Damn The Crocodiles—Keep The Cameras Rolling! (June 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 4)

Damn The Crocodiles—Keep The Cameras Rolling!

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Authors: Byron Riggan

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June 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 4

When the movie version of Lord Jim was released a few years ago, it had a special interest for me because a friend of mine, an Englishman, had been a member of the film crew that spent several months on location in Cambodia. After I saw the finished product, with its awe-inspiring scenes of some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, I remembered my friend’s reply when I asked about the hardships he had encountered.

“Hardships!” he laughed. “We lived better down there than we ever did in London. All the luxuries. If we wanted anything, a jet could fetch it from anywhere in the world within hours.”

He explained that location shooting off the beaten track had become a perfected routine, learned from the experience of earlier companies—”from movies like The African Queen, Lawrence of Arabia , and King Solomon’s Mines . And, of course, they owed a great deal to the pioneering expeditions—particularly to the grandcladdy of them all, Trader Horn . Now, making that film was really an undertaking.”

Trader Horn ! Through the fog of memory floated a flickering image of a pale young woman with waistlength ash-blonde hair; scantily clad, she stands in a jungle clearing surrounded by a mob of nearly naked and highly agitated natives. I also recalled a giant billboard advertisment showing the girl flanked by a handsome young man in a pith helmet and an older man in a floppy khaki hat. The jungle looms behind them, and they are frozen in attitudes of acute anxiety as they stare off-camera toward some approaching peril. Then I remembered some of the rumors that have followed Trader Horn down through the years, rumors nearly as weird as anything depicted in the film itself: that the young actress contracted a deadly African disease and slowly expired in a Hollywood nursing home; that the leading man gave up civilization and retired to the jungle; and that some of the natives employed in the film later became organizers of the Man Man. A passion for jungle films and a reawakened curiosity about all those stories needed only my friend’s remarks to set me looking into the history of Trader Horn .

On a January night in 1931, a noisy and titillated throng surged around Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The occasion was the most glittering and glamorous film opening the world had yet seen. Trader Horn was a landmark in movie history: it was not only the first “talkie” made by Metro-GoldwynMaycr, but the first ever made outside the United States by any Hollywood company. It had cost a record §2,900,000 and had been two years in preparation; one of those years had been spent in what the press agents liked to call “the dark heart of Africa.”

Limousines purred up to the theatre entrance and discharged the movie idols of the