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This jungle adventure from Universal Pictures and director James Whale follows an expedition into the South American jungle led by Keith Brandon (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). They're searching for a lost Inca city said to contain valuable treasure. However, they soon encounter two problems: restless hostile natives that don't like these outsiders monkeying with their sacred sites; and a woman (Joan Bennett), a late addition to their party, who attracts the affections of more than one of the men in the party.

This is an infamous flop, regarded by most involved as the low point of their respective careers. I didn't find it nearly that bad, and much better than many other jungle movies that I've seen. Perhaps it was the big budget and large cast that garnered unmet heightened expectations. The script is silly, with a lot of corny dialogue, especially in the melodramatic love scenes. And there's a lot of blatant ignorance about the native culture depicted, but that was part and parcel of these kinds of movies during that time. I still ended up enjoying this a bit, thanks to the cast and the "forbidden temple" setting.

A search for gold in Incan ruins is complicated by the arrival of a pretty lady. This is one of those old movies that you really want to love but it just doesn't work. The sets are terrific and would be reused to great effect by Universal in other films. On paper the cast is excellent. Sadly most are either underutilized or given parts that don't play to their strengths. Why was Alan Hale playing a straight role? The movie would have benefited greatly from one of his fun lighter performances. Doug Fairbanks huffs and puffs his way through the whole thing doing a poor Clark Gable imitation. And that awful part for Joan Bennett - don't get me started!

I've revisited this movie a few times over the years, hoping to find more to like about it. At its best it's a forgettable Saturday afternoon adventure flick. Unfortunately a lot of it is kind of dull and lacking in much style. You'd never guess James Whale directed this.

Started off promising but got bogged down in the middle with the introduction of Mrs. Richardson (Joan Bennett). Warning, spoilers will most likely be in the rest of the review. It seemed kind of pointless to kill off Vincent Price so early in the movie, a lot was made of how mysterious he was. Also, convenient of George Sanders to kill himself just before they get rescued, this prevents any kind of entanglements there might have been if they all had been rescued. The fun thing to do with this film, is that knowing that director James Whale was gay, is to look at the characters in another light. Isn't it strange that everything was going great with the exploring party made up of just men but once Bennett comes along everything goes to hell? Also what was the deal with John Howard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.? It sure seemed to me that Howard was carrying a torch for Doug. Oh, the mind reels.

Some people know how to make a movie. That is when we get a film.

This is an example.

This is simple story telling and adventure, with some great scenery.

It's set in a jungle as a team of excavators hope to bring back Gold and news of an archaeological find.

The key is to have all the elements.

We have expert directing, more than adequate editing, and good script writing enough to tell an exciting and interesting story. In today's world of dull routine scripts, this is probably more exciting than a modern audience is used to. This was made in the days when people were smart enough to know de Mille was someone to emulate, and this director does emulate de Mille in many ways, as much as he can with a less than de Mille budget.

The next element is believable and interesting characters. We have a slew of them. More than the usual excavation team. Even a few of the natives have interesting, believable, and important roles. Some of the more ignorant red necks of today will scoff at the superstitious ways, but superstitious attitudes are what makes this even more believable. We're at an Information Age cusp right now in which many of the younger people wallow in an Ignorance they aren't aware of, and don't realize what makes a character in 1940 credible.

This is excellent story telling and adventure. To deny that is to look like a jealous fool.

Essentially "Lost Patrol with a Girl"; not enough action to be a true adventure. Nice photography and spotty acting are the main features of Whale's last film. Noble Englishmen exploit grateful natives, finding treasure in an Inca temple. They fight over "the girl" and then are surrounded by savages with poison darts. Good battle scenes at the end. A must for Whale fans, for everyone else it's a moderately amusing time-waster.

Voted the worst picture of the year by the students of Harvard and presumably the winner of the Harvard Lampoon award for 1940 if such was given out back in the day, Green Hell is a great example of what some actors will do for a friend.

Note the credits for producer of this film, the name of the gentleman was Harry Eddington. He and another man Frank Vincent were partners in a talent agency and according to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in his memoirs, Eddington had always wanted to be a producer. He was well liked by his clients and the cast members he assembled were from mostly his free lance clients who did a favor for him. He got Frances Marion to write the script and James Whale to direct and sold the whole business to Universal.

