor. The best I can say about Wanda McKay’s performance as Greta is that she recites her lines without mispronouncing any of the words. As an unfair contrast, her native galpal/servant Wanami (Armida) is bubbly and energetic and much more fun to watch; compensating for that, possibly, is the fact that there’s no way in hell that Mexican actress Armida could ever be believed as an African, even with much squinting and willing suspension of disbelief.

Anyway. Greta’s eager to return to civilization, and plans to use the eight-day window to plan a good exit strategy with Mike. Naturally, the two fall in love. I can tell mostly because, when Greta gives the fifteen-minute story of how she got where she is (which, despite the emphasis placed her trying to get home to Johannesberg because the war was starting, occured simply because the plane fell out of the sky), he doesn’t tell her to tighten it up. Maybe he was as interested in hearing about the woman sitting next to her and the pilots as she was in telling it. I’m glad somebody was.

“But your hair is lighter! You MUST have divine powers!”

Everything would go smoothly except that Bob, confined to a guarded hut, is too stupid and mistrustful and selfish to trust that Mike and Greta have a plan for getting them all out. He descends quickly in the audience’s estimation; not only does he question the idea that Greta actually cares he killed a member of the tribe, but he later proposes to Mike that they let Greta get killed in the escape and only take back a token to claim the reward. It should be no surprise, then, that their simple and neat escape plan is punctuated by a huge fistfight between Bob and Mike (or rather, between George Reeves’ and Ralph Byrd’s stunt doubles), another shot native, and a flight into the jungle which looks a lot more like a long, slow trek. (The plane’s only a mile away. Bob’s a professional navigator. How long should it take them to get there, even with Greta’s dumbass twisted ankle slowing them down further? Long enough that both they and their pursuers have to stop and camp for the night, that’s how long.)
In fact, “long, slow trek” describes the entire movie. Despite the economical running time, the whole movie is slack of tension, unspooling to contractual lengths without ever getting a viewer’s heart pumping. Part of the production philosophy appears to have been that audiences would have gotten their limit of drama and suspense in the first feature of the double bill, and that therefore this B-movie should forego such considerations. Almost every opportunity for tension is sidestepped or toned down, from Greta’s precarious position as goddess (until and unless the tribe discovers her not to be one) to Mike and Bob’s growing rift, to what should have been a mad dash for the plane at the end (which instead turns into Bob stumbling slowly through the jungle set, randomly firing his gun out-of-frame at stock footage predators, and a wildly out-of-place stock footage orangutan).

Sometimes a revolver is just a revolver. Sometimes. But not now.

You know how people usually get hailed as deities in these things, right? They show up when the chief’s offspring is injured, and “miraculously” heal him with their Western skills. Here, all the pieces are in place — Greta pointedly mentions that she’s hoping to use her first-aid training as a nurse in the war, and the tribal chief meets her with supplications when his warriors first find her wandering in the jungle. And yet she doesn’t actually DO anything to help the chief’s son; according to her, the boy got well on his own soon after she arrived, so they attributed his recovery to her, and presto! she’s a goddess. Honestly, why even bother setting up the angle if you’re just going to wander away from it before the payoff? Even obligatories like the jealousy of the tribe’s witch doctor (Smoki Whitfield) for Greta — and was that already such an established trope in 1948 that the filmmakers could sketch it in and assume the audience would fill in the blanks? — is treated in a ho-hum manner. The whole thing is an exercise in how not to make an exciting action-adventure movie.

You’d like to think — or I’d like to, anyway — that just about any semi-competent denizen of Hollywood could have made a better jungle adventure with an arboreal soundstage, a pair of professional leads, two dozen African-American extras, and a heaping helping of stock footage.