Kids today will never know the existential highs and lows of the TV afternoon movie and its accompanying format. Featured most prominently during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, the afternoon movie was at times like sticking your hand into a chocolate box without specificity or discretion. You could unwrap a sketchy looking sheath to unveil a chocolate with more chocolate inside, or some kind of marshmallow. Or you could unwrap a pristine Gold wrapping to unveil a chocolate thinly covering some kind of odd tasting jelly, blech. Many American cities in the aforementioned decades had at least one station it seemed that ran the afternoon movie. This was long before Cableganza was upon us and all were inundated with pixelated distraction ad infinitum. Usually, a local non-Network affiliated channel from a big Megapolis, such as WDCA-20 from Washington, D.C. or WSBK-38 from Boston, Mass would show older movies in the afternoon. Some channels had the “Dialing for Dollars” construct, where the host of the program that was broadcasting the movie would literally scroll through the phonebook, call random Mother-Fuckers and ask them what movie he was showing. If the callee knew the answer, they would receive 50 bucks or some shit like that. My Grandmother on my Father’s side, God bless her and rest in peace, had the mind frame of a kept housewife even when nobody was keeping her. She was essentially retired from work by the early 1970’s when she was in her own early 50’s, so she always had the afternoon movie on the TV in her well-kept museum room decor-looking house.
I was Nine years old and my Sister Courtenay was Seven and we were staying with Granny for the week in her new town house in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. It was one of those new planned developments that people were moving into in the Summer of 1977. A planned community with matching houses, perfectly spaced apart from each other. The little community had a pool, either Granny or the oft-drunk Grandpa could take us to swim, members only. One day in the middle of this particular week, Grandpa went to the racetrack and it was a day in the house with Granny with 80 degree temperatures outside in temperate Washington state in early August.
After running around the house 73 times since awakening at dawn (I was still on East Coast time physiologically) and had already taken in a few second-hand chest pulls of Granny’s morning indoor Breakfast of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, I was beginning to sketch out the Pilot for my Youth Adventure rewrite of the TV action show of the time “Baa Baa Black Sheep” (Which would essentially be the same show with all the drunken sex scenes taken out), when Granny suddenly exclaimed from in front of her other electric friend, the portable television, “ooh, ‘Naked Jungle’ with Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker, this is a good one!” Granny stopped playing her endless morning game of Solitaire to watch this flick, Granny was a weirdo, so I took notice of the film she was entranced by. I can safely say, I never forgot this movie, even after 47 years when I re-watched it. This movie is a riot.
From 1954, “The Naked Jungle” is set somewhere in South America. At one point, a character mentions Ecuador to be a nearby country. I’m no Coffee expert, but since the movie takes place on a supposed Coffee plantation, I am going to take a wild guess and say the setting for this movie is either Peru or Columbia. The year is 1901, Charlton Heston is a fortune hunting self-made capitalist asshole named Leninger, he supposedly came to the jungle in 1886 at the age of 19 to be an incel business badass. By the time he is 34 according to the story in the movie, he is either tired of being an emotional Virgin or tired of hearing and feeling the slapping cheeks of Indigenous Jungle girls, or both. He decides to order a mail-order Bride like many good God-fearing Protestants would be want to do.
Enter Eleanor Parker as Joanna, the Mail-order bride, she’s got this Courtesan vibe with her, just a little too well put together. She’s so fucking beautiful, it throws Leninger off his game, way off his game when he meets her finally. This Technicolor effort by Director Byron Haskin is curiously also Produced by 1950’s legendary special effects wizard George Pal, famous for his creation of the Martians in the 1953 Hollywood film version of HG Welles’ “War of the Worlds”. So what special effects are in this besides Eleanor Parker, you ask? This is really two movies in one, but it’s all about a slow-drip romance that squeezes every ounce of anticipation out of it’s allure, much like John Ford’s “The Quiet Man”, also made in 1954.
Leninger tries to be fake nice, his new bride is not turned on. Leninger attempts to be mean and controlling and his new bride is not turned on. Finally, Leninger admits to Joanna that he has no experience with First-World Women at all, he just knows how to get with Jungle prostitutes who accept the payment of a fresh Cocunaut on the night stand. Leninger in a moment of vulnerability admits he has no experience with Women and that he feels intimidated/humiliated by Joanna and her smooth repertoire and the knowledge that she has an ex-Husband already in life under her belt. Knowing that Joanna has superior knowledge in both relationships and sex, Leninger was secretly hoping for an Virginal Girl Scout, not a duplicitous escort who has been around the proverbial block. The detente between new Husband and Wife is as palpable as the simultaneous sexual frigidity. When are they going to stop posturing and fuck, for Christ sakes? Each of Heston and Parker look the equal of the other, we definitely get a sense that every time they are physically near each other there is heat, it’s not just the close proximity to the equator.
As Leninger, the hard-ass Confederate Coffee Plantation Owner, Heston is a visage of uber-human toil and unbridled masculinity. Every day on the plantation is an ass bust with his Indigenous slaves, er, housed workers. Leninger built a Nineteenth Century style mansion in the middle of the Jungle near the Amazon River, can’t imagine Lloyd’s of London insuring that shit. He would have great seats, however, if Fitzcarraldo’s opera boat happened to sail by in mid-libretto. There couldn’t be a trustworthy roofer for miles. This movie shamefully uses a few British actors in dark face, the Indigenous Jungle folks are played to be about as primitive as one could imagine. The inference here is that by working for Leninger he treats them so fairly that they have a better life working under him then they would trying to farm and work for themselves, a shameless capitalist and colonialist manifesto.
