Manhunt in the Jungle, a movie so obscure that it’s not even listed in Leonard Maltin’s film guide, is one small facet of a fascinating puzzle.
First, the viewer sees Robin Hughes given a star introduction with his name and headshot before the title. Who? Unknown today, Hughes was active in the ’50s and ’60s, but 1958 was probably his biggest year because aside from this movie, he had minor roles in the big-budget Auntie Mame and The Buccaneer. On the other hand, it was also the year he played a disembodied head in The Thing That Couldn’t Die. He covered the waterfront.
Smoking a pipe and wearing a fedora in the manner of Indiana Jones, Hughes essays the role of Commander George M. Dyott, a pioneering aviator and Amazon explorer who wrote the 1930 book Man Hunting in the Jungle, on which the film is based. It purports to be the true story of his expedition to find Col. Percy Fawcett, a fabled explorer who vanished while searching for a rumored lost jungle city that he believed to be El Dorado.
This background is explained by a narrator (the ubiquitous Marvin Miller) before Hughes’ Dyott takes over the narration. That narration, containing such choice observations as “We were on the threshold of a savage world from which no white man had ever returned”, reminded me of another narrator’s line from a contemporary Goofy cartoon: “Where the hand of man has never set foot”. Anyway, Dyott’s lecture continues throughout every scene of the movie, underlining a “documentary” aspect in the style of traditional nature and exploration films of the kind in which producer Cedric Francis specialized.
This ambience must be how the movie gets away with voluptuous breasts nudity in the National Geographic style, surely the only Warner Brothers feature of the decade that can boast this. The film’s docudrama quality is immensely aided by its having been shot entirely on location “in the Amazon Country of South America”, as the credits inform us — or as it says on the poster reproduced on the DVD cover: “Actually filmed in the Matto Grosso… Head-hunting land of horror!”
The attractive photography is handled by Robert J. Brooker, whose only other credits are a couple of Disney items about animals. This is a curious coincidence, because the story tosses in a coati mundi as a cute mascot whose antics are what we’d expect of Disney. The rest of the film is serious and even tense, containing scenes of subduing a huge anaconda and of cloth canoes getting torn and overturning in rapids. Obviously, the scene of a piranha attack that kills one man is faked rather clumsily, but it’s still a grim moment.
The most dangerous and mysterious terror faced by Dyott’s men is the Amazon tribe headed by Chief Aloique. This is a real vision of culture clash, although of course the movie aligns its audience with Dyott’s men as they feel they’ll be lucky to get out alive — and some don’t. The narration feels compelled to note Aloique’s distinctive presence, and that striking, crafty, wide-mouthed persona is the grace of Luis Álvarez, a major Peruvian actor also known as Luis Álvarez Torres. This was apparently his first film, while the tribal peoples are clearly real Amazon Indians–more documentary elements.
Another supporting actor, Jorge Montoro, is also Peruvian, leading us to the reasonable speculation that “the Amazon country” in which the movie is filmed is Peru rather than Brazil. This would mean we can’t trust the poster’s assertion of filming in the Matto Grosso, and perhaps this is why the film’s credits only refer vaguely to South America.
Possible spoiler: We shouldn’t be surprised that this fact-based account doesn’t end up in a fabulous lost city as in other jungle potboilers, though today’s anthropologists believe what’s called Kuhikugu may have been the city in question. Fawcett’s disappearance triggered decades of explorations and speculations among colorful characters, such as plucky American adventuress Aloha Wanderwell, who ought to be the subject of her own biopic. Some recent writers have tended to validate Dyott’s belief that Fawcett died at the hands of Indians somewhere along the line. This film makes the assertion while also ending in mystery and uncertainty, a conclusion out of keeping with Hollywood romance.
Despite Dyott’s escape to tell the tale (and appear in a couple of movies himself, allegedly recounting this story in a 1933 indie called Savage Gold), we’re left with the sense that the jungle wins and the outsiders have failed to impose themselves on its green implacability. Perhaps that ultimately anti-celebratory bit of colonial chastening is among the reasons this modest if sincere effort is so obscure. Maybe nobody wanted to see that when they might go to another remake of King Solomon’s Mines, like the following year’s Watusi, or some other inspiring fabulation.
Director Tom McGowan was following in his own footsteps, having previously made documentary shorts about the Amazon and El Dorado (which were also, like this movie, scored by Howard Jackson), and he would go on to direct the two Disney animal items shot by Brooker. It seems to have been a cozy team. Writer Owen Crump was also primarily a documentarist, while this is the only credit for co-writer Sam Mervin, Jr.
This movie is now available on demand from Warner Archive. The WarnerColor print could easily benefit from restoration and correction of its fluctuating color values, but such a minor curiosity doesn’t seem likely to attract the expense required. Too bad. No trailer is available, not even on Youtube.