African Treasure

African Treasure finds Johnny Sheffield as Bomba the Jungle Boy looking to help his native friends who've been taken prisoners and forced to mine diamonds in a secret location that some smugglers know about. Arthur Space and Lane Bradford keep the prisoners and another criminal played by Lyle Talbot holds Bomba's friend, Commissioner Leonard Mudie prisoner as well. The odds don't look good for Bomba.

But of course with his knowledge of jungle ways Sheffield does triumph in the end. Like Tarzan, Bomba has a chimp to make chumps out of the bad guys and save him in a tight spot. Like Tarzan, Bomba's learned the value of friendship with the animals though he does get into a fight with a lion here.

This particular Bomba entrée has got more than it share of pulp adventure sequences that would have kept its young audience glued to their movie seats. It will keep you in your Laz-E-Boy chairs as well.

"African Treasure" is the 7th of 12 Bomba the Jungle Boy films, which were made by Monogram films in the late 40s and into the 50s. It's better than most I've seen and holds up a bit better over time.

A group of ruthless diamond smugglers have kidnapped folks and are using them to mine for diamonds in the jungle. Bomba comes to the rescue and saves the day.

While the plot is very simple and the conclusion foregone, the movie works a bit better than usual because unlike most jungle films of the era, this one is NOT filled with ill-suited stock footage of animals. Too often, when they are used in movies of the 1930s-50s, the animals often aren't even African ones and the footage is quite grainy. For some reason, the filmmakers decided not to use such footage and it makes for a better movie. Now I am NOT saying "African Treasure" is any sort of classic but it does play reasonably well and is enjoyable.

Roy Rockwood's creation, Bomba, the Jungle Boy, returns for his seventh cinematic adventure--amusingly, this one as cheap and padded with stock footage as were the previous six! As the mythical "white devil" who swings from the vines and talks to the animals, Johnny Sheffield seems to know much more English this time, and he's allowed to have affectionate feelings for the requisite native girl involved in the proceedings. Still, the premise here (diamond poachers in an abandoned crater using kidnapped natives to sort out the stones from clay and help smuggle them out) doesn't allow for much animal action or boy-girl romance. Instead, we get the greedy, murderous white men ordering the natives around mercilessly, while Bomba sends urgent messages back to the village via drum calls (when Bomba takes out two sticks and starts pounding away on hollowed branches, this entry almost becomes a "Bomba" parody). The murky underwater photography, as well as a fight between Bomba and a lion, are both bottom of the barrel, however Sheffield still manages to hold the screen with his youthful appeal. *1/2 from ****

Andy Barnes (Leonard Mudie) gets word by short wave that two of the three geologists who passed through his district some weeks before were known diamond smugglers, and that nothing since has been heard of the trio. And he also learns that a hunter, Pat Gilroy (Lyle Talbot), who has just arrived at the compound is really an escaped convict named Roy DeHaven.

Obviously, time to call in Bomba the Jungle Boy (Johnny Sheffield). He is summoned via the jungle drum wireless-telegraph, and Barnes asks Bomba to go to the cheesy back lot set and try to locate Gatesby, the geologist who was with Greg (Arthur Space) and Hardy (Lane Bradford.)Bomba finds the body of Gatesby but...lucky him and the viewer---he also finds Lita Sebastian (Laurette Luez), who is out in the jungle looking for her father, Pedro (Martin Garralaga),a Portuguese guide, and the cheesy jungle set now looks better than it did.

Through the help of jungle drums and his animal friends, all stock footage except Kimbbo the Chimp, Bomba leads Lita to where her father, and a large number of natives, are being held as slaves by Greg and Hardy, who have found diamonds in the crater of an extinct volcano, known locally as The Mountain of Diamonds. Lita is captured by Greg, but Bomba has summoned help and Gerg and Hardy flee but not without first staring a landslide on the enslaved workers.

Bomba has a lot of work to do before he can restore order to this jungle.

Perhaps he's not into girls, or maybe he's already got a thing going with Kimbbo the Chimp (it can get lonely in the jungle), but Bomba (Johnny Sheffield) shows absolutely no interest in smokin' hot babe Lita Sebastian (Laurette Luez), even when she says that she doesn't know how to repay him for his bravery. I'd have a few ideas! Bomba's certainly no Tarzan, that's for sure.

Speaking of Tarzan, this adventure for Bomba isn't on a par with even the weakest of the Johnny Weismuller classics, in which Sheffield played the yodelling vine-swinger's adopted son, Boy. It's not Sheffield's fault - he does what he can with the weak material: no, the fault lies with Ford Beebe, whose direction is as bland and uninspired as his script (he also pads out his film with dreary stock footage). I've seen four other films by Beebe thus far, and 'Mediocre' seems to be his middle name.

The dismal plot sees Bomba help Lita to rescue her father, who is one of a group of unfortunates forced by diamond hunters to work in a mine in a crater in the jungle. The film is so dull that the highlights (lovely Luez aside) are a monkey wearing a napkin and the chimp throwing a rock. While I'm usually a sucker for a tussle with a stuffed lion, Beebe even manages to suck the fun out of that. The film's dumbest moments are Bomba using a tree as a makeshift jungle drum (try that next time you're in the woods to see how stupid it is) and finding a submerged tunnel through which he can swim into the crater unseen - how fortuitous!

3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for Luez.