by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
The film Charles and I screened last night was Beyond Bengal, a 1934 jungle documentary directed, written and largely photographed by Harry Schenck (the last name is pronounced “Skenk”) filmed in the sultanate of Perak, Malaysia and with the Sultan, Askader Shah, not only acknowledged in the credits for his cooperation but actually shown on screen in what narrator Schenck insisted was the first time he had ever been photographed. Schenck insisted in his narration that his expedition was a scientific safari whose point was not to kill exotic animals but to photograph them in the wild and learn more about them, but he didn’t send his crew out with tranquilizer-equipped stun guns the way scientific safaris are done now. Instead Schenck’s pistol and the rifles carried by other members of his crew – all but one of whom were Malay natives, treated in the narration with the patronizing Orientalism we expect in a film this old – had live ammo, and while he insisted they only shot animals when necessary to protect human life, they seemed within that stricture to rack up quite an impressive array of kills.
Beyond Bengal has survived in wretched condition, with quite a few splices (oddly more apparent on the soundtrack than in the picture), including one in which Schenck introduces the native girlfriend of native boy Ali (whose name he pronounces “Alley”) and says, “Her name is … ” and then a splice eliminates her name (at least just then – later we find she’s called “Bee”). It reminded me of the horribly ill-timed splice in the Universal Crime Club mystery The Black Doll, in which whodunit is revealed in the last reel but a splice eliminates the explanation of motive so whydunit remains a mystery. There’s a charming scene in which Ali and Bee go through a D.I.Y. marriage ceremony, complete with a portable phonograph playing a Victor record (we see the “scroll” label Victor was using from 1925 to 1937) of the wedding march from Wagner’s Lohengrin. (One wonders whether scenes involving record players had become de rigueur in native documentaries since Robert Flaherty showed one on Nanook of the North, in which Nanook marveled at this machine that made music and tried to eat one of the records.)
One thing that surprised me big-time in this film is it featured an animal I’d never heard of before, called a “sladang” (later I found out from an online source, https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/528398968763893923/, it’s also called a “seladang” or a “gaur”), which is apparently the world’s largest species of bovine. It looks something like a hump-backed ox but apparently can run as fast as an antelope, and it’s carnivorous (unlike most cows or oxen!) and hunts down prey, including humans if it encounters any. The big climax comes when the one white woman on the expedition, Joan Baldwin, comes down with “jungle fever” and experiences flu-like symptoms (I couldn’t help but bitterly joke, “What is this, SARS-CoV-0?”). Her illness not only eliminates her from doing whatever she was supposed to be doing on the expedition (we’re told she’s “very prominent in the scientific community” but just what sort of science she was there to do remains a mystery), and in the film’s climax – to the extent she has one – Schenck realizes that she has to be evacuated and got to a modern hospital within 10 days or she’ll die.
The result is a hideously racist series of scenes in which the native members of Schenck’s expedition are sent out to “clear” the local river of crocodiles so the expedition’s elephant train can ford it and evacuate Baldwin out of the jungle to get modern medical care. Alas, whoever Baldwin is (and I’d already decided I didn’t like her because, like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, she’d shown up for the expedition’s departure in a hideously inappropriate print dress, though later we saw her in a more practical pantsuit) she’s considered so important that Schenck is determined to clear that river no matter how many natives get killed by the crocs. Eventually, after quite a lot of natives have been sent to Malay heaven, or Nirvana, or wherever they believe the afterlife is (actually, according to the Wikipedia page on Malaysia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia, the country is majority Muslim, and the constitution gives Islam “established religion” status but allows the practice of other religions), Schenck and company give up on getting the crocs out of the river and have the elephants do the best they can getting across it – and somewhat to my surprise the river is so deep the elephants end up nearly submerged for surprisingly periods until they finally get across and Ms. Baldwin and the native boy Ali (who volunteered for the crocodile hunt even though he was too young and he was “attached”) both survive. A weirdly sententious bit of narration from Schenck claims that Ali’s life was spared because Bee prayed so hard for him, and with that this rather lumbering documentary (it’s the sort of movie that seems to last a lot longer than its official running time of an hour and two minutes) draws to a close.
Beyond Bengal is very much an historical curio, reminiscent of the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom shows of two decades later only in black-and-white and considerably grainier and splicier – and though Schenck gives us the insistence in his narration that everything in the movie was absolutely real, the crocodile attacks seem tricked out with fakery (Charles was sure some of the crocs were either models or corpses being artificially moved), which might have helped make them the most genuinely exciting and suspenseful scenes in the movie! There seems to be a hard-core audience (no pun intended) for this kind of nature porn – I’ve seen reviews of other films like this on imdb.com that have celebrated movies that contain filmed records of species that have since gone extinct – and Beyond Bengal emerges as an oddball movie, very much of its time in its taken-for-granted speciesism and racism but still a good bit of fun.
