THE JUNGLE PRINCESS (1936)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

There's not much doubt that THE JUNGLE PRINCESS was an attempt to emulate the success of 1932's TARZAN THE APE MAN, since one of the credited writers, Cyril Hume, had worked on two of the MGM Tarzans before contributing to PRINCESS. As an interesting sidebar, director William Thiele went on to helm two MGM ape-man adventures after this film. All that said, PRINCESS is intended to be a romantic drama first and foremost.

Jungle-girl Ulah (Dorothy Lamour in her feature film debut, which "typed" her as a sarong-girl) isn't precisely raised by animals in her rather vague origin. When she's a small girl she's apparently living in the Malaysian jungle with her father, and the father is killed by a tiger (presumably a female) even as the tiger is shot to death. Ulah then just lives in the jungle for the next fifteen or so years alongside the tiger's cub, who ends up looking pretty healthy for a fifteen-year-old tiger. Ulah apparently has some rapport with the local monkey population, who hang out with her despite her tiger companion, though she's never said to wield any literal power over animals.

A group of white hunters come looking for zoo animals, and their party includes Chris Powell (Ray Milland) and his fiancee Ava (Molly Lamont). They're warned by natives of a legend of a "laughing tiger," but this is a superstition that's grown from the locals having heard Ulah's girlish laugh when her tiger friend was roaming about.

Chris ventures into the jungle, where he's attacked by Ulah's tiger, but Ulah appears and orders the tiger to leave him. Ulah takes Chris to her cave to care for him, and almost immediately falls for him. She can only speak what Chris calls "baby-talk Malay," but this common ground gives the hunter the chance to teach Ulah some English. Though it's unlikely that Ulah knows what human sex entails, her body language suggests an intense desire for propinquity at the very least.

Once Chris returns to his camp with Ulah in tow, everyone's glad to see him, but Ava's not the least glad to see Ulah. Ava conceals her hostility, but when Chris invites Ulah to eat with the group at a European-style dinner table, Ava sees an opportunity to make Ulah look bad. She tries to take advantage of the sarong-clad beauty's ignorance by dressing her in foolish clothes. But in a moment that probably gratified female viewers in 1936, Ulah senses what's going on, dumps the bad clothes and cobbles together an impressive outfit that makes Chris appreciate her even more. To his credit, he realizes he's fallen out of love with Ava and tries to be honest with her, though she doesn't want to hear it. 

The natives, still fired by superstition, cage Ulah's tiger and plan to kill it, believing it a demon. They nurture the same plans for Ulah, and when the whites get in the Malaysians' way they're scheduled for sacrifice too. But somehow Ulah's monkey friends (one of which is prominently an African chimp) find out about her peril and come to her rescue, swarming into the Malaysian village and causing havoc. Thanks to the distraction the white hunters are able to escape with Ulah, and later she and Chris are implicitly united, with Ava being a belated good sport about it.

Dorothy Lamour, a former New Orleans beauty queen, enhances her formidable looks with a light, enticing personality. The sarong-look is almost certainly derived from stories about South Sea Island vahines, and though it's hard to tell from the black and white print, it looks to me like the makeup people might have darkened Lamour's skin for the role. In theory Ulah might be at least partly Malaysian, since nothing is said about her mother, and Ulah patently learned her pidgin-Malay from someone. But the broad implication is that Ulah is white, though it's also hard to judge even the father's ethnicity from his brief appearance. As with Tarzan, Ulah is a figure that potentially allowed audiences to flirt with breaking racial codes, in that the character is technically white but suggests the possibility of dallying with someone from the other side of the ethnic tracks.

In addition to the animals' rapport with the sarong-girl, the legend that grows up about "the laughing tiger" fits my category of the phantasmal figuration, even though in this case it arises from a social misapprehension.