La selva negra

This has to be one of my favourite movies. Madeleine Carroll put in an great part as Linda Stewart, and I think it is one of the best she has ever delivered. Plus with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Jim Logan along side Tullio Carminati, this movie can't go wrong. A great movie and a great cast!

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. didn't think much of Safari as a film, describing it as a routine action programmer in his memoir Salad Days. He did however like the Hollywood karma of getting Madeline Carroll finally after losing her to Ronald Colman in The Prisoner Of Zenda.

Safari is one of those pale imitation films of some better jungle films and Fairbanks himself is a cut rate Hemingwayesque action figure who coincidentally fought in the Spanish Civil War. Carroll in fact lost her fiancé in the same war, but now she's accompanying titled no account count Tullio Carminati on Safari. Carminati is looking to make her his trophy countess and he's a man to the manor born and used to getting his way.

Mentioning the politics her makes me wonder why that aspect of Safari was not further developed. Had it been Safari would have been a better film.

Also the natives weren't exactly treated with any respect. Fairbanks refers to the native bearers by the names of Snow White's 7 Dwarfs I guess so he and the other whites don't have to remember their given African names. It certainly doesn't play well today.

And even in all that tropic heat Madeline Carroll's porcelain blond beauty shines.

I'd skip Safari unless you're a big fan of the stars.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is the best hunter in... well, whatever part of the African jungle that the Paramount backlot and the L.A. County Arboretum is supposed to be. He's called it quits. He can smell the War developing in Europe, and he wants to be part of it. Nonetheless, he agrees to one last trip with Count Tullio Carminati and his would-be Countess, Madeleine Carroll. Doug is very professional, but Carminati is high-handed, and Miss Carroll thinks she can use Doug to make Carminati jealous enough to marry her.

It's directed by Edward H. Griffith that somehow takes all the stereotypes of African natives at the time and humanizes them a bit. Fairbanks gives a good, straightforward performance that plays off the action movies he was making in this period, Rupert of Hentzau, and GUNGA DIN and THE CORSICAN BROTHERS. Miss Carroll is playing the serious gold-digger that her Hollywood career had type-cast her as, and Lynn Overman is present, sporting a Scottish accent as Fairbanks' mentor and plot-advancer. It's a well done movie, given the sort of budget that Paramount could spend on a programmer, if not one to advance anyone's career: a paycheck movie for Fairbanks amidst more interesting projects.

Beryl Markham, a prolific lady bush pilot of the 1930's was invited to be in this movie playing herself, flying the sorties used. Her father trained horses in Africa, where she learned the adventurous life. Beryl soloed in a Gypsy Moth aircraft in 1931. She became an intrepid pilot, loved flying in the African bush, and hence a natural to participate in "Safari", doing what she did in real life. In the 1930's she developed her own method of flying her aircraft over game lands, spotting the location of elephants and other game, then over the safari hunters to direct them to the game. Around 1936, she flew the Atlantic solo from England to Nova Scotia. This feat likely put her in the limelight that led her to Safari. Her Atlantic fight is a later chapter in her autobiography "West With The Night" (1942). A later critical biography on Beryl Markham, "Straight on Till Morning" was written by Mary Lovell (1987).

"Safari" was Beryl's only movie.

I wish I knew where I could get to see this 'Safari', or obtain a copy VHS or CD.