Pulp Cinema: The Naked Jungle

The Naked Jungle

Welcome to Pulp Picture Review! Each month I will be posting a review of one film that has some relation to the pulp world. This month’s pick is The Naked Jungle, starring Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker, and released by Paramount Pictures in 1954.

Plot:

Joanna Selby arrives in South America in 1901 to meet her arranged husband, Christopher Leiningen for the first time. Leiningen is the wealthy owner of a major cocoa plantation who has decided that it is time to marry and have children to inherit his sprawling estate. Joanna wants children as well but she was previously married to a man who passed away, a fact Leiningen was not aware of.

Upon arrival at the plantation and meeting her husband, Joanna discovers him to be a hard, cruel man. He is furious to learn that she has been married before and is therefore “used.” Heston and Parker have a series of scenes in which they verbally spar, all of which manage to actually be highly entertaining. I came into this film looking for a cool battle with soldier ants in the jungle, not a marital drama, but the film manages to make Leiningen and Joanna’s conflict compelling. There’s also some shockingly explicit sexual dialogue for the time period, with Joanna realizing that Leiningen is a virgin and is using his hard exterior as a cover for his nervous inexperience around women.

Word reaches the plantation of trouble out in the jungle. Leiningen and Joanna go out with the local commissioner to investigate and discover the approach of the marabunta, soldier ants who swarm for miles and devour all in their path. Even worse, we are told that these ants think and are intelligent enough to fight well against human efforts at stopping them. They’re heading right for Leiningen’s plantation. The man stubbornly refuses to join his fellow plantation owners in flight and elects to remain behind and fight for his home. Joanna bravely stays by his side to fight as well, and the two bond and grow close as they work together. Inevitably, they fall in genuine love as Leiningen’s emotional walls come down.

But the physical walls of the plantation must hold against the ants. They swarm and they consume, devouring human, animal, and plant life instantly. Leiningen cleverly constructs a series of moats and trenches to hold them back, but the ants strip leaves from trees in order to float across the moats. As the ants finally reach the plantation walls, the man sets his land ablaze, burning thousands of the ants alive to keep the horde back. But they keep coming, even as he sacrifices all the furniture in his home to keep the fires burning. Finally, with no other choice, Leiningen kisses his wife goodbye, and prepares to rush through the ant swarm on foot with a stack of dynamite to blow up a nearby dam and