Bwana Devil (1952)

I will admit that "Bwana Devil" is not a great movie, but to compare this groundbreaking 3-D movie to "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is utterly ridiculous, as "Bwana Devil" is not bad--but it is slightly below average. The negatives are Robert Stack's overacting and forgetting his accent frequently as well as a few cheesy scenes (seeing a stuffed lion tossed on Nigel Bruce when he was supposedly being attacked was unintentionally funny). The HUGE plus is that this film was made mostly in Africa and looks so much better than the tons of schlocky African films of the 1930s-50s.The story is a dramatization of a real story of a couple man-eating lions and the man who ultimately killed them. It's the same story you'll see in the newer and better "Ghost and the Darkness"--so my advice is see this film instead. But, if you don't, you'll essentially learn the same story...along with Stack's less than stellar performance. Not a bad film at all--just not one that will bowl you over, either.

The first film shot in 3D finds an inebriated Robert Stack pining away for his fiancé and trying to get a railway constructed in the heart of Africa at the turn of the last century. He's in British Equatorial Africa which later became Kenya colony and where the Sahara meets the veld. What's stopping the progress of the colonial British dream of a railway from Capetown to Cairo is a pair of lions.These two lions have the natives scared out of their wits. Lions are not known to attack humans, you leave them alone and they'll leave you alone unless they're hungry. But these two, a male and female have developed a real taste for human flesh. Showing no fear of man or anything man made, they attack humans indiscriminately at will. No one wants to work until this lion problem is solved.Stack's got both a lion problem and an unsatisfied testosterone problem. The second is remedied by the arrival of Barbara Britton, no one it seems can deal with the first.Bwana Devil was shot in Africa and it's writer Arch Oboler owes a lot to Moby Dick. These two lions and Stack's obsession with them are taken from the Herman Melville classic. Good thing Barbara Britton arrived when she did, she provides something Captain Ahab didn't have.Best scene in the film and it's almost laughable was when these three white hunters, best in their line of work are imported by the railroad to kill these lions. So what do the lions do, but actually enter the private railroad car where the hunters are hoisting a few with Nigel Bruce who plays Stack's sidekick and a doctor and proceed to kill them all and carry the cadavers off for a later snack. Presumably based on a true story according to the credits, don't you believe it. The 3D jungle scenes are nice, but it's attached to one ridiculous story.

I admit I have not seen this movie in 3D, nor is it germane to my opinion. As another reviewer notes, this movie elevates "Plan Nine From Outer Space", which was made with virtually no budget, to "good movie" level.This studio movie features contract actor Robert Stack, who leaves me wondering why the studio retained him on contract. He was a horrible actor, with no more depth than a mannequin. In this movie, the stuffed lions used to cold-cock Barbara Britton,(the archetypal swooning, cumbersomely-dressed white-woman-in-peril), had more animation than Stack. Or Britton.But moving on, this movie is about rogue man-eating lions. Er, lions in the wild eat moving mammals including men, so this was already a silly premise. But this "Kenya", obviously filmed on a Hollywood backlot (I recognize the area), features an African-less Africa. By that I mean, there are no Black Africans save for the random Black toddler who is eaten by the stuffed lions. The "African" slaves are all well-paid, self-sufficient, independent Sikhs! 1950's Hollywood sanitized film and TV by eliminating Blacks wherever possible. Apparently that included Africa. In this movie, "Africa" had automagically become the less-dark, ergo more acceptable India! I wonder how the previous reviewers missed this salient feature. Hm.What is there to recommend this movie? Well, perhaps as an example of bad acting, writing, plot, special effects, production values... It is a relic of what killed the movie industry in the 1950's and 1960's.Hint. It was not television.

I saw it the first day of its first run release at the Chicago Theater in Chicago in 1952. 'Bwana Devil' was the brainchild of radio director, Arch Oboler. - best known for the radio (and early live TV series) 'Lights Out'. Oboler's brother-in-law was Milton Gunzburg. Gunzburg was, I believe, the optician who connected the use of Polaroid lenses to the making of stereoscopic films. In 1952, television was stomping out movies and movie theaters the way rogue elephants could destroy villages. Hollywood was searching for any gimmick it could use to bring people back to the theaters. Cinerama, a cumbersome early widescreen process had come on the scene. It produced an 3-D like effect. That opened the door for Gunzberg and his brother-in-law. They called their process Naturalvision, raised some money to demonstrate the process, and produced 'Bwana Devil'.While the story and production values took a back seat to the illusion of depth, the picture was a hit. It was quickly followed by 'House of Wax' and others. Most producers opted to exploit the stereoscopic effects rather than make good movies. 'House of Wax' was one of the rare exceptions. After about a year, audiences tired of the shoddy productions, and Naturalvision eventually disappeared. Into the void Fox introduced CinemaScope, a flat wide-screen process, and helped stem the sinking theater system.I imagine seeing 'Bwana Devil' in flat projection would be painful. But for those of us who saw it with pristine prints, and quality projection, it was something to behold. Lions leaping off the screen into our laps was something few of us would forget.It has taken another fifty years for 3-D to return. Today's producers seem not to be making the same mistake as those in the early fifties. I hope so. After all, 3-D is so much more fun than flat.