Female Jungle

Having seen this movie recently for the first time I found it surprisingly arty. The classification cheap indie doesn't do the picture justice. The photography in sharp black and white – well, far more black than white -, the quirky camera angles and the editing are almost as good as in more famous film noirs of that period like, for example, Kiss Me Deadly.

The story has a really uneasy feel to it. I am not sure if all that surrealism is intentional or mainly caused by a low budget, I just know that is is damn effective. The action unfolds in one dark night and feels like a claustrophobic nightmare. There are several similarities to Otto Preminger's Laura, the ever effective John Carradine is cast as a rich, arrogant art critic in the line of Waldo Lydecker. And he delivers all right. But who is Laura? There are three different women who occasionally pop up, dead or alive, in photographs on billboards, in sketches or framed paintings. They are not real but rather like figments in a man's imagination. Maybe they are the same woman altogether? Very confusing. And who is the man who imagines those women? Is it the caricaturist who thinks he is a failure as an artist? Or the alcoholic policeman? I could not help assuming that they were one and the same person, too. Just think of David Lynch's Lost Highway! It is not really clear, what is going on in this picture. People do strange things. Sneaking up to an apartment at 3 a.m. asking urgently, hysterically for a caricature, entering another apartment at 3.30 a.m., having a discussion with a woman in her bedroom while in the background the woman's husband tosses uncomfortably, desperately trying to sleep, entering a third apartment at 3.45 a.m. putting a head on the bosom of Jayne Mansfield who's reclining there - without any explanation. The police detectives refuse to take people to the precinct and want to conduct the investigation into a murder in a sleazy bar near where it happened. These strange scenes are not cheap - they work in a way that you start feeling slightly feverish.

The set design is very good. Several fifties interiors and gadgets are nicely displayed. I admire all those movies in which great effect is created with little means. One reason why I like film noir where this tendency at times results in real art.

Female Jungle is a fairly good and at times noteworthy low budget indie feature. Produced by star Burt Kaiser, who plays a down on his luck sketch artist with the longest 1950's hair this side of Elvis, the film also features Lawrence Tierney, who sleepwalks through his role as a drunken cop trying to win back the respect of his sergeant by helping solve a murder mystery. Tierney's career was entering crisis mode at this point thanks to his own drinking problem, and though he's obviously trying his best here, it shows. The story is fairly feeble, but the fine cast--which also includes John Carradine, Attack of the Giant Leeches man Bruno Ve Sota, an unglamorous looking Jayne Mansfield, and Davis Roberts--is worth watching. For a poverty row cheapie the film looks quite good--a testament, perhaps, to the effective work of DoP Elwood Bredell, who always did good work with little money on 'B' classics like Man Made Monster and Phantom Lady.

Even at 73 minutes this film began to drag, which is a shame because as B-movies go it had quite a lot of promise. The 1950's were better known for the sometimes laughable sci-fi offerings - it was often only the cheap special-effects which caused derision though and the films had lots of good ideas and storylines. The film noir rip-offs from the same period didn't rely on effects and most are worth watching - they are certainly better than the straight-to-video junk churned out in the 90's.

'Female Jungle' begins with the murder of a glamourous blonde actress outside a bar. Having immediately grabbed our interest the narrative steadily falters and ultimately the good work is undone by a confused plot and characters who elicit little interest.

Lawrence Tierney plays the central character, a drunken cop who may be involved in the crime, but he only serves as a dull vehicle around which the minor, but more interesting, characters can operate. These are primarily John Carradine as the suave but sleazy agent of the murdered actress and Jayne Mansfield who plays Candy Price, the mistress of a down-on-his-luck artist who knew the victim ( the artist is played by one Burt Kaiser who also wrote and produced the film, but seems to have done nothing else at all - wonder what happened to him ).

The action seems to take place over one night - there are certainly no daylight scenes - but there is a disjointed feel to proceedings and I kept getting lost towards the end as to what was exactly happening.

If you take away the great title, the opening 5 minutes and Jayne Mansfield then there is not much here. B-Movies don't need a great deal though and these 3 elements make the film just about worth catching.

