Secret of the Incas (Paramount, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I had intended to show my husband Charles and I a movie that would have been yet another blow against Left-wing McCarthyism and the anti-racist P.C. Thought Police (I’m actually sympathetic to the goals of the Left in general and anti-racism and anti-sexism in particular, but calls for banning films like Gone With the Wind strike me as really over the top) by watching the 1946 Walt Disney musical Song of the South -- one of Disney’s efforts to combine live action and animation in telling Joel Chandler Harris’s Br’er Rabbit stories. It’s a movie the current Disney management hath decreed shall never be shown again because of its racist stereotyping -- in a How Times Have Changed example James Baskett, the Black character actor who played Uncle Remus and narrated the tales to white kid Bobby Driscoll, got a special Academy Award for his performance. Unfortunately, the grey-label DVD I ordered online was labeled as containing Song of the South but actually had on it the 1954 Paramount potboiler Secret of the Incas, one of Charlton Heston’s journeyman roles at Paramount between 1950 (when he made his film debut in a reasonably good film noir called Dark City) and 1956 (when Cecil B. DeMille gave him the star-making part of Moses in The Ten Commandments because DeMille thought Heston looked like Michaelangelo’s statue of Moses).

Though it’s hardly a film on the likely level of Song of the South either as a work of art or a racist hate object, Secret of the Incas is a movie I’d long wanted to see largely because I’m a great fan of the exotic Peruvian singer Yma Sumac (born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Ichocan, Peru on September 10, 1923), who not only sings three songs in it but also plays a small part as Kori-Tica, daughter (and designated successor) of the High Priestess of a surviving band of Incas in Cuzco, Peru. Directed by Jerry Hopper from a script by Sidney Boehm and Ranald MacDougall (both writers had other, far more imposing credits than this one!), Secret of the Incas casts Charlton Heston as Harry Steele, freelance adventurer and tour guide (he forces his services on unwilling tourists with a ferocity approaching the grim determination with which he led his captive people out of Egypt two years later) who’s determined to find the Sunburst, a legendary Inca artifact that when I first saw bits of this film years ago (my late roommate and home-care client John had recorded part of it on a late-night showing and I wanted to see Yma Sumac in action) reminded me of a giant and particularly ornate hubcap. Actually there are two Sunbursts in the movie, a small one that’s in the vault of a Peruvian church (though why the Catholic Church is storing an artifact they would have considered a Satanic piece of pagan idolatry is something the writers never bothered to explain) and the Big One, which is buried somewhere in the ruins of Machu Picchu and which Steele is determined to find and steal even if all he could do with it would be to melt it down for the gold and gems (119 diamonds and 250 other precious stones, we’re told) it’s made of.

Secret of the Incas is often cited as a precursor to Raiders of the Lost Ark -- apparently Steven Spielberg copied Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones wardrobe after what Heston wears here (brown leather jacket, dowdy fedora, tan pants, an over-the-shoulder bag, and revolver) and visually quoted a scene or two. But Charles and I found ourselves much more reminded of films made before Secret of the Incas, including three of Humphrey Bogart’s best-known vehicles: The Maltese Falcon (groups of morally dubious people in quest of a priceless relic), Casablanca (not only the exotic locale but the casting of French actress Nicole Maurey, whom Paramount briefly tried giving a star buildup to, as a Romanian refugee trying to escape the clutches of the hard-nosed Romanian official who flies to Peru to arrest her and bring her back), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (yet another quest movie, set in a rugged Third World locale and largely shot in Mexico, as Secret of the Incas was largely shot in Peru, so the opening titles boast). He also found the general tone of the film and specifically the Heston-Maurey romance (which seems to consist mostly of him winning her affections by literally forcing himself on her, or coming as close to that as you could in a Code-era movie) to a post-Raiders heroic-anthropologist movie, Romancing the Stone (which I’ve never actually seen), and the parallels to both Sierra Madre on one end of movie history and Raiders of the Lost Ark on the other only show how much less talented and charismatic an actor Heston was than either Humphrey Bogart or Harrison Ford.

