Jungle, The (1952)

Reviewed on Aug 08, 2007 under Action-suspense |

Produced and directed by William Berke
Written by Carroll Young
Starring
- Rod Cameron
- Cesar Romero
- Marie Windsor
- Sulochana
- M.N. Nambiar

In most stories that center around a journey, the travel is only a framework for the narrative, both to define the time span and to allow the peril to and conflict between the characters to intensify as they approach their destination, if any. In Huckleberry Finn, the river journey supports motifs of a figurative journey from one’s roots, and the fact that one may very well end up where one began, or at least with the same people. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam’s trek to Mordor increases the power of the Ring over Frodo, and intensifies the conflict between Gollum and Sam as reflections or analogues for sides of his own character. (A gross oversimplification, obviously, but a useful one.) In these and hundreds of other cases, the geographic journey is more than simply a journey.

Not in The Jungle. Here, the whole movie’s about traveling to get to a place, and the only thing the story’s really getting at is where it’s getting to (if you see what I’m getting at).

Well, one of these performers playing an Indian is actually an Indian. That’s something, right?

In a contemporary era to the production, i.e. the 1950s, the Princess Sita of India (Marie Windsor, last seen around here in The Silver Star (1955)) comes home as the regent for her father, the monarch, who is undergoing treatment in England. The urgent matter which brings her back to lend a royal presence to a crisis of state is — elephants! It’s India, and there are elephants! Elephants are at random intervals storming out of the jungle and crushing villages! What shall we do?

To be fair, the “elephant crisis” is mostly dangerous because it exacerbates tensions already running through the country, mostly traditionalists up in arms about some of her father’s “progressive” reforms (such as, for instance, allowing a woman to function as regent without any limitations).

Which, I’ll grant you, is not really something that only a blue-blooded princess can determine. In Sita’s and her father’s absence, her minister Rama Singh (Cesar Romero – !), the strong Sikh warrior with whom low-current unconsummated sparks continuously flow, had already done what any sensible Indian would have done: Called on an American! (Hey, it worked in the casting, right?) Renowned hunter Steve Bentley (Rod Cameron, who is apparently who you got when Ronald Reagan was too expensive) has already gone into the jungle once with ten local hunters, hoping to find the main heard for the marauding elephants and find out what’s causing their stampedes. Only Bentley came back alive, with a fantastic story: There are mammoths in the mountains! Giant wooly mammoths!

So spontaneous musical numbers are not a recent development in Indian productions, then.

So Rama Singh has egg on his face, plus one of the dead hunters was his own kid brother, so you know he’s just a seething morass of passion well-controlled under that collected exterior. (Either that, or his payment for the part wasn’t high enough to summon seething morasses of passion.) But since the elephant raids are still going on, and since both Sita and Rama Singh are albe hunters themselves, they decide to lead their own expedition into the back country to find out the truth of the matter. And Bentley elbows himself a place in the expedition, determined to defend his reputation.

So now that you have the setup, I could probably sketch the rest of the movie with lists, thusly:

- Stock footage animal sequences. Every few steps, it seems, there’s some jungle creature worthy of note: Tigers, warthogs, snakes, bears, mongooses (mongeese?)… Given that the party is (cough) composed entirely of natives except for Bentley, the only person really excited by all of this is the film editor. Every once in a while, though, a predator comes on the scene and almost interacts with the human actors. Thrill to the leopard who stalks along unseen in adjoining footage until it suddenly leaps into the frame with a bearer! (Funny how the fearsome jungle cat instantly looks like a stuffed toy when it does that.) Even more commonly, the party stops as two wild animals decide to have an altercation right in their path. Stony-faced actors look on as jungle bouts take place which would lend their names well to kung fu movies: Tiger vs. bear! Cobra vs. mongoose! Leopard vs. warthhog? Lest you think that there’s too much animal cruelty on display in these scenes, remember two things: (1) All such footage was very likely culled from nature documentaries, and (2) in every such case, the battle ends not with death, but with one of the combatants deciding he really didn’t want to fight so much, and scurrying off into the jungle.

Holy moley, I can smell the musk from here.

- Songs and other cultural displays. The bearers they take along, they’re a jovial sort. They burst into song on the train; the burst into song when setting up camp; they burst into song when using woven basket-boats to cross a river. We also get to see plenty of temples and statuary, at least until the expedition passes far enough off the main beat that such displays would be incongruous. It’s not as bad as, say, all those movies set in Paris in which the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe can be see from opposite windows in every room of every home, but there’s enough here to suspect that dollars from the Tourism Board kept this production afloat.

Every once in a while, the cultural displays do intersect with the plot. One of the bearers is the disciple of a traditionalist rabble-rouser who wants the princess dead; after a troupe of travelling entertainers crosses paths with the expedition and puts on a show around the campfire, the disciple pays the troupe’s bear trainer to unleash it in one of the expedition’s tents. (Still muzzled, I should point out.) But most of the time, the songs and dances and whatnot are simply to keep us amused while we’re waiting for the main story to bloody well get on with it.

Which it rarely does. Given that Bentley and Rama Singh are both capable outdoorsy prospective Alpha Males, it’s no wonder that they form sort of a triangle with Princess Sita — not a love triangle, but perhaps a trust triangle, as Bentley holds to his story of mammoths causing the elephant stampedes. But that whole conflict is kept low-key, as is most of the plot. (The non-lethal mauling of Sita’s aunt by the bear remains the high point of tension, and nobody thinks to investigate if maybe the bear trainer had something to do with it.) Pretty much the whole movie is walk, walk, walk, look at the beautiful scenery and the edited-in animals, listen to the cheerful natives singing…

Hey, wait — where’s Big Bird?

Eventually they do get far enough into the mountains to confirm Bentley’s report. After crossing a deep gorge by a log bridge, they discover — MAMMOTHS! Which is to say, elephants in fur suits, moseying placidly around the landscape! Not exactly the kind of behavior that one would suspect of causing elephants to stampede. Especially when you remember that, um, to get to where the mammoths are, we had to cross a log bridge. So how, exactly, are the mammoths even interacting with the free-range elephants?

Ah, well, no matter. Bentley gets to throw the hand grenades he brought along for this very purpose, and after an indeterminate number of bearers die and a rockslide cuts off the Land of the Mammoths from the Land of the Easily Spooked Elephants, it’s time to turn around and come home. The end.

(blink) “Uh-oh…”

I think that even under the best of circumstances, it would be hard to put together an engaging movie around the discovery of mammoths surviving in some hidden pocket of the world. Mammoths are cool as set-dressing in a caveman movie, but they really don’t have the coolness factor of dinosaurs or other extinct beasties. That’s probably one of the reasons that the expedition only reaches them in the final five minutes of the movie. (The other reason being that elephants probably won’t put up with being decked out in shag rugs for too long.) But a better movie, saddled with the restriction that the mammoths can only appear in the very last scene, would have done something more engaging with the sixty-eight minutes before those last five. All of the pieces were in place for both political intrigue and a tight love triangle, each a perfectly serviceable plot engine, but neither one was given any gasoline. Which means that most of the movie, instead of being a gripping story of suspense and emotion, is mostly a travelogue.