by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Captive
Girl, a 1950 entry in
Columbia’s “Jungle Jim” series starring Johnny Weissmuller as the white
big-game hunter in Africa, originally created in 1934 as a comic strip by the
talented and prolific Alex Raymond (who also created Flash Gordon and drew the Secret
Agent X-9 comic strip for Dashiell
Hammett!), who ended up on the big screen when cheapie producer Sam Katzman
(running a company of his own variously called Banner, Esskay and Sam Katzman
Productions) bought the rights and worked out a production/distribution deal
with Columbia to make a series of Jungle Jim movies aimed at the prepubescent
(or barely pubescent) male audience that flocked to Saturday matinees. As his
star he tapped former Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller, who was still a nice-looking
man and convincingly butch but was getting too hefty to be credible wearing a
loincloth and swinging on jungle vines. Charles and I had watched the first Jungle
Jim movie not long ago and
hadn’t thought much of it, but I wanted to watch this one because one of the
villains was played by Larry “Buster” Crabbe, who had a career trajectory
similar to Weissmuller’s: they were both champion swimmers, both won Olympic
gold medals, and both got signed by movie companies to play Tarzan (so Captive
Girl counts as one of my
“doubles” movies). The story is the typical fol-de-rol concerning an African
tribe; its hereditary ruler, Chief Mahala (Rick Vallin, the nice-looking and
surprisingly talented young man who was in Ghosts on the Loose with Bela Lugosi, the East Side Kids and Ava
Gardner, who of course went on to biggers and considerably betters — Vallin
should have had more of a career than he did, since he was not only personable
and good-looking but he obviously could act, even though here the only
concession to “nativicity” was plastering dark-brown makeup on his face that
made him look like a white guy who’d gone to a really good tanning salon), has
just returned from getting a white man’s education and is ready to take over
and rule the tribe. Only he’s got a major rival for the throne: the tribe’s
medicine man, Hakim (John Dehner, virtually unrecognizable under the
bone-studded headdress he wears in all his scenes), who’s out to murder all his
rivals and take the chief’s position himself.
There’s also a white villain,
deep-sea diver Barton (Buster Crabbe), who uses a SCUBA tank when they were
still a relative novelty on the screen and who’s out to steal the treasure
buried in the “Lagoon of the Dead,” including the golden chains with which the
medicine men tie up anyone they want to get rid of to weight down their bodies
so when they’re thrown into the lagoon, they’ll drown. And the “Captive Girl”
of the title is a mysterious someone-or-other (Anita Lhoest), an impassive
woman with long blonde hair (she looks something like Morticia Addams would
have if she’d dyed that long straight hair blonde and dressed in a leopard-skin
two-piece swimsuit) and a pet tiger (I’m not making this up, you know!) whom
she can control by whistling at it. Captive Girl was at least marginally better than Jungle Jim even though the director (William Berke) and
screenwriter (Carroll Young) were the same, if only because this time around
Berke got a better sense of atmosphere and was considerably more adept at
matching the film’s oodles of stock footage to the new scenes (a better
cinematographer — Ira Morgan instead of Lester White — no doubt helped). The
plot is silly and the film suffers from the weird resistance of Katzman’s casting
director to using Black actors as the “Africans” — the “natives” in this film
either look like (East) Indians, Polynesians or whites getting the suntan
treatment, but it’s still a lot of fun to see Weissmuller (or his stunt double,
Paul Stader) swing through the jungle on rope vines as he had in his old Tarzan
days, and perhaps out of reference to their swimming backgrounds writer Young
and director Berke staged the climactic fight scene between Weissmuller and
Crabbe under water, which was fun.
The gimmick
is that the mystery blonde woman is actually Joan Martindale, the daughter of
two anthropologists who set out to discover the “Lagoon of the Dead,” did so
but then were caught and killed by Hakim, so she’s been staging one-woman
guerrilla attacks on him ever since (exactly what she was doing to discomfit him, Young never
specified), and the surprisingly thrilling climax to an otherwise rather dull
movie occurs when Jungle Jim, Mahala and Joan, captured by Hakim and seemingly
doomed to eternal rest in the “Lagoon of the Dead,” are rescued by a stampede
of primates, summoned by Joan’s whistle, who overpower the baddies and spare
the lives of the good guys. It’s a neat ending but also a mysterious one: obviously the monkey stampede is pre-existing footage, but
from what, and how was it staged in the first place? There are also major roles
for Jungle Jim’s pet chimpanzee as well as the obnoxious poodle he had as a pet
in the first film — they don’t get along, of course, though at times the chimp
delivers a more expressive and emotionally committed performance than any of
the humans in the film and he and the dog work out a deal whereby they trade
bananas for bones (this was obviously supposed to make the original audience think, “My, how cute”).
