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| Johnny Weissmuller poses with a curiously unreal-looking Tamba in a JUNGLE JIM promo pose. |
For the last month or so, I've been revisiting Columbia's JUNGLE JIM series via the Umbrella Entertainment three volume set, imported from the wilds of Australia. Now that I am nearing the end, I find myself wishing I had taken care to chronicle my journey here, because they do get jumbled up in memory and it would have been nice to have a record of which ones pleased me most, and why. I can tell you that the Umbrella Entertainment DVD set is both worth having and, at the same time, not quite ideal.
THE JUNGLE JIM MOVIE COLLECTION, VOLUME 1 includes JUNGLE JIM (1948, #1), VOODOO TIGER (1952, #9), SAVAGE MUTINY (1953, #10), JUNGLE MAN-EATERS (1954, #13), CANNIBAL ATTACK (1954, #14), and DEVIL GODDESS (1955, #16).
THE JUNGLE JIM MOVIE COLLECTION, VOLUME 3 includes JUNGLE JIM IN THE FORBIDDEN LAND (1952, #8), FURY OF THE CONGO (1951, #6), JUNGLE MOON MEN (1955, #15), KILLER APE (1953, #12), and VALLEY OF THE HEADHUNTERS (1953, #11).
I was surprised to find that the snap cases of these Australian releases feature PG and M ratings indicating "Parental Guidance Recommended" and "Violence," but after refreshing my memory of the films, I'm finding these cautions to be responsible. The films are not graphically violent in terms of their staged violence, which is fairly tame (at least outside the number of times Weissmuller pretends to stab an animal into submission), but rather for their sometimes extensive use of documentary footage, which includes brief images of ivory harvesting, animal predation, and also one or two cruelly staged animal battles - including one in which a lion is placed in a pit with a bull and is shown several times being hoisted into the air by its horns, reducing the King of the Beasts to a panicking basket case.
Here are a few notes I took on some of the earlier movies I watched:
There is a scene in one of the early movies, perhaps the very first, in which Jim is called upon to defend himself against an attacking black panther. At one point, Weissmuller's stand-in lifts the kicking panther in front of his face and shows its underside to the camera. Unbelievably, this scene would be repeated in the series (so far as I presently know) in four different movies. There are other scenes (and many individual shots) that are repeated more than once throughout the series, including high dives, Tamba's backwards somersaults, and Weissmuller swimming footage. The viewer feels simultaneously cheated and impressed by their sheer gall.
There's a wonderful moment in PYGMY ISLAND in which Jim and Tamba are attacked by a gorilla (Ray "Crash" Corrigan), where a swaying rope bridge crossing a deep ravine offers their only path to escape. When Jim gets nearly all the way across the bridge, the gorilla succeeds in uprooting the stakes anchoring it, and the bridge collapses. The scene is supported by an excellent Lydecker Brothers matte painting, but when the bridge drops, it (and most of Weissmuller, up to his shoulders!) disappears as it falls behind the lower matte! It's hilarious.
JUNGLE MANHUNT reprises the famous stock footage of the giant crocodile and iguana fighting to the death (originally filmed for 1940's ONE MILLION B.C.), which Weissmuller got to stumble upon once before as Tarzan in TARZAN'S DESERT MYSTERY (1943). This film is also notorious for a deleted scene that was nonetheless heavily promoted in its original trailer and ad campaign, in which Jim is attacked by a man-sized dinosaur with a hearty, hyaena-like laugh. Despite the omission, I found JUNGLE MANHUNT to be one of the most entertaining entries in the series.
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| The fabled missing scene from JUNGLE MANHUNT. |
FURY IN THE CONGO is jam-packed with highlights - it features Lyle Talbot in evil mode, ponies painted to look like a rare relative of the zebra, an all-female tribe of spear-carriers, Vasquez Rocks, endless wind storms, several instances of offscreen sadism, a brief appearance by a giant desert spider (it looks like a Roomba with large black pipe cleaners sticking out of it), and it’s also notable as the only title in the series where they tried putting Tamba in a fur diaper to cover her butt - but it feels like significantly less than the sum of its parts.
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| The giant desert spider encounter from FURY IN THE CONGO. |
In JUNGLE JIM IN THE FORBIDDEN LAND, the plot concerns an anthropologist's intent to see and document a rumored race of Giant People in the jungle. When a male and female example of these Giant People are captured, they turn out to be werewolves - and really not so extraordinarily tall, yet no one ever comments on the fact that they look like werewolves!
And now some more detailed notes on the three Jungle Jim pictures I've most recently watched...