Other than some establishing shots the entire thing was done on the sound stage of Universal. It all looks phony, even the King Kong jungle at RKO was better than this. Of course American movie companies were not shooting abroad in tropical climates at this time. Fairbanks remembers that while the sets were all phony, the humidity due to lack of air conditioning wasn't.

The story is set in South America at the Amazon headwaters where one of those movie lost cities has been found. Rumors of Inca treasure has brought a motley concoction of adventurers on an expedition headed by archaeologists Alan Hale and ramrodded by Fairbanks. Vincent Price is part of the group, but he's killed off before a third of the film is done. But when the native porters bring back medicine to help him possibly survive poison arrows, they also bring back his wife, now his widow Joan Bennett.

And Joan is dressing pretty chic for jungle travel, she's got all the guys panting after her. But when those headhunters who killed off Price come back, it's starting to look more like the Alamo.

Green Hell is a curious concoction that's part Trader Horn, part Rain, a little of the Alamo and a little of John Ford's Lost Patrol. Vincent Price as well as Fairbanks used to cheerfully make fun of this film.

What some people won't do for a friend.

Director James Whale was nearing the end of his rope when he made the dismal Green Hell, in which he was perhaps trying to do for jungle movies what his earlier The Old dark House did for horror pictures: to spoof the genre with wit and style. But the script isn't there, and the excellent cast, which includes George Sanders, Vincent Price, George Bancroft and Alan Hale, flounder, and play altogether too sincerely for laughs.

At his peak, in the early and middle thirties, Whale was one of the masters of film. His reputation was at least as high as Hitchcock's, and there seemed no end to what magic he could do on celluloid. His best work was in the horror field, but there was really no reason why he should have stayed there.

One senses in Green Hell a director who wants to get out of the movie business altogether. The film would be sub-par even for a routine studio director. Whale was perhaps eager to get back to his first love, painting. He succeeded.

'Green Hell' was Whale's penultimate feature length film. Frances Marion, the screen writer, was famous in the silent era, but when the talkies came in, her scripts had to be re-written by others for dialog. She simply had no talent at all for that; her mastery was in plot and action.

Whale was coming off of 'The Man in the Iron Mask' which made lots of money for its producer, and Whale's agent told him that if he made 'Green Hell' it would put him back in the limelight.

The budget was good enough, $685,000, and he had a reasonable thirty-six days to complete it. He had the help of Karl Freund and Ted Kent, his long time favorite editor, and one of his favorite assistant directors, Joe McDonough.

The ambient temperature was screamingly high that summer; Freund's large bank of carbon arc lights didn't help. The problem with the film was the script. The dialog was worse than inane, audiences were falling out of their seats, laughing.

I think Whale may have been bipolar. He had periods of manic activity, interspersed with complete disinterest in what he was doing. He was a director who was not afraid of demanding re-writes, and he did have a talent for judging scripts. He must have known that he was attempting to turn a color-by-the-numbers canvas into a work by Picasso, but when Ted Kent approached him about the script, Whale, according to James Curtis, Whales biographer, said merely that it was "very good. Great."

Francis Marion wanted her name taken off the credits. But she wrote the script, and very little had been done to change. Her credit remained, and it was the last script she ever sold.

The reviews were terrible. In his memoirs, Douglas Fairbanks doesn't so much as mention the film. Famous Productions had lasted for the length of this one movie, the company failed before the film was released. Harry Edington, according to Curtis, "took a job as production chief at RKO."

I rated this a six but actually I enjoy this type of film. I expected much more from a top cast and director like James Whale. At any rate,it wasn't a total disappointment. The actors gave fairly good performances considering the screen play and hammy direction by Whale. It was fast moving and there were some good moments. The viewer just has to be patient.

With a cast that includes some big names (Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Bennett) and a couple of guys who usually play fascinating villains (Vincent Price and George Sanders) you'd think this movie would be a lot more entertaining than it is. Also, for an adventure story of men going into the jungle to find lost gold from an ancient civilization might also spark added interest...but that didn't work, either.

Credibility is a big problem here, at least looking at this film 50-plus years after it was made. When you see South American natives that look and sound like they came right off the farm in Kansas, it's tough to take the movie seriously! The sets were pretty hokey, too, and the dialog was really corny.

