Female Jungle

... and the only one released by AIP. When a hot new Hollywood starlet is murdered, the cops think it may have been off-duty detective Lawrence Tierney. Larry was blackout drunk, so he's not even sure if he's guilty or not, and decides to investigate the case himself. This mirrored problems Tierney was having in his own life with heavy drinking, which tanked his leading man acting career at RKO. Featuring Burt Kaiser (who also produced and co-wrote) as a sweaty artist, Kathleen Crowley as his wife, Jayne Mansfield (in her movie debut) as his girlfriend, John Carradine as a creepy publicity columnist, Bruno Ve Sota (who also directed and co-wrote), and a handful of actors using pseudonyms: Duane Gray (as Rex Thorsen), Cornelius Keefe (as Jack Hill), Davis Roberts (as Robert Davis), and Alan Jay Factor (as Alan Frost).

This was shot in 1954, but sat around until Mansfield made a name for herself. Co-star Crowley was reportedly assaulted (off set) during production and left the movie, so they cut her role and used a stand-in. The whole film is a bit clumsily edited and shoddily filmed, but it adds a little seedy flavor to things. It's also a bit too talky. I liked Carradine, with streaks of silver hair and large glasses, nattily dressed. He scares Crowley with his state-of-art home stereo system on which he plays classical music too loudly. Mansfield looks good, too.

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.

There's a persuasive argument to be mounted that the end of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood movie-making can be ascribed not to the studios' divestiture of its theater chains but to the explosion, in the motorized society of the 1950s, of drive-in theaters, where the main attraction was not on the screen. Up to that point, even the lowliest second feature was apt to show at least a modicum of craft and plausibility. The exploitation movies changed all that, ushering in an era when just about anything goes – or, often, nothing.

American International Pictures was the outfit that pioneered fodder for the teenage popcorn-and-petting trade. In 1956, it released one of its few features that might be considered even marginally noir – Female Jungle (also called The Hangover). Neither title quite fits, though the second has a bit more claim to legitimacy than the first, which was simply a ploy to pack 'em in.

After the gala premiere of her debut film, a starlet leaves a seedy bar and meets her quietus at the hands of a strangler. For the next hour or so, Lawrence Tierney, John Carradine, Jane Mansfield and half a dozen other characters go racketing around through the night on a series of wild-goose chases. Tierney plays an off-duty policeman whose long evening bending his elbow resulted in a blackout; he thinks he might have been the killer. Carradine plays a gossip columnist whose helped the dead starlet's career, only to be jilted. Mansfield (in her screen debut) seems to be playing a call-girl who's in love with an out-of-work caricaturist whose wife might be the next victim of….

All that said, Female Jungle remains watchable, if barely. It was AIP's policy to engage a few actors on the way up and a few more on the way down, filling up the rest of the slots with whoever was handy (both the producer and director have parts in the movie). But Tierney, by this time seriously on the skids and persona-non-grata in the major studios, exudes some of his rough magic while Carradine, looking particularly suave, gives it his old-trouper's all. And Mansfield, of course, has her own morbid fascination. There's a peculiar allure to some of this late-50s sleaze; if you're into it, this is the movie for you.

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.

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.