Ants…and Pants August 22, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Action / Adventure / Thriller, Film & DVD Reviews , trackbackFirst published in another form at The DVD Forums.
‘Marabunta!’
Included in the CVs of director / producer team of Byron Haskin and George Pal are the sci-fi classics War of The Worlds and the strangley prescient but lesser known Conquest of Space. Sandwiched in between those two movies, in 1954, they came up with a peculiar hybrid of over-heated melodrama and creature feature, The Naked Jungle.
It’s 1901, and hard nosed plantation owner Christopher Leiningen (Charlton Heston) has been hacking his way through the jungles of South America since he was 19 years old, building himself a cocoa empire reclaimed from the Amazon basin. Along the way, he’s forgotten a few things; no family, no real friends, no woman. Incredibly wealthy, he sets his brother the task of acquiring a wife; Leiningen is lucky in that he strikes it rich when flame-haired beauty Joanna Leiningen (they married by proxy), played by Eleanor Parker, arrives from up river to pop his cherry. Yes folks, he’s the only 30-odd year old, square jawed, broad shouldered virgin on the whole continent.
For more than an hour we dance around Leiningen’s virginity and ‘Madame’s’ (as Leiningen insists on calling her) attempts to take the starch out of this stuffed shirt and get him between the sheets. He wants kids, though he’d rather do without the whole nonsense of actually having sex, or even having a woman around, never mind a woman who talks back to this ‘master of all he surveys’. She wears skimpy nightclothes in front of him (the harlot!), he gets drunk and determines to do the deed but can’t when he finds out that - shock, horror - she’s not the virgin he expected. And there’s some laughable dialogue about the master’s brand new piano, which has never been played until the mistress arrives. As she tickles the ivories she tells him, eyebrows arched: “If you knew anything about music, you’d know that the best piano is one that’s been played.”C’mon Chuck - get your kecks off and bang a tune out of this old Joanna! I mean, there will be rumours…
After all that fluff, we finally get down to the meat of the tale. The local Commissioner (played by William Conrad) tells Leiningen that there’s something nasty in the jungle, something 20 miles long and two miles wild, unstoppable, brutal, and they’d all better get the hell out of the way. Of course, Chuck, and the woman he’s now slowly falling in love with, say they’ll make their stand against…Marabunta! The word is so memorable because of Conrad’s stentorian delivery; the future fat detective rolls the single word around his tongue like a vintage Merlot, gargles twice and spits it out, endowing each and every vowel with spine-tingling horror. We ain’t see it yet, but we clearly ain’t gonna like it…oh, goody!
Alright, alright, after all the dark mutterings, we are in fact talking an army of soldier ants; I expected Haskin, a master special effects technician, to give us the works, but sadly what looked so ’special’ to me 40 or so years ago, now looks rather feeble, and, worse, feeble possibly even to contemporary audiences. However, the battle between Leiningen and the lethal, flesh-stripping army should have occupied more of the films 95 minute running time, but it doesn’t. And as exciting as the all too brief denouement is, it’s all too predictable. There’s a scene, by the way, where Chuck rides to high ground to get his first view of the vast ant army. He takes quite a small eyeglass and scans the horizon…and the camera suddenly switches to a view of ants which are plainly a foot or so from the lens. For Father Ted, fans it’s a familiar reference from the first episode; and, still in Craggy Island mode, no Chuck, these are small and those are far away… It’s also worth noting that this is one of the films that Paramount, encouraged by the CIA, made sure showed Americans treatment of natives was seen in a good light (See here).
As films go, not very special, and even as homicidal ant films go (a genre that is, I accept, rather limited), it holds out a promise it simply fails to keep. Give me Them! every time.
What is special about Paramount’s R1 release is the transfer. Filmed in three-strip Technicolor, they have got hold of almost pristine elements, given them a good wash and brush up and the results are quite superb. That Paramount would do this for such a relatively minor work is all to their credit; colours are strong, with only a very few shots being ever so slightly out of registration, contrast is excellent, and it has that Technicolor golden ‘glow’. It’s all nice and sharp and I couldn’t detect any intrusive edge enhancement. The English mono soundtrack is excellent too.
Paramount has transferred this with the film matte opened up; 1954 was the year widescreen movies were launched proper, and several movies photographed in Academy (Shane probably the most famous) were cropped for showing in theatres so equipped, as the new format took off. The obvious difference here is that The Naked Jungle was plainly photgraphed with widescreen in mind; there’s plenty of headroom, allowing the film to be viewed either way, and it looks quite comfortable (unlike Shane which was shown at 1.66:1 - it wasn’t filmed for such, and I don’t think it works at all) when seen in a 1.85:1 (or thereabouts) ratio.
Discs this good are a joy to behold and, sometimes, actually make up for deficiencies in the narrative; they do enable you to better enter the fantasy world of cinema - my hat is off to film restorers whose work is as good as this.
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