QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE (1935)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

There's just one element in this 12-chapter serial that renders it marvelous: a short sequence in which two people in the African jungle are pinned down by some sort of "strangler vines." To the best of my knowledge there exist no such plants, so QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE is marvelous. But most of the significant phenomena are uncanny, so as I occasionally do on this blog, I include labels for those tropes for my own reference.

QUEEN gets a "fair" rating for mythicity just because it manages to touch on five or six major jungle-adventure tropes. Nevertheless, the serial is a mess. It recycled footage from a 1922 silent serial, JUNGLE GODDESS (now lost), which was noteworthy in its time for having been shot on a forested backlot in the U.S. and for having a better than average budget for a chapterplay. But in the 1930s silent films were unmarketable. So a producer named Herman Wolk chose to cannibalize certain sequences from GODDESS and to shoot a lot of matching sequences on soundstages. This leads to a lot of padding with the use of stock jungle footage, none of which includes either old or new players. This creates one amusing sequence in which a chimp, cornered on a high rock by hungry lions, is rescued by a helpful elephant, who's never in the same frame with the lions.

Two of the major jungle-tropes used here are that of the "lost city" and "the white goddess." To be sure, there are actually two bizarre African cultures crammed close together. In the ERB tradition, there's a small coterie of White people-- far from the usual "city"-- that have somehow established a priesthood over their Black neighbors. To be sure, the two groups are never seen together, aside from an early scene in which the Black chieftain confers with head priest Kali (Lafe McKee), so apparently this mirrors the original plot of GODDESS. The White priests all wear big conical hats that I suppose are meant to look vaguely Semitic, but their only cultural identification is that they consider themselves citizens of "Mu." Since this legendary locale did not appear in print until one James Churchward wrote a book about it in 1926, I think it's safe to assume this tidbit is a 1935 interpolation.

The more numerous Black natives venerate a huge statue that sometimes shines deadly rays from its eyes. Since the viewer eventually learns that there's a radium deposit nearby, in the so-called "Garden of Rad," possibly the original idea in GODDESS was that the statue was inhabited by minions of the priesthood. The statue is seen to move its hands a little, which sounds like real votive statues (albeit much smaller ones) that were designed to "come to life" and impress the gullible. Did GODDESS originally include the idea that priests inside the statue somehow projected energy from raw radium through the statue's eyeholes, in order to create lethal rays and execute sacrificial victims? Hard to say, for that serial's gone, and QUEEN never explains the statue at all. ("Rad," by the way, is the name of the priesthood's god, so maybe they're supposed to be Latinate Romans?)

The white queen comes to the Black tribe by accident. As a small child, Joan Lawrence is taken away from her parents, and from neighbor-kid David, when she's caught in a hot-air balloon. The balloon's descent into the territory of Mu impresses the Black tribesmen and they raise little Joan to be their queen (Mary Kornman), even referred to a few times as "The Queen of the Jungle." 

Little David, however, grows up to be Adult David (Reed Howes). Joan's parents could never find her, or the radium mine that the father came to Africa to locate. Yet David apparently takes that right turn at Albuquerque, since he makes his way to the Mu territory with no big hassle. He does however get captured and slated for sacrifice by radiation-gaze. Adult Joan at first seems totally okay with the White guy getting burned to ash. Then a crawl asks rhetorically if her "White blood" will allow Joan to endure such savagery. By the next episode, naturally, Joan rescues David.

Despite the fact that Joan has forgotten the English language, and David doesn't speak the local Swahili, the young hunter talks the Queen into leaving the only people she's ever known. More oddly, they agree to let her go with no fuss. However, the writers, probably loosely following the earlier movie's template, did this so that Joan and David could be attacked by diverse menaces on their trek back to civilization. I think Kali is at least responsible for some assaults, because he's afraid David will bring back other invaders and mess up Kali's setup-- but the continuity's excruciatingly hard to follow. In addition to the aforementioned strangler vine, and the usual jungle-animals, David is attacked by a pair of natives who are implied to live beneath the surface of a river (no, no explanation of that either) while minions of Kali blind Joan with radium, stick her in a canoe and send her careening toward a waterfall. For a time White hunters capture Joan and David to find out the mine's location, I think because they've been sold minute quantities of radium by Kali. But the funniest assault comes when a native somehow manipulates a chimp into attacking Joan with a knife. David's priceless line as the chimp runs away: "I wonder who put him up to it."

Since Joan never learns English "on the road," her personality is confined to that of wide-eyed innocence. She's not any sort of fighter, but her scenes in Mu make the loose implication that she MAY have a psychic connection with elephants for some reason. She's seen commanding a trained elephant in Mu, and then later, on the hunters' ship, she actually commands an elephant whom the hunters have taken captive to do her will-- that is, by reaching its trunk through a porthole to strangle a bad hunter-guy. David therefore shoulders almost all the action-scenes herein, and Reed Howes acquits himself quite well, given that most fights in thirties' serials were spottily choreographed. He's seen to be a stand-up guy, tempted to take advantage of Joan's innocence but not yielding to the temptation.

Whenever the 1935 producers utilize footage from 1922, they don't bother to synch the two, so the viewer sees various scenes of "undercranking," resulting in characters moving like jumping-beans. The longest scene from GODDESS is one in which Kali tries to make his fellow priests think that Kali's own little boy is a god made flesh. But there's a mixup and the priests get the idea that a chimp is the new god in town, so there's an amusing moment where the simian cavorts around the room and the priests imitate his holy actions. However, Kali, like a number of other characters, just disappears from the story when it's convenient for the filmmakers, and so he never pays for his crimes.

QUEEN is a real curio. It's not good, or even "so bad it's good." But it's not as dull as some serials out there, and that's something.