Il gorilla

With impressive scenery, close-ups of animals and rich colour photography, Swedish master cinematographer Sven Nykvist directed "Gorilla" in cooperation with Lars-Henrik Ottoson and Lorens Marmstedt. Nykvist also acted as Director of Photography with Bengt Lindström, creating some wonderful images of rhinos, anteaters, elephants, crocodiles et cetera. Added to this more or less documentary material is a story about the white hunter and some villagers' fear of an old gorilla male. The film is an interesting depiction of Congo in the 1950's, seen from the white man's perspective.

This was a spectacularly impressing film for its amazing animal shots, actually catching life in the deepest jungles of the Congo 60 years ago in the 1950s. The photo is by Ingmar Bergman's favourite photographer Sven Nykvist and brags all the way of splendid professionalism. The story is rather banal but nevertheless well told, an established Belgian hunter having trouble with a Swedish tourist imposing on him with her total ignorance of the jungle, and with a gorilla harassing a village and killing villagers. This is the first Swedish colour film, and it's amazingly well made under evidently extremely primitive circumstances. The main asset of the film is not the story or the players but the splendid photography of the animals, especially elephants but also crocodiles, giraffes, okapis and the gorilla himself, towering in terror like almost a mythical figure of mystery, the film building up to a nerve-racking finale of the difficult gorilla hunt. Also the psychology of this lonesome gorilla and his predicament is very well unveiled. It''s a film on the level with the Swedish master of nature films at the time, Arne Sucksdorff, who almost simultaneously filmed in colour in India from the deep forests there, but with natives only. Here the beautiful Gio Petré as the blonde tourist in shorts add an extra charm to the jungle adventure and hardships, but I agree with the previous reviewer, that the film is best regarded as almost a documentary. It actually ends by asserting the fact that its story is true.

Sven Nykvist directs and shoots a film about a Swedish man in the jungle. He makes his living collecting animals for zoos. When a village is attacked by a rogue gorilla he heads into the bush to kill it.At the same time he is saddled with a female photographer who insists on going along. More documentary then drama this is a beautiful film that shows a side of the African wilderness that is probably all gone now. Certainly animals like the rhinoceros with horns the size of a small car are gone. As a documentary of life in the jungle and its changing nature its a great little film. Clearly the filmmakers are were aware that the world they were filming was changing and they note it in the narration. As a drama the film is pretty standard stuff. its clear that the man and the women will have a romance and all of that. However there really isn't much to the story and the emotional climax of the film isn't really the gorilla hunt, which ends with a "thats it?" moment, rather its an elephant stampede just before it. Flaws of the drama aside this is quite simply one of the better African lensed films I've seen. Certainly its one of the better documentaries of the period(which predates the Mondo Cane style shock films by a couple of years). I really liked this film. If you take it as a drama its 6 out of 10. As a documentary its 7 out of ten.