The Jungle

This is one strange film from Lippert Pictures. They spent a lot of time and trouble to take a film crew over to India with three Occidental players in Marie Windsor, Cesar Romero, and Rod Cameron. A lot of very nice background footage of India is sadly wasted on a rather unbelievable story.

Today's computer graphics might have been able to come up with more convincing Ice Age type mammoths who are terrorizing contemporary elephants who are in turn running for their lives and trampling a lot of humans in the process in Marie Windsor's kingdom. The mammoths we see here look like today's pachyderms dressed up in raccoon coats.

In any event Marie who has been learning western ways is summoned hastily back to her Indian kingdom after her father died. She has enemies herself who are opposed to any modernization and want to kill her which forms a subplot to this film.

Ruling in her place until she got home was prime minister Cesar Romero who hired white hunter Rod Cameron to solve a problem of raiding elephants. Cameron was the lone survivor of an expedition where Romero's brother was killed and Cameron comes back with this tall tale about prehistoric mammoths.

One thing is for certain. Mammoths were Ice Age creatures who died off when the earth's general climate warmed up. No way would they be living even in a remote area of the Indian jungle. But I guess no one thought of that in making The Jungle.

Jungle, The (1952)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Low-budget nonsense about Princess Mari (Marie Windsor) who moves back to India where hunter Steve Bentley (Rod Cameron) and Rama Singh (Cesar Romero) fight over her. While all of this is going on villagers are being killed by stampeding elephants so the three love birds go into the jungle and discover woolly mammoths. The jungle film had been around since the silent days and when you hear jungle and low-budget you typically expect all sorts of stock footage mixed in with the actors on a sound stage. It's shocking but that's actually not the case here because this film gets the added benefit of having actually been shot in India and these locations are certainly a major plus. Sadly, the rest of the film is a major chore to sit through because the 73-minute running time is pretty much all start and very little end. We know we're going into the film to see the "monsters" but they don't show up until around three-minutes left to go in the film so we have to sit through countless dialogue scenes that just go no where and it's clear the only reason they're in the film is to fatten up the running time. We get quite a bit of footage of local animals including several elephants as well as lions, tigers and boars. We even get a pretty violent fight between a boar and a tiger that might be the highlight to many even though it never gets too graphic. Being able to see all this stuff was a bonus but the rest of the footage is pretty lame. The sight of the woolly mammoths are a real treat because they're just elephants with some sort of rug thrown over them. I will give the producers credit because they don't look too horribly bad but at the same time it's still very obvious at the trick they did. The three leads are decent in their parts but none of them are worthy of awards. I'd say it's a safe bet that all three were happy with their trip to India so we're lucky we got anything from them. Director Berke was a veteran of this type of film has he was behind the camera on several of the Jungle Jim movies but I can't say I'm impressed with his work as he brings no energy to anything we see.

Interesting tale of giant mammoth elephants running amok in modern India. Features transparent special effects-elephants dressed in shaggy coats sporting tusk extensions. All this said, we do have a good story and a fine cast at work, and an exciting climax. It's been said that the running time on this one was doubled when it showed in India-courtesy of Robert Lippert, a master at 'padding.' Given a choice, opt for the shorter version.

Indian princess Marie Windsor takes over her father's kingdom as he dies. The principal issue facing her is reports of elephants trampling crops. Advisor Cesar Romero has tried to deal with them by sending a hunting expedition of ten men, including his brother and hunter Rod Cameron. Only Cameron has returned, and he claims they aren't ordinary elephants. They're mammoths. There's scoffing, and Romero, Cameron and Miss Windsor lead an expedition to hunt down the marauding beasts.

It's shot in India. Director William Berke and DP Clyde De Vinna, a long-time specialist in shooting in exotic locations, are the only Hollywood people involved in the shoot. The rest, cast and crew, are local talent, and quite good (even if I don't care for V. Dakshinamoorthy and G. Ramanathan's repetitive score). The images are enhanced by sepia toning, and there are things like a bear fighting a tiger and a mongoose tackling a cobra for people who want a sense Kipling's India. For a rather simple and often cliched story, it shows a great deal of ambition for the Lippert organization.

Understand the limitations of the time, and this probably had a low-budget, but for me way too much of this movie consisted of... travel along a path stop and watch an animal fight or attack... sometimes with the same animals multiple times. Made it a bit dull for me.