The Jungle (1952)

Rugged great white hunter Steve Bentley (well played with appropriately manly resolve by Rod Cameron) and feisty Indian princess Mari (a sturdy performance by the sultry Marie Windsor) embark on an expedition into the India jungle in order to find out the source of wild animal stampedes that have left many people dead.Director William Berke relates the engrossing story at a steady pace and maintains a likable sincere tone throughout. Cameron and Windsor make for personable leads; they receive fine support from Cesar Romero as Mari's loyal and protective husband Rama Singh. Carroll Young's tight script draws the characters with some depth and presents plenty of thrilling obstacles for the protagonists to contend with. The exotic locations add an extra tangy flavor. The stampede sequences with scared elephants trampling everything in their path are genuinely harrowing; ditto several moments depicting animals fighting each other to the death. A dance sequence with various lovely harem girls rates as another definite highlight. Clyde DeVinna's crisp black and white cinematography basks everything in a gorgeous sepia tone. Worth a watch.

This is one strange film from Lippert Pictures. They spent a lot of time and trouble to take a film crew over to India with three Occidental players in Marie Windsor, Cesar Romero, and Rod Cameron. A lot of very nice background footage of India is sadly wasted on a rather unbelievable story.Today's computer graphics might have been able to come up with more convincing Ice Age type mammoths who are terrorizing contemporary elephants who are in turn running for their lives and trampling a lot of humans in the process in Marie Windsor's kingdom. The mammoths we see here look like today's pachyderms dressed up in raccoon coats.In any event Marie who has been learning western ways is summoned hastily back to her Indian kingdom after her father died. She has enemies herself who are opposed to any modernization and want to kill her which forms a subplot to this film.Ruling in her place until she got home was prime minister Cesar Romero who hired white hunter Rod Cameron to solve a problem of raiding elephants. Cameron was the lone survivor of an expedition where Romero's brother was killed and Cameron comes back with this tall tale about prehistoric mammoths.One thing is for certain. Mammoths were Ice Age creatures who died off when the earth's general climate warmed up. No way would they be living even in a remote area of the Indian jungle. But I guess no one thought of that in making The Jungle.

I can't really criticize this film. It is literally the first film I ever remember seeing and lead to a lifelong love of science fiction and horror films and prehistoric animals. Fortunately, seeing it again years later, it held up fairly well. Rod Cameron plays a big game hunter whose last safari was wiped out by mammoths. No one believes him, including his best friend, played by Cesar Romero, whose brother was among those killed. And Rod Cameron was the only survivor. The film was shot in India and has some good scenery. The acting is on a high level. I don't believe Rod Cameron, Cesar Romero and Marie Winsor ever turned in a bad performance. The mammoths, when they finally arrive are fairly effective. The ending also has an unusual twist, particularly for a 1950's science fiction film. Definitely worth seeing.

Most films about prehistoric animals almost always feature dinosaurs. This is one of the few films I know of that deals with prehistoric mammals. In this film the menace is woolly mammoths that are driving elephants out of the countryside and into villages wrecking havoc and death. While the basic idea is interesting, the film itself is slow going. The American version which is only a little more than an hour long is padded with lots material designed to use up footage. Its seems it takes the party almost forever to encounter the mammoths. The final confrontation is exciting but it takes too long. The only other point of interest is that this is the earliest American/Indian co-production that I am aware of.