FORBIDDEN JUNGLE!

Forbidden Jungle (1942)
Star: Don C. Harvey

A shallow, yet self-analytic, big-game hunter who is being payed big bucks to find a boy who was lost 15 years earlier in an uncharted jungle (and who keeps repeating “I’m just doing this for the money!”) learns the meaning of friendship and altruism when the noble jungle boy saves him from being killed by a slow-moving stock-footage man-eating tiger (who never eats a man during the film).

An introspective jungle movie---that’s right! Most of these mid-WW II quickies were satisfied with showing George Burrows running around in a gorilla suit and maybe a public domain animal stampede or two, plus endless low-budget dialogue to fill out their 65 minute running time, but “Forbidden Jungle” is different.

For one thing, it was lensed in 1950, near the end of the “jungle flick” cycle, and it reflects the freedom people felt after the claustrophobic war years of the 1940s. Secondly, it reflects America’s growing need to have fun and watch bikini ladies. There’s about two long scenes of village women wearing extremely small sarongs that seem to have no reason justifying their existence other than to spotlight beautiful ladies wearing skimpy jungle apparel. As Paul McCartney sang: “And what’s wrong with that? I want to know.”

Finally, there’s the character of the big-game hunter, himself, as played by Don C. Harvey, a prolific actor who died in his mid-50s, but not before starring in over 150 productions. Harvey started out as a B-serial actor, then got into jungle films and gradually went heavily into TV in the mid-50s, acting in everything from The Roy Rogers Show to Combat to The Outer Limits. His last film (and final acting job) was “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” (1963).

Harvey plays the hunter as a well-meaning guy (he’s hesitant to shoot anything!) who keeps trying to sell himself on the idea of being a highly paid mercenary when he actually spends much of the movie wondering about the other characters’ motivation and questioning his right to take the jungle boy back to civilization. Even when an unfriendly native messes with his drinking water and gives him jungle fever, Don never really harbors a grudge!

OK, I like jungle movies. Always have. These absolute bargain-basement films—usually shot in shabby Burbank back lots and spiced up with stock animal footage--were a staple of Saturday afternoon local television programming everywhere in America throughout the 1960s. Tarzan (Gordon Scott was my favorite, though Denny Miller was a close second); Jungle Jim (Johnny Weismuller); Bomba ( Johnny Sheffield)—I loved ‘em all.

I even enjoyed that cheesy late’60s Tarzan tv series, shot on a very low budget in Mexico, that ran for a few years and starred Ron Ely. And I’ve had the opportunity to meet most of my heroes (except for Weismuller) with the added bonus of chatting with Irish “Sheena of the Jungle” McCalla! Life really doesn’t get much better than that.