Bomba, enfant de la jungle

I guess I saw this when I was about eleven years old too, in the Mayfair Theater in Hillside, New Jersey. I remember getting quite a kick out of it, since I'd read all of the adventures of Bomba the Jungle Boy, a kind of second-rate Tarzan who lives in the Amazon Basin instead of an African Valley.

Mostly, I remember one particular scene. Peggy Ann Garner has had some sort of trouble pushing her way through the bush and her skirt is torn. Bomba, in a fashion that is unusually cultivated for the Amazon basin, points that out to her. She grabs her torn skirt, flips it, and glances down for a moment at her underpants showing through the tear. I thought I would die with excitement.

There were other adventures too, most involving animals I think, but I've long forgotten them.

Historical note: The Mayfair turned to even MORE explicit fare in the 1970s and, the last time I saw it, was boarded up and defaced by grafitti. And to think that George Washington passed within one hundred feet of this site on a trip to New York. The old days are gone forever. (Sob.)

I discovered BOMBA in the late eighties, thru my US VHS provider. Never heard of it before, the same with JUNGLE JIM character and movie series too. If you love TARZAN, you should,I say YOU SHOULD, like this cute series of movies, and not episodes, unlike JUNGLE JIM, which existed both in movie theaters and on TV. So back to this series of films made of course in Monogram studio lots, and certainly not on locations, it is fun, full of animals, natives, villains, celluloid jungle. OK, when you have seen one, you can consider you have seen the other ones, but for your kids, even now, in 2023, it would be better than Iphone silly and disturbing, insane games.

Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949)

** (out of 4)

When MGM decided to take their Tarzan series into a different direction, Johnny Weissmuller headed to Columbia to start the Jungle Jim series while his son, Boy, went to Monogram and began production on another Tarzan rip- off, Bomba, which would end up running for twelve films. The series opener has Pat Harland (Peggy Ann Garner) and her father (Onslow Stevens) are in Africa trying to take photos of some rare animals when she ends up in the jungle lost. Soon Bomba (Sheffield) shows up to show her some of the finer, less appreciated things in life. There's no question that this series should have been called TARZAN, JR. and there's no question that what brain cells the MGM series had are pretty much gone here. This isn't a horrible movie but at the same time it's doubtful too many are going to find it completely entertaining and this is due to several factors. One is that the screenplay really doesn't offer us anything new, original or really all that entertaining. I thought for the most part we got one boring sequence after another and in fact it takes nearly thirty-minutes before Bomba shows up, another ten-minutes for any sort of action and it takes yet another fifteen-minutes before Garner finally gets into her leopard-skinned outfit. As with the Tarzan films and the countless other rips, this film gets the benefit of many stock footage shots of the wildlife in Africa. We get to see a wide range of animals but it's obvious the footage was shot for other movies as it looks quite poor and even for stock footage the stuff isn't that good because the shots are so far away from the target and out of focus that at times you struggle to even tell what you're looking at. For some reason the film is pretty light on action as there are only a few fight sequences and even these are pretty tame. The first time Bomba fights a fake leopard it all happens off camera. The one saving grace to the film are the performances. Sheffield does a nice job playing the lead character and Garner adds up some nice support. The two feature some nice chemistry together and fans of HOUSE OF Dracula will enjoy seeing Stevens in his part. At just 70-minutes the movie goes by at a decent pace but it's just too bad they didn't try something fresh or original to throw a little life into the picture.

When I sat down to watch "Bomba: The Jungle Boy" I thought I was in for a fun, goofy hour. Instead I sat through a painfully dull movie. This is my second Bomba movie and I don't want to be mean but Johnny Sheffield is deadwood on screen. He brings nothing to the table. On the plus side, Peggy Ann Garner is cute and appealing. So the stars kind of balance each other out. "Bomba: The Jungle Boy" will only stay in my memory bank for about another ten minutes.

Johnny Sheffield as a teenage Tarzan in the African wilds, rescuing a pretty young shutterbug and (rather half-heartedly) attempting to reunite her with her photographer father and his guides. Having already played "Boy" opposite Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan several times, Sheffield was a natural choice to enact the formative years of this role once filmmakers began to run out of ideas and made the (worthwhile) decision to explore the loin-clothed legend's early beginnings. Sheffield is somewhat self-conscious as the boy who calls himself Bomba, and yet his modest performance is the best thing in the picture. He's straightforward in an innocent way, immature and yet brave around the girl, and he manages an amusing connection with the audience (one can almost hear the sighs of young filmgoers as Bomba gently helps Peggy Ann Garner's Pat onto a log to cross the river). The film is padded with nature footage (most of it poorly photographed and repetitive), and too much time is spent dragging the characters back and forth through the foliage, but the simple story (perky girl meets tame savage boy) still holds a spark of enchantment. ** from ****