JUNGLE HELL (1955)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

I won't say that I burned with desire to see JUNGLE HELL. From everything I read, it was just a cheapjack "potted-plant jungle" flick from the mid-1950s, set in India but with a few moments of a flying saucer edited in to grab a potential SF-audience. But I kept  a weather-eye out for a free showing of the movie on streaming or on Youtube. Imagine my completist's outrage when I viewed a copy on Youtube, and it left out the lousy flying saucer!

Nevertheless, I'm counting HELL as a marvelous film even if I didn't see the marvelous content, because there are numerous online testimonies from others who saw the full inanity, such as this review of a DVD pairing of this film and an unrelated Sabu flick. Apparently HELL started out as a pilot for a "Sabu the Jungle Boy" series (which would have been in production during the last years of the "Bomba the Jungle Boy" film series), but no producers bit. I  don't know if credited director Norman Cerf was involved with the original project, but I find it interesting that this was his only directorial credit, and that almost everything else he did was related to editing. The first movie-version of the TV-footage definitely called for tons and tons of editing, for Cerf loaded at least twenty minutes of stock footage of various scenes from India, particularly of elephants doing stuff (including one lady elephant discreetly giving birth). Later, other hands apparently took Cerf's work, shortened it, and edited in the flying saucer stuff, with some voice-overs to explain what effect the saucer-people were having on the jungle, given that no aliens meet any of the characters, or even animals.

Far odder than the inserts is the fact that if you strip away the inserts and the stock footage, the "story" that was allegedly a TV pilot is an absolute mess. In both films and TV shows of the fifties, jungle-tales followed a very simple template, in which the heroes and villains are quickly established, as are the stakes over which the opponents are fighting. Impoverished though almost all the JUNGLE JIM movies and TV shows may be, at least they make sense as they trundle along from Plot Point A to Plot Points B and C. Maybe the incoherence proves that Cerf, credited also as the writer, WAS involved in the original project.

The basic conflict, such as it is, is the opposition between the superstitious ignorance of primitive Indian natives and the enlightened knowledge of White Bwanas, which was a common trope in many other jungle-genre works. Interposed between the two worlds is diaper-clad Sabu the Jungle Boy, who lives with his primitive people (though we never see a village as such) but standing foursquare with the Bwanas. The sole representative of Good White culture is Doctor Morrison (David Bruce of MAD GHOUL fame), though he's later joined by lady doctor Pamela (K.T. Stevens from MISSILE TO THE MOON). 

The exposure of a local kid to radioactive uranium sets up the conflict. Tribal wise man Shan-Kar (essentially an Indian version of an African witch doctor) merely fakes trying to cure the boy with mystic jargon (which I think is at least real Hindi). Sabu, a sort of local culture-hero, takes the boy to Morrison, who immediately cures the child of radiation poisoning, no muss, no fuss. But Morrison has a guest, a Russian named Trosk (for "Trotsky," no doubt). Unlike most Communist provocateurs in fifties flicks, Trosk is totally without any thug-backup, but somehow he wants to get his hands on the uranium and ship it back to his people. One would think that Trosk would eventually contend with either Sabu or his White Friends, but he never does. He lurks around, suggests an alliance between him and nasty know-nothing Shan-Kar, but nothing comes of that. Eventually, when Trosk is out in the jungle trying to steal the uranium, he's attacked by stock footage of a tiger (and a stuffed tiger) and he dies.

Actually, the only combative scenes in HELL take place between Sabu and fellow native youth, Kumar (Robert Cabal, later "Hey Soos" from RAWHIDE, who was seven years older than thirty-something Sabu). An odd bit of dialogue suggests that Sabu's title of "Jungle Boy" is some honorary title that isn't exclusive to him, since the hero tells Kumar something like, "When you're Jungle Boy, you can make the decisions!" At no time does the shaky script suggest that Sabu lives apart from other humans as Bomba did. There's one scene in which he summons an elephant, but there's no suggestion of any communion with animals. It would be easy to believe that Sabu the fictional character was simply a mahout, an elephant-handler, as indeed Sabu the actor had been-- though that wouldn't explain the elevated title.

The sloppy script doesn't really even bring home the lecture on the importance of converting ignorant natives to Western ways, and a romantic subplot between Morrison and Pamela may also be the worst romance ever seen in a jungle flick. Sabu is the movie's only asset, but thanks to the tons of stock footage, even the actor's fans will find this HELL particularly tortuous.

On a side note I also watched the feature that joined HELL on the DVD, a 1951 production from Lippert Pictures called SAVAGE DRUMS. This item had no metaphenomenal content, aside from showing how the Asian "fire-walking" trick might be done. But this formula film, directed by a fellow who also helmed a handful of JUNGLE JIM entries, at least had the sort of A-B-C storytelling of which Norman Cerf could only dream.