by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Wild Women of Wongo, a really peculiar 1958 indie from Florida (the
production is credited to Jaywall Productions and Wolcott Productions,
companies obviously named for the film’s director, James L. Wolcott) that was
profiled in the last Harry and Michael Medved book on bad movies (before
Michael turned into a supposedly “serious” Right-wing commentator lamenting the
coarsening of the culture by “liberal” Hollywood) based on a script by Cedric
Rutherford that achieves a sort of demented silliness. The film opens with a
voice-over narration by a woman representing herself as Mother Nature, over
some stock shots of the natural beauties of Florida, explaining that 10,000
years ago she made a mistake: she created adjacent countries called Wongo and
Goona, and in Wongo she made all the women beautiful and the men homely, while
in Goona she made all the men beautiful and the women homely. The story
basically deals with how the Wongo women discovered and ultimately won the
Goona men, all of this under the threat of the “Great Dragon” (actually a
crocodile to which the Wongo women periodically sacrifice one of their number
as part of their religion) as well as a group of ape-men who supposedly are
going to invade from a fleet of canoes and conquer both Wongo and Goona. The
Wild Women of Wongo isn’t as bad a movie as
its reputation: Harry Walsh’s cinematography is genuinely beautiful (and
actually benefits from the film being in Pathécolor — the fact that there are
literally no interiors and therefore all of it is shot in natural light, save for an underwater sequence with
one of the Wongo women successfully wrestling and killing the Great Dragon,
helps a great deal) and Wolcott’s direction (assuming it is indeed his and not
the illustrious guest he hosted on the set — more on that later) is competent and serviceable. The weaknesses
of this movie are the silliness of the concept and the way it got expressed in
Rutherford’s writing and the highly stilted delivery of the actors — yes, this
is one of those movies in which (in Dwight MacDonald’s words) the term “actor”
can only be used for courtesy, but it’s not clear how much of the
first-day-of-drama-school monotone we hear from virtually everyone in this
movie (the line readings are so bad a parrot upstages all the human actors!) is
the fault of the on-screen performers and how much is because Rutherford and/or
Wolcott wanted it that way.
The
plot is an assemblage of clichés that Rutherford doesn’t even bother to
resolve; the outside threat from the ape-men, which provides the initial
motivator for the plot (in hopes of building an alliance between Goona and
Wongo to repel it, one of the Goonish men travels in a boat to Wongo — only
once the Wongan women get a look at him, they want him rather than their own homelier men, and the jealous
Wongan men react by condemning him to death — a fate he barely escapes, racing
down the beach to his canoe and frantically rowing his way out of there),
simply disappears in mid-movie. So does the ritual that the Goonish men have to
go into the jungle for “one moon” (meaning one month) without weapons and not
have any interactions with women, and when they come back they get a Goonish
woman as a bride (and there’s a quite cruel group shot of the Goonish women to
indicate what a dubious prize that
is) — only the Wongan women just happen along to the Goonish men’s encampment and spoil the whole thing.
Eventually, of course, the Goonish men pair off with the Wongan women, the
Wongan men pair off with the Goonish women (we’re supposed to believe they find
each other appealing!), the ape-men just disappear from the plot altogether and
the film grinds to a close — and given that this movie was probably aimed at
the grind-houses and the drive-ins the term “grinds to a close” for once seems
appropriate. It also doesn’t help that the carefully worked out schema of the
story seems to have eluded either the talents or the capabilities of the
casting director: though we’re told that the Goonish men are hot and the Wongan
men are hopelessly ugly, the Wongan males are distinguishable from their
Goonish counterparts only by being a bit heavier-set and given horrible
blue-grey hair dye (indeed, my own tastes run so much towards the “bear” type
some of the men playing Wongan males did more for me than the Goonish ones
did!), while the high priestess of Wonga is a rather homely-faced woman, though
with a good enough bod that she acquits herself reasonably well in the dance
the movie’s plot stops right in the middle long enough for us to see. And the ape-men,
to the extent we see them at all, aren’t the ugly, swarthy creatures we were
expecting but aren’t bad looking themselves.
The most famous aspect of The
Wild Women of Wongo had to do with the
presence of one of America’s most illustrious playwrights, Tennessee Williams,
on the set; indeed, there was one rumor (repeated as fact by a trivia
commentator on imdb.com) that Williams actually directed much of the movie as a
favor to Wolcott and for the novelty value of doing something he’d never done
before. Not true, said Harry and Michael Medved: according to their account,
members of the University of Miami football team were pressed into service to
play some of the male characters, and Williams was having an affair with one of
these men, so he’d show up on the set of The Wild Women of Wongo and wait for his boyfriend de jour to finish filming so the two of them could go out
and have fun. Indeed, according to the Medveds, Williams was so bored by the
proceedings on the Wild Women of Wongo set that he kept falling asleep, and director Wolcott worried that his
snoring would get on the soundtrack and ruin the film! Not that that would have mattered much; though there are far worse
movies than Wild Women of Wongo
(like Shriek of the Mutilated, The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman, The
Creeping Terror and Manos: The
Hands of Fate), and one can at least
appreciate the beauty of Harry Walsh’s lovely photography of all that Florida
scenery, this one is pretty dull and doesn’t even have the saving grace of
being wretched enough to work as camp.