One of the good things about Secret of the Incas is the sheer number of 1930’s character actors we see in it, including Thomas Mitchell as the principal villain; Glenda Farrell as the wife of one of the tourists Heston leads around Cuzco as a guide (she’s marvelously salty and exits the movie way too soon) and Robert Young as the leader of an archaeological expedition trying to find the Sunburst on the original temple site and acquire it for a museum before adventurers like Heston’s or Mitchell’s characters can steal it. In an early scene in Cuzco, Steele is fired on by a sniper with a silencer-equipped rifle, whom it turns out has been hired by Mitchell’s character to scare him off the quest -- only Steele traces the guy to the hotel room from which he fired, overpowers him, grabs the gun and swings it like a baseball bat against a bed frame, wrecking it. Naturally I couldn’t resist joking to Charles, “Did we just see the future President of the National Rifle Association actually destroy a gun?” Steele and his new squeeze, Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey -- remember that the actress is really French and is supposed to be playing a Romanian, but this was still Hollywood in the era in which they considered one foreign accent pretty much like any other, which is how German Marlene Dietrich and Swedish Ingrid Bergman both got cast as Frenchwomen), steal the small Cessna plane on which the Romanian consul flew in to arrest Elena and take her back to Communist Romania. They fly it as close as they can get to Machu Picchu, where Steele uncovers an inflatable life raft he had secreted there earlier to go down the river for the next leg of their journey (an unlikely plot twist that really bothered Charles, who thought the raft would either have rottted away or been stolen long before Steele got to it with Elena).

Once there they find a fully equipped team of archaeologists led by Stanley Moorehead (Robert Young in what was, according to imdb.com, Young’s last role in a feature film: after this he worked exclusively on TV), who’s also interested in Elena and offers to marry her so she can naturalize as a U.S. citizen, but she’s too overwhelmed by the rough steel of Steele’s arms to be seriously interested in anyone else. Of course villain Ed Morgan (Thomas Mitchell) has followed them there, and he manages to get Steele’s gun from him (whatever happened to “pry it from my cold, dead hands”?) and forces him to turn over the rock on which an ancient Inca carving revealed the location of the Sunburst (a piece chipped off from a larger one, the rest of which is on display in that church museum) -- only Ed conveniently falls off the mountain and into a chasm (one of the least convincing dummy shots ever in a major-studio film) to his death. Steele has a change of heart and agrees to return the Sunburst to the remaining Inca for their sacred rituals, and he and Elena fly out to the U.S. as Yma Sumac sings the song “Aytapura” (“High Andes”) and the closing credits come up. Yma Sumac is by far the most entertaining part of the film and the main reason to want to watch it (though Thomas Mitchell and Glenda Farrell also provide nice reminders of their glory days); all three of her songs, including “Taita Inty” (“Virgin of the Sun God”) and “Tumpa” (“Earthquake”), are from her debut U.S. 10-inch LP Voice of the Xtabay (1950). She’s costumed in the same faux Inca finery she wore on that album’s famous cover, and the three songs she sings in the film are all lip-synched to the tracks from the Xtabay LP. One could tell from the dramatic shift in the acoustic, especially the heavy echo producer Les Baxter put on much of the album to make the music sound like it was coming from a faraway mountain and being naturally amplified by an intervening canyon.

I’ve had Xtabay in one form or another for years -- a beat-up copy of the 10-inch, then a 12-inch reissue with another Sumac album and on CD as part of a boxed set called The Exotic Lure of Yma Sumac, and over the years I’ve grown more and more impressed by it. Not only does it showcase Sumac’s remarkable voice -- she encompassed virtually the entire female range, from growling deep-voiced contralto to high, chirping coloratura soprano (she publicly performed at least two operatic roles -- the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the title role in Delibes’ Lakme) -- but also Les Baxter’s beautiful arrangements. I think Baxter’s achievement on Xtabay is comparable to Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne in taking folk material and using it as the basis for at least light-classical compositions of extraordinary and unexpected weight and power. I suspect the only reason Xtabay isn’t part of the standard vocal repertoire along with Chants d’Auvergne is how specifically tailored it was for Sumac’s remarkable range. A few years later Baxter tried it again with an “exotica” album called The Passions, but instead of Sumac the singer he used was the much less talented or interesting Bas Sheva. Yma Sumac lived to be 86 but had the bad luck to die at the same time (late 2008) as Lena Horne and Odetta, both of whom outshone her in the inevitable competition among the obituaries -- though I mourned all three of them equally. It’s nice to see Yma Sumac sing even though the sequences she’s in are ridiculous. She’s standing outside on a crag meant to represent a mountain in the High Andes and dressed in the absurd costumes of her High Priestess role (the stuff she was forced to wear on stage as well since exoticism was what she and her husband and manager, Moises Vivanco, were selling), including a final scene in which she holds aloft the Sacred Hubcap as she sings the ritual song of her people.