The Naked Jungle

Paramount Pictures and that ‘Puppetoon man’ producer George Pal got along fine while his pictures were making good money and earning Oscars; the honeymoon ended when returns leveled off and the optical effects bills stayed high. Commentators on this special edition disc say that Paramount’s executive Frank Freeman Jr. was not a helpful ally.

Not long after the smash success of The War of the Worlds, producer George Pal and director Byron Haskin took a break from science fiction to visualize the popular Carl Stephenson short story about a tropical planter’s attempt to hold off an onslaught of voracious killer army ants, an insect tsunami given the name ‘Marabunta.’ A tough problem for the visual effects people, the tale was considered a natural for Pal, who had just won two consecutive Academy Awards in that field.

For once a sensational title is also a fitting one: The Naked Jungle. The original 1938 short story Leiningen versus the Ants focused solely on the defense against the insect army, which becomes the movie’s Act 3. Ace screenwriters Ranald MacDougall (Mildred Pierce) and Ben Maddow (The Asphalt Jungle) concocted almost an hour of pre- Marabunta soap opera conflict direct from the torrid romance pulps. Eleanor Parker is the brave woman who faces a strange new land and a hostile new husband. Both she and a young Charlton Heston deliver pro performances that bring these melodramatic clichés to life.

Mail order bride Joanna Leiningen (Eleanor Parker) arrives at her new husband’s plantation stronghold in Brazil. Christopher Leiningen (Charlton Heston) is handsome enough, but he’s obsessed with fighting native superstition, disease and the elements to carve his kingdom out of the pitiless jungle. Joanna finds him to be cold and stubborn, with a pre-formed opinion of what kind of woman would accept a marriage proposal from afar. When Chris discovers that Joanna has been married before he mutters something about ‘used goods’ and redoubles his contempt. Joanna fights an uphill battle to get Chris’s attention, until a crisis comes along for which he needs all the help he can get. A black tide of billions of army ants called ‘Marabunta’ is marching toward Leiningen’s delta plantation, devouring everything in its path. And there’s no known way to stop it.

The Naked Jungle falls into two distinct parts, pre- and post-invasion. Joanna tries music, low necklines and yearning looks but still fails to communicate with her brooding Byronic hubby. She must weather Chris’s bitter insults while searching for the path to his heart. In other words, although He sent for Her,  She must take on the job of seducing Him. The he-man fantasy works well enough with actors as committed as these. Heston’s mulish intransigence is a preview of his later work in much bigger epics; his Major Dundee projects the same kind of rigid over-confidence.

The versatile (and top-billed) Ms. Parker excelled in playing dynamic women that overcome difficult circumstances: The Very Thought of You, Caged, Detective Story. Her work here compares well to that of Elizabeth Taylor in another 1954 Paramount release, Elephant Walk.  It also is a marital soap-adventure set in an exotic foreign jungle, but with elephants instead of ants. Both movies feature actor Abraham Sofaer as the ‘master of the house,’ a male Mrs. Danvers type. If Elephant Walk were filmed in Hollywood the two movies could have shared some sets. The two plantation houses are somewhat similar.

The Naked Jungle appears unaware of the Spanish literary theme of ‘La selva,’ stories in which men must challenge the vast South American jungles. When Chris Leiningen talks about trying to bring civilization to the jungle, he sounds a bit like Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, who wants to bring opera to the upper Amazon. Leiningen’s concern with music is limited to one imported piano, out of tune, that Joanna uses to make a provocative sex reference: “If you knew more about music, you’d realize that a good piano is better when it’s played.” Later on, Joanna’s suggestive remark about how spoons nest together becomes another brazen come-on. She finally gets a kiss with that one.

This is a mostly studio-shot show, with most of its jungle work filmed on Paramount’s stages and standing exterior sets. The former Universal expert John Fulton is in charge of opticals, and matte paintings help establish the Brazil location. Some good art direction helps avoid the cramped, claustrophobic look of Paramount’s Pine-Thomas action melodramas Sangaree and Jivaro. The Amazonian selva still feels too much like Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, especially with sweaty William Conrad taking off his pith helmet to wipe his brow. The menacing hit man from The Killers looks out of place but his radio experience comes in handy for putting real panic in his voice:

“Leiningen, you’re up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide… forty square miles of agonizing death! You can’t stop it!”

