L'Enfer vert

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.

'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 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."

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.

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.