This was another movie that started off strong and the quickly became horrible and stayed that way.

Well actually, Green Hell is not as bad as all that, it begins strongly and has some decent battles at the end. But what started off promising goes to dust once the two best actors of the movie, George Sanders and Vincent Price, get killed off early on, and Joan Bennett's very irritatingly dull character gets introduced, making a short spout of perhaps unintentional fun turn to tedium after a while. Green Hell doesn't look that lavish and the sets are rather hokey. The dialogue is unbearably corny and the story is full of predictability, a complete lack of credibility(I agree about people sounding too much like they come from Kansas) and contrived situations. James Whale's direction seems disengaged and does little to make anything exciting or thrilling, the two main things that a jungle adventure does need. The acting looks great on paper, but most take their roles too seriously(Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Joan Bennett) or try hard but are not in the movie anywhere near long enough(George Sanders, Vincent Price). Overall, not a complete disaster but ludicrous, contrived and corny and possibly the worst films of Whale and Price(possibly Fairbanks as well). 3/10 Bethany Cox

I will propose here that some films have merit, and are worth watching even though they are horrible. I mean to exclude laughing at ineptness from the equation.

This is an example. It has three notable items, the first of which is where the allure resides.

— It takes itself seriously. Really, the appeal of competence fades in the light of earnestness. As soon as it appeared, the participants realized it was a disaster, but you rarely know that when you are making the thing. It had name talent and a reasonable budget. The narrative stance has no irony or folds. It was intended to hit straight on, and even if the arrow did not score, it was shot with the intent to kill. And that matters.

— The film world had long since developed a shorthand for black sexual malevolence by depicting the risky jungle. Two touchstones were "Kongo" and "King Kong" both of which exploited the (then) visceral fear from racism. The same is attempted here, but I do not believe that any of the natives are played by blacks. The effect is startling, a now comic understanding of how transference occurs. You have the deep seated fear of sexual arousal out of control in the American populace. Deep, and strong. That gets transferred to an innocent people, only recently by the time of this film. That in turn gets denoted in unambiguous ways by the jungle and jungle people in film. At each step, there is a trailing disconnect, so that by the time you get to this film, the people in the jungle do not have to remotely look native. (It is not Africa, but that is irrelevant.)

— the script has all the elements. Sexual betrayal. Sexual competition (separately). Ancient magic attached to gold. Sexual imagery with phallic structures and blasting through walls to release floods. All the competitors (stereotypes) locked in a small space fighting the inevitability of death. It doesn't work, like "Kongo" does. But there sure as heck are all the parts.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

'Green Hell' does not deserve the contempt it gained at its time, as it does keep up with the spirit of pure adventure. Perfectly discardable are the funny situations that occur between so many males in the presence of a female - which go from stupid jealousy to ridiculous declarations of love. 'Green Hell' can be seen as a crazy denouement with certain points of naivety. By the end the characters are at the doorstep of a new adventure, aware of what they will do until the last of their days: carry on.

Green Hill was one of those old adventure movies where a bunch of guys gathered in the interior of Africa, or the Mayan ruins, to find secret treasure or a gold artifact. This one felt a little low-budget, without A-tier actors or Technicolor footage. However, it was entertaining, and some of the characters really kept me riveted. I particularly liked George Sanders in this movie. Usually a villain, instead he was a big-hearted, jovial fellow who was doomed to have a broken heart mainly because he didn't get first billing in the opening credits.

Joan Bennett, the object of everyone's affection, is desired by many men. No one knows exactly why she's come to such a terribly dangerous, deserted place, but some think they can discover her secrets. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Is the fellow who does get first billing but doesn't have as many likable moments in his character as George. While George sings, dances, and enjoys cheering Joan up, Doug Jr. Broods, worries, and snaps at people. Poor Joan; tough decision. Also on the expedition are Vincent Price, John Howard, Alan Hale as a foreign doctor, Gene Garrick, and George Bancroft as a guitar-strumming Texan. When he sings "Home on the Range," it's barely passable, but when George Sanders chimes in, it's hilarious. His big, booming voice cuts through and turns the ditty into an opera ballad!