That’s just the kind of fatalistic dialogue that got our 12 year-old motors running: thrills and high jeopardy.

The optical fakery to depict tropical Brazil fares better than the screenplay’s dime-store racial attitudes. Chris Leiningen treats ‘his’ Indians as if they were mindless children, and struts his Anglo superiority in the old-fashioned God-in-his-domain style. We’re supposed to judge him benevolent because he doesn’t beat the natives, as does his unpleasant planter neighbor Gruber, a very Nazi-like John Dierkes. But Leiningen’s every instruction remains a boss-man threat or insult. The attitude is that Leiningen is the white master come to conquer the hellish wilderness. The Indians were just savages in the forest until he came along and made wage slaves out of them.

Don’t get your hopes up for a tropical bathtub scene, as in the steamy rubber plantation pre-Code Red Dust. Thanks to Christopher’s frosty attitude toward sex, Joanna’s efforts go for naught until the ants finally show up, none too soon for adventure fans growing weary of soap opera. Joanna wins her husband’s respect by standing with him to defend the homestead. She even uses her presence as the wedge to retain his skittish native workforce. “Leiningen doesn’t run! Leiningen’s woman doesn’t run!”  Ideal colonial wives also do what’s needed to keep the natives in their place. Neither disease, parasites, poisonous snakes nor headhunters must deter cocoa production. The hot chocolate must flow!

The Naked Jungle generated ‘playground cred’ back in the day when us 4th graders gathered to compare notes on what we had seen on TV. I heard about this movie long before I saw it, and my classmates’ exaggerations included gory descriptions of animals and people being consumed alive by ants. We kids understood ants, as Southern California was then overrun by fierce red biters from the desert. 1954 was definitely the year for ants, what with the big ones featured over at Warner Bros..

George Pal’s ant attack is still fairly impressive, thanks to a flurry of imaginative optical shots engineered by John P. Fulton. Piles of real ants are seen in close-ups and shown swarming over foreground objects matted in front of location footage (from Florida, we’re told). Some brave stunt players allow hundreds of real ants to crawl over them, creating images that will make sensitive viewers’ skin crawl. For wider shots the all-devouring ant horde is depicted with mattes showing a red-brown carpet spreading across the landscape. Rather than show a stack of matte shot images, let me link to the thorough NZ Pete Matte Shot Page on this show from 2010. Plenty of examples there.

In medium and longer shots it looks as though dyed oatmeal or something similar has been tossed on the actors to represent the attacking insects. Modern CGI effects would surely come up with more dynamic visuals, but these are quite good. I believe we got a dose of CGI army ants in Spielberg’s 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I don’t remember being impressed, though.

Did anybody have a Cold War theme in mind when cooking up this show?  Leiningen ends up destroying his plantation to save it, yet finds true love in the bargain. It’s presumed that Chris and Joanna will rebuild his jungle empire, and perhaps hold off future Marabunta attacks by bribing the ants to leave them alone, or investing in anteaters or something. The Naked Jungle would make an excellent discussion film about manifest destiny and colonialism.

Eleanor Parker continued to get good starring parts through the 1950s, and turned her ‘thankless role’ in The Sound of Music into a mini-triumph. Plenty of viewers found her classy Baroness more palatable than that fiancé- stealing brat from the convent.

Charlton Heston continued to muddle through manly-man tough-guy roles for Paramount and others, and usually fared better than the material he was given. His opportunity to act for director King Vidor was a let-down but his 100% effort for Cecil B. DeMille’s overproduced circus movie paid off handsomely: DeMille rewarded him with a major career boost just four years later.

Around this time the Paramount front office apparently began to lose faith George Pal’s hit-making capability. His planned film Conquest of Space got bashed around, rewritten and budgetarily slashed. [Imprint] has a new Blu-ray coming for that colorful sci-fi movie. We’re also pleased to hear that George Pal’s giant Cinerama production The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is on the way in a deluxe Blu-ray, with a second ‘Smilebox’ encoding. Commentators Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo express a desire for Grimm not knowing that it’s on its way.

The show’s initial notices were mostly good. Reviewers expecting standard jungle thrills were likely surprised by the love story; most critics including Bosley Crowther warmed to the Heston-Parker chemistry. I vaguely remember my mother not being too excited when we started to watch Jungle on TV, and then becoming interested — at least in the film’s first hour.