Parker, by contrast, as Joanna, is drawn to Leninger’s life and energy, but is tired of his controlling incel misogyny, she wants to be his adventure partner, not his trophy wife. Hence, she toys with him when it is evening and he is on her turf socially. During the day, he is a workaholic Leviathan, she wants to be included in his work adventure and struggle but he can only see her as a Feminine object so their time is only spent together in the evening when he expects her to act demure, dress extravagantly and play piano for him and his guests. Joanna’s tales of her first marriage turn Leninger off to the point that he wants her to go….all the way back to New Orleans where she came from. Joanna is an extremely strong character; while she may be drawn to Leninger, she is so empowered she is not putting up with his controlling bullshit. emotionally at one point she has defeated him, he is romantically vanquished and bereft of desire. Since Leninger knows little of Women, he can only show her off, not knowing that she needs to sweat with him in his world of hardscrabble agriculture to connect with him, not be his show pony.
To put these two potential Colonialist love birds on the right track toward bungling in the jungle, the film’s script by Ronald MacDougall and the blacklisted writer Ben Maddow develops the most insane plot twist that I could imagine at age Nine and watching it again it’s still pretty fucking nuts, I would love to see a modern reboot of this. Leninger and Joanna’s romance needs an artificial boost, and boy does it get one.
Leninger and the local Commissioner, played by Anglo William Conrad (Later star of the TV series “Cannon”, where watching his big fat ass run down a flight of stairs with faux Disco Music in the background seemed to take like five minutes out of each episode’s air time) are having drinks one night when Leninger informs the local Commissioner that he is ditching his wife. The Commissioner informs Leninger that he’s a fool and oh, by the way there maybe a swarm of Billions of Army Ants on the march towards Leninger’s plantation to eat everything, and by that, I mean eat EVERYTHING. The Commissioner refers to the ants as “Mora Bunta” and the music score gets suddenly creepy and sinister. The score by Daniele Amfitheatrof is solid and at times thrilling. “Mora Bunta” apparently means “Soldier Ants” that move in formation and eat everything in sight. In this fantasy-based portrayal of South America, the Ants are believed to come out every 27 years and cause Locust-type destruction for miles and miles (including eating animals, people, born-again Christians, etc) until they mysteriously descend back into the ground again.
So I looked up some creepy facts about Army Ants and apparently they can indeed devour little Forest animals and sometimes animals as big as pythons. One source I read says they can take down an Elephant by entering the Elephant’s ears and making their way to eat the Elephant’s brains. Here is where the magic of George Pal and his special effects team come in, as we the viewers are treated to a large panoramic shot of a huge swath of the Amazon jungle being devoured. As a few humans watch from far away, billions and billions (Carl Sagan voice) of hongry and potentially coked-up (it is Columbia, after all, they probably gobbled up a plant or two thousand) ants get their grub on. It is an amazing special effects shot, the edges of the jungle where the Ants are eating seems to vibrate in the distance with the chomping of the Ants. The movie plays in tone like an old-fashioned Action-Adventure movie, yet there are elements of Horror as well. Sex and Death appear to conjoin in a a scene where Joanna and Leninger realize that the Ants have made it impossible for Joanna to leave; they come upon the skeletal remains of the owner of a rival plantation stripped clean of his flesh by the Ants. The fact that Joanna is not freaked out by the danger turns Leninger on, she is now displaying that she is as tough-minded as he is, he can relate to that.
The film carries on it’s pattern of unveiled racism when all the Natives and Mestizos of the land are so terrified of the Ants they either die in their tracks or they head for the hills while Leninger, the only pure-breed White guy around takes the Ants head on. Joanna joins Leninger on his Anglo power trip when she informs him he has to keep her at the plantation, otherwise all of the Native workers will run away as well. If they see it’s too scary for the White Woman, it’s too scary for them. She wants in on the action, it’s why she’s there. The Ants are a traumatizing event like a Hurricane, or a Volcano, they are there dramatically to stimulate the romance of the two leads.
One sequence that made hilariously no sense to me involved the Indigenous Indians living on Leninger’s plantation, many of whom flee at the first mention of Mora Bunta, yet when Leninger has a crazy plan to defeat the Ants, some of the remaining Indigenous folks blow some bombastic notes on some giant conch shells and suddenly twice as many people that left the plantation now come back to seek shelter from the rampaging Ants.
Due in part to it’s racist stereotypes of the Indigenous people, “The Naked Jungle ” would be a cult film as time goes by, I feel it could be reborn as a sweeping love story set against the backdrop of people fighting to survive against billions of hungry ants. Several of the scenes involving Producer Pal’s effects are eye-popping and will keep this movie alive in the public’s nostalgic eye for longer than most that are doomed to future internet anonymity. The real story for me in this film however, is the Anglo elitist champion battle of the sexes between Heston and Parker and the sexual tension that it leads to; these two eloquent actors are given lives in this film that feed into the idea that both characters are searching inside themselves to find their true sexiest inner selves to please the other.
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