Green Hell (Famous Productions, Universal, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Given the uncertainties around my husband Charles’ schedule, I chose last night, April 21, to be the evening on which we finished the James Whale oeuvre and watched the last three films in his canon: Green Hell (1940), They Dare Not Love (1941) and his final film, an experimental short based on a play by William Saroyan called Hello Out There (1949). Green Hell is an insignificant movie artistically but it’s quite important as a landmark in Hollywood history, It was the brainchild of Harry Edington, who in the late 1920’s had won a reputation as Hollywood’s most legendary agent. He was able to attract a stellar list of clients largely on the strength of the contracts he had extracted from MGM for their two biggest stars, John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. In 1940 he decided to become a movie producer, and he thought of a plan that would become one of the most important and most common ways movies would get made after the disintegration of the studio system in the 1950’s. Edington’s model was to put together a film project entirely from his clients, assembling a story, writer, director and cast and offering the whole package to whatever studio wanted to take it on on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. He wouldn’t succeed in this venture – Green Hell was his only film as a producer, and it was both a commercial and critical disaster – but other agents like Charles K. Feldman and Lew Wasserman would adopt Edington’s business model and prosper with it. In fact, Wasserman prospered with it so much that eventually he was able to buy Universal, the venerable studio with which Edington finally cut the deal to make Green Hell.

I remember watching this with Charles early on in our relationship and wondering how on earth a film with a great screenwriter, Frances Marion; a great director, James Whale; and a cast that, if not great, was at least serviceable – Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Bennett, George Sanders, Alan Hale, Vincent Price and John Howard – could come up with a movie this silly. According to James Whale’s biographer, James Curtis, the real problem was Frances Marion. She had become one of Hollywood’s most regarded writers in the silent era because, Curtis argued, silent films emphasized what she was good at – constructing a coherent story and dividing it into scenes that could be filmed – and didn’t require her to write dialogue. When sound came in Marion was under contract to MGM, whose studio chief, Irving Thalberg, used Marion’s talents as a story constructionist and assigned other people – usually Anita Loos – to fill in the dialogue. Alas, when Thalberg died in 1936 the new management at MGM let Marion go and she was on her own. One particularly silly line Curtis quotes from Green Hell is when the white male explorers looking for Inca ruins in the rain forests of Peru (so you thought Peru was all mountains and desert? Obviously Frances Marion didn’t, though I recall reading somewhare that enough of the Amazon rain forest overlaps into Peruvian territory that this isn’t quite as silly as I thought it was when I was watching it)) bring in a woman they’ve found and take her to their camp while she’s unconscious. One of the explorers asks if there’s anything wrong with her, and he’s told, “Just a coma” – a line that apparently brought laughter when Green Hell was previewed before release and various people, including Whale himself, wanted it deleted from the final cut. It’s still there.

Green Hell Is one of those stupid Holliywood jungle movies, with whites in the jungle dealing with such menaces as alligators (the usual stock clips appear) and cannibals, who besiege them at the end of the film with the general idiocy of John Ford’s Indians or Peter Jackson’s orcs. Totally unable to use their numerical advantage in any significant way, they’re sitting ducks for the good natives who come in like Ford’s Seventh Cavalry at the end and rescue all these silly white people from becoming the cannibals’ latest main course. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. – speaking with the British accent he picked up from his decades of living there (when his dad relocated to Britain following the breakup of his marriage to Mary Pickford, Jr. stayed there and eventually became so “native” a lot of people thought he was English) – is an explorer who when he travels in Peru is surrounded by so many native girls they’re basically groupies. He heads an expedition ostensibly fronted by scientist Dr. Loren (Alan Hale) and including Forrester (George Sanders, who as usual in his otherwise bad movies plays the part with a world-weary hauteur that steals the film from the rest of the cast; Sanders was a fine actor and in the hands of a director who knew what to do with him, like Alfred Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk, he made a great impression, but somehow Whale wasn’t able to get that much out of him, at least with Marion’s cardboard script), Hal Scott (the typically useless John Howard, who spent his career playing drips even in otherwise good movies like Lost Horizon and The Philadelphia Story), “Tex” Morgan (George Bancroft in a schticky comic-relief performance that had Universal had its druthers in the casting would probably have gone to Andy Devine), and Richardson (Vincent Price – one ot the legendary horror stars made a movie for one of the legendary horror directors and it was not a horror film!), who gets killed about a half-hour in.

Joan Bennett plays his wife, who had followed him into the jungle, only she doesn’t arrive until after he’s killed by natives and when she recovers from that non-serious coma the guys have to break the news to her. Of course, now that she’s a not-so-merry widow both Fairbanks and Sanders cruise her, and she seems undecided until the cannibals in the final scene render the choice academic by knocking Sanders off. About all Green Hell has to recommend it is some good special-effects work by Universal’s go-to guy for trick shots, John P. Fulton – the gushes of water that threaten to drown the principals’ camp are especially well done – and the professional acting of Sanders and Price, who stand out if only because they’re able to convey the impression that they take Marion’s tripe seriously. (Later Price would get a lot of scripts that were even worse than this one, and he’d respond by camping them up on purpose, essentially winking to the audience, “I don’t take one word of this garbage seriously – and you shouldn’t, either!”)