KILLER APE (1953): One of the endearing traits about the Jungle Jim films is that, when audiences began to grow tired or queasy in the face of "jungle thrills" (predation-themed stock footage crudely integrated into the adventures), they turned to monsters - and producer Sam Katzman had an uncanny knack for coming up with monsters so homely, they are lovable. (Look no further than THE GIANT CLAW, for example.) In this twelfth Jungle Jim adventure, our hero's main challenge is to find, identify, and clean the clock of a crazed scientist (CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON's Nestor Paiva) responsible for chemically altering jungle wildlife, but his mysterious adversary frames him for the murders committed by one of his rampaging creations. Watching the film and listening to its dialogue, one gets the sense that said monster was scripted to be the usual man-in-an-apesuit, possibly with minor augmentations to make him scarier, but instead, said "Killer Ape" is some kind of towering half-man, half-ape who thuds around in Wooly Bully boots and a Neanderthal bearskin toga. Exactly how human and simian chromosomes got commingled, the film leaves to the imagination, but the result is played by 7' 7", 499-pound, heavy-browed professional wrestler Max Palmer, who would soon retire from the ring and the screen to become an evangelist preacher. But here he looms out of bushes, through doorways, and surges forth right away in the opening credits, leaving deep, barefooted footprints everywhere despite his proto-Sonny Bono footwear. Though Jim never gets tied down to anyone other than his pet chimp Tamba, the films usually have some kind of love interest, and this time the female element is provided by the aggressive tawny-skinned Carol Thurston, who generally played native, Indian, and island girl roles; her character believes Jim to be guilty of murder for much of the film, until he is able to prove the existence of the Killer Ape, so there's none of the usual romance, per se. "Crash" Corrigan, who owned the jungle lot used in these films and played gorillas in earlier JJ films (notably MARK OF THE GORILLA), has a brief uncostumed role. Character actor Michael Fox, who had played a renegade Nazi in VOODOO TIGER, returns here in the final sequence as the medical officer.
JUNGLE MAN-EATERS (1954): The thirteenth film in Sam Katzman's Jungle Jim series is technically the last, as Johnny Weissmuller's protagonist would be presented somewhat differently hereafter, and it may well be the worst of the series to this point - and it doesn't help that the film's 1.33:1 aspect ratio is cropped to an anamorphic 1.78, the first time this has happened in any of the three Umbrella Entertainment sets. It’s especially (though not exclusively) damaging to the stock footage and this one is overrun with such; it even pilfers stock footage from the previous entries in the series, shots of Weissmuller climbing, walking, swimming, and so forth. When Jungle Jim frees a black panther from a bamboo cage, I thought for sure they were going to reprise Jim’s fight with the black panther once again, already reused in three sequels at this point after its first appearance, but... I guess they didn’t dare. Director Lee Sholem comes up with an ingenious trick, following the swimming shots with a damp-haired Weissmuller wearing clothes that are absolutely dry but one or two shades darker! The plot is about two African tribes pitted against each other by a malicious Frenchman (Gregory Gaye, who played the Nazi scientist in Sam Katzman’s THE CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN) who hopes to loot their diamond mines after each tribe wipes the other out. Neither of the African chiefs can act very well, so one imagines they hired the best they could get or afford... but then, well into the third act, there’s a shot of maybe a dozen members of a tribe marching sullenly across the screen... and they are led by none other than Woody Strode! (Uncredited, of course. No, that’s not him in the photo.) These warriors get into a tussle with Jungle Jim and his cohorts (including Richard Stapley) and then, for all of three or four seconds, the film gives us REAL movie magic - a once in a lifetime fight to the death between Johnny Weissmuller and Woody Strode! Then the movie goes back to drudgery mode, closing up after 67 minutes with the charming sight of an aging Tamba loudly smooching with a much younger chimp to the survivors’ delight. PS There are no cannibals in the story, nor is anyone eaten by a wild animal, so the title is something of a cheat - but there is some very tense and not exactly entertaining stock footage of a staged fight in tight quarters between a lion and a bull. (The poster promised cannibals. There are no cannibals. It could be that someone slapped the wrong title on the movie, as when VOODOO TIGER - which featured a Valley of the Headhunters replete with shrunken heads on display - was followed by... VALLEY OF THE HEADHUNTERS, which didn’t! The next Jungle Jim movie? CANNIBAL ATTACK. We’ll see about that.)
CANNIBAL ATTACK (1954): Indeed, the fourteenth film in the series reneges on its title. It doesn’t feature any cannibals; rather, it features a reformed cannibal tribe that no longer eats people but which isn’t above being hired by crooks to dress up in Hollywood quality rubber “crocodile” skins and deter any attempts to challenge their hijacking of precious supplies of cobalt. (They also carry super-cool gator clubs fashioned to look like a gator’s jaw. I found myself coveting this stupid prop.) A lengthy stock footage prologue confirms that the story takes place in Africa, rather than some nebulous "jungle," but this time (unusually, even for this series), the story takes place in an Africa without Africans. All the native tribesmen look either Polynesian or Hawaiian, not to mention out of shape. Not only that, but nine times out of ten, whenever someone says “crocodile,” the movie shows us a round-snouted alligator - even a whole happy, snapping family of them. As if this doesn't add up to enough fake window dressing, producer Sam Katzman’s contract for the Jungle Jim character expired with this picture and was considered not worth renewing, so Johnny Weissmuller is deprived of his trademark hat and now simply addressed as “Johnny.” Also, his chimpanzee Tamba - who was showing dangerously psychotic behavior by the previous entry - is replaced here by a younger, more sweet-natured chimp helper, Kimba. The leading lady this time around is sultry Judy Walsh, who mostly steers clear of Johnny romantically (Kimba amusingly defuses her only attempt at such an overture!), and former MAD GHOUL David Bruce gets to wrestle his own alligator. All in all, I’ve seen worse; it’s pretty mild, no better than average, but it’s got a couple of enjoyable matinee serial moments and its mind-boggling inaccuracies add to the fun.
I still have JUNGLE MOON MEN and DEVIL GODDESS to watch. I'll let you know how they play.
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