The Jungle Book (Alexander Korda Films, United Artists, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night shortly after 9:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 1942 film The Jungle Book, produced by Alexander Korda, directed by Zoltan Korda, with production design by Vincent Korda. (Yes, they were brothers.) I’d picked up a public-domain copy of The Jungle Book the last time I stopped into the Mission Hills Library along with three other DVD’s: the 1949 Western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne; Verdi’s opera Rigoletto with Luciano Pavarotti, Edita Gruberova, and Ingvar Wixell, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and conducted by Riccardo Chailly from 1983; and a 1983 “Gala Concert” from Sydney, Australia with Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, and Richard Bonynge conducting. I rattled off all four of those for Charles and it seemed like The Jungle Book was the one that most excited him even though we’d seen it before together. It didn’t take Charles long to notice how badly faded the colors were in the print (that’s a common failing of public-domain films that were originally in color; I remember a testy exchange on the old imdb.com bulletin boards about the 1939 film The Little Princess, Shirley Temple’s first color film; it had slipped into the public domain and some people on the bulletin board had suggested it had been colorized, which prompted a comment from Sybil Jason, who as a child actress had been in the film with Temple and said it had been in color originally). Ironically, I just watched the original trailer which is linked to on The Jungle Book’s imdb.com page and its colors were far brighter and more vibrant than the ones in the actual movie, at least in the print we saw. I’ve had occasion to mention the 1942 The Jungle Book in connection with some of my movie soundtrack reviews for Fanfare because it’s the first film for which an original soundtrack album was issued. Record companies had issued music from films before that, but they’d insisted in re-recording it in their own studios with their own equipment. In 1942 Capitol Records was a young, struggling company co-owned by singer Johnny Mercer, and one of their ideas was to license an original soundtrack, transfer it to disc masters, and issue it on records as an album (back when an “album” meant literally that: a batch of 78 rpm records bound together in sleeves like a photo album). One could hear why The Jungle Book was chosen for this honor because Milkós Rósza’s score for it is incredible: warm, coloristic, innovative and fascinating listening even on its own without the film.

As far as the actual movie was concerned, the last time I’d watched it I’d found it utterly magical; this time around I found it harder going. It’s based on Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories, or at least four of them – “Mowgli's Brothers,” “How Fear Came,” “Tiger! Tiger!,” and “The King's Ankus" – which screenwriter Laurence Stallings (best known for his 1920’s play about World War I, What Price Glory?, and seemingly an odd choice for a children’s fantasy about India) blended together into a reasonably coherent narrative. The star was Sabu, playing Mowgli, who when he was a child lost his father to the man-eating tiger Shere Khan. Mowgli happened to run off from his mother just as his dad was becoming Shere Khan’s dinner, and he was taken in by a wolf pack and, like Romulus and Remus, raised by them. As the film starts (it’s actually narrated as a flashback by Joseph Calleia as an old Indian beggar entertaining Anglo tourists) Mowgli has just returned to his native village, to the joy of his mother Mahala (Patricia O’Rourke). He falls in love with a village girl, Messua (Rosemary DeCamp), but her father, trader Buldeo (Joseph Calleia), takes an instant dislike to Mowgli. Mowgli intimidates Buldeo into giving him a “tooth” – actually a knife – with which to hunt and kill Shere Khan. Much is made of the “law of the jungle,” and in particular its prohibition against killing anything unless you’re doing it for survival or food. There’s a great scene in which Mowgli sees a bear-skin rug and laments that the bear, whom he knew, got killed for so pointless a reason as to be turned into a carpet. Mowgli and Messua set off into the jungle in search for Shere Khan, and they fall down a hole in front of a gigantic palace built by a long-extinct human tribe which assembled major riches. (The movie was shot at a Southern California resort named “Sherwood Forest,” and I think the giant palace was the same building the Halperin brothers used as a Cambodian temple in their 1936 film Revolt of the Zombies.) Messua takes home one coin after she’s confronted by Kaa the snake (voiced by Mel “Bugs Bunny” Blanc), who explains that he’s old and his venom has been exhausted but the items in the treasure, especially an ornament with a ruby inside, are cursed and will kill anyone who tries to remove them. Mowgli finally confronts and kills Shere Khan with one-third of the film’s 108-minute running time left to go. The rest is taken up by an all too human intrigue as Messua’s dad Buldeo (ya remember Messua’s dad Buldeo?) catches her with the gold coin. Buldeo and his associates “The Barber” (John Qualen) and “The Pandit” (Frank Puglia), hatch a plot to go to the abandoned city and grab the treasure, but in the end they set the city and the surrounding jungle on fire while Mowgli, disgusted by the greed-driven ways of humanity, returns to the jungle and his animal friends.

The Jungle Book is a visually stunning entertainment – even in the dreadfully faded print we were watching Lee Garmes’s and W. Howard Greene’s cinematography remains beautiful – but it’s also a story that treads on the thin edge of silliness and occasionally goes over. Charles lamented that precisely because the film is in the public domain, it’s unlikely to be the subject of the restoration job it desperately needs. At least Sabu is cute in the male lead (and he was the only card-carrying Indian in the cast, though when his British and American film career faded and he tried to get parts in Bollywood he was refused a work permit from the Indian government because he was a naturalized U.S. citizen), though like Shirley Temple he lost his career when he grew older and could no longer credibly play pre-pubescent precociousness. I’ve seen various versions of Sabu’s first name – some sources call him Sabu Dastagir and some call him Selar Sheikh Sabu – but what is known is he got discovered for films by the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, who in 1936 went to India to make Elephant Boy (another Kipling adaptation, from Toomai of the Elephants), also with Alexander Korda as producer. Sabu wowed Korda, who put him under contract, took him to London, hired tutors to improve his English (his performance in Elephant Boy is notable for the vast difference in his English skills between the footage Flaherty shot in India and the retakes Zoltan Korda directed in Britain), put him in another film called The Drum (Drums in the U.S.), and then cast him in the title role of a 1940 film, The Thief of Baghdad (a much better movie than the Douglas Fairbanks silent of which it was nominally a remake). Unfortunately, while Korda was shooting The Thief of Baghdad World War II started, and when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister he had the entire British film industry shut down because it was using up resources important to the war effort. So Korda took his cast, crew, and half-completed film to Hollywood, finished it there, and looked for another property which became The Jungle Book.