Green Hell (1940)

Well actually, Green Hell is not as bad as all that, it begins strongly and has some decent battles at the end. But what started off promising goes to dust once the two best actors of the movie, George Sanders and Vincent Price, get killed off early on, and Joan Bennett's very irritatingly dull character gets introduced, making a short spout of perhaps unintentional fun turn to tedium after a while. Green Hell doesn't look that lavish and the sets are rather hokey. The dialogue is unbearably corny and the story is full of predictability, a complete lack of credibility(I agree about people sounding too much like they come from Kansas) and contrived situations. James Whale's direction seems disengaged and does little to make anything exciting or thrilling, the two main things that a jungle adventure does need. The acting looks great on paper, but most take their roles too seriously(Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Joan Bennett) or try hard but are not in the movie anywhere near long enough(George Sanders, Vincent Price). Overall, not a complete disaster but ludicrous, contrived and corny and possibly the worst films of Whale and Price(possibly Fairbanks as well). 3/10 Bethany Cox

Some people know how to make a movie. That is when we get a film.This is an example.This is simple story telling and adventure, with some great scenery.It's set in a jungle as a team of excavators hope to bring back Gold and news of an archaeological find.The key is to have all the elements.We have expert directing, more than adequate editing, and good script writing enough to tell an exciting and interesting story. In today's world of dull routine scripts, this is probably more exciting than a modern audience is used to. This was made in the days when people were smart enough to know de Mille was someone to emulate, and this director does emulate de Mille in many ways, as much as he can with a less than de Mille budget.The next element is believable and interesting characters. We have a slew of them. More than the usual excavation team. Even a few of the natives have interesting, believable, and important roles. Some of the more ignorant red necks of today will scoff at the superstitious ways, but superstitious attitudes are what makes this even more believable. We're at an Information Age cusp right now in which many of the younger people wallow in an Ignorance they aren't aware of, and don't realize what makes a character in 1940 credible.This is excellent story telling and adventure. To deny that is to look like a jealous fool.

'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."

Director James Whale was nearing the end of his rope when he made the dismal Green Hell, in which he was perhaps trying to do for jungle movies what his earlier The Old dark House did for horror pictures: to spoof the genre with wit and style. But the script isn't there, and the excellent cast, which includes George Sanders, Vincent Price, George Bancroft and Alan Hale, flounder, and play altogether too sincerely for laughs. At his peak, in the early and middle thirties, Whale was one of the masters of film. His reputation was at least as high as Hitchcock's, and there seemed no end to what magic he could do on celluloid. His best work was in the horror field, but there was really no reason why he should have stayed there. One senses in Green Hell a director who wants to get out of the movie business altogether. The film would be sub-par even for a routine studio director. Whale was perhaps eager to get back to his first love, painting. He succeeded.