One night outside a seedy LA bar, a sexy blonde Hollywood starlet is strangled to death by an unseen, shadowy figure. Naturally the cops are baffled, and one cop in particular is having the queasy sensation that he himself might be the killer. That cop has good reason to suspect himself because he's played by Lawrence Tierney--and Detective Tierney spent that very evening in that very bar drinking himself into Blackout Land (an uncanny nod to the particular problem that sent the actor tumbling down to poverty row). After being summarily dressed down for his repeated drunkenness, Tierney is then inexplicably asked to lend his questionable expertise to solving the murder.

What then begins is a bizarrely claustrophobic nightmare chase to the end of the line, offering up a host of potential other suspects. Could it have been the sinister Hollywood gossip columnist (John Carradine) who helped make the starlet's career and was then casually dumped by her? How about the oddball caricature artist (Burt Kaiser) who had recently drawn the starlet's likeness and was one of the last people to see her alive? And what about the caricaturist's wife who just happens to work at the bar? Let's not forget about Tierney's drunken cop who staggers his way through this nocturnal labyrinth with all the conviction of a man staring down at the bottom of an empty bottle. And how does Candy, the gorgeously voluptuous call girl (Jayne Mansfield in her screen debut) who's been sexually involved with both the artist and the cop figure into all of this? Perhaps it's best to not to be overly concerned with the storyline, which is deliriously beneath pulp trash, and relish the demented visual poetry of cinematographer Elwood "Woody" Bredell, himself no stranger to the dark confines of the noir universe, with 1940s classics like PHANTOM LADY, THE KILLERS, SMOOTH AS SILK, and THE UNSUSPECTED lurking on his resume. (Bredell was 70 when he shot FEMALE JUNGLE, which would be his final feature film. He died in 1976 at age 91.) And this is precisely why FEMALE JUNGLE is such an important film, for it relentlessly discards any use for logic in favor of the inhabitation of its own deranged nightmare world. Bredell invests the film with such strikingly abstract imagery that it's impossible to attribute its surreal look and feel to the accidental good fortune of its nearly non-existent budget--as many of the film's detractors have done. Rather, it is a pure distillation of the totality of the noir ethos and much more resonant with the thrill of death and doom than any other 1950s film outside the realm of Nicholas Ray.

FEMALE JUNGLE was the first film directed by Bruno Ve Sota. And despite having directed only two others (THE BRAIN EATERS (58) and INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES (62)) his career was fairly deep as an actor, appearing in such disreputable (and legendary) films as DEMENTIA (55, aka DAUGHTER OF HORROR, which he also co-produced and allegedly co-directed), a bunch of classic 50s Roger Corman films, namely THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, ROCK ALL NIGHT, WAR OF THE SATELLITES, BUCKET OF BLOOD, THE WASP WOMAN and ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES as well as the Arch Hall, Jr. teen trasher THE CHOPPERS (61; Leigh Jason), and the tres obscure beatnik noir THE CAT BURGLAR (61; William Witney).

Shot in 1955, FEMALE JUNGLE was picked up for distribution by Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson's fledgling American International Pictures (then briefly known as ARC) and released in early 1956 as the second half of a double bill, beneath a Roger Corman western THE OKLAHOMA WOMAN. Ve Sota, oddly enough, has a small role in that film, too.

But it is FEMALE JUNGLE, an imaginatively ambitious and unapologetically naked excursion to the darkest regions of film noir, that we will remember Bruno Ve Sota for—and deservedly so.

This highly recommended film is not available on a US DVD (a UK one does exist, though). It came out on a VHS tape from RCA / Columbia in the early 90s and turns up on eBay every now and then. Jump on it when it does.

An actress who climbed into the bed of every man who could help her finally becomes a star..... and is promptly murdered. The police investigate, but disgraced sergeant Laurence Tierney wants in on the case.

It's a solid noir from American International, just before they went entirely to cheap movies made for teen-agers. It's not like they spent a lot of money on this one: an unknown director, a cinematographer who spent most of his career on Poverty Row, fading actors like Tierney and John Carradine, and Jayne Mansfield in her movie debut -- she got paid $150 for her part, then went back to selling popcorn at a movie theater. Yet like all good noirs, it's very atmospheric, and the ambience of a bar after closing, where the bar man and the janitor want to go home is just right.