Female Jungle

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.

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.

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.

I imagine the sole reason for most people to want to see this movie is for the screen debut of 50s cinema sex goddess Jayne Mansfield. However, the film itself stands up reasonably well after fifty years.

The plot, as you are probably already aware, concerns the hunt for the killer of a Hollywood actress, murdered after she leaves a bar. An off-duty cop is in the frame as the killer and sets out to track down the real culprit.

This movie was obviously done on the cheap but has a gritty edge to it and more than enough action and suspense to fill its meagre running time. Shot entirely at night the film has an oppressive feel and has good performances from all concerned. Jayne Mansfield, in her film debut, is very impressive as a slutty broad and performs well without her trademark squeal. Although obviously very attractive she isn't at all glamorous here and acts very well. For anyone in doubt of her abilities then Female Jungle proves that she definitely had something.

Cheap, short and in the long term, forgettable, this is still an entertaining way to spend an hour. Don't break your neck to see it but if the opportunity arises, don't pass it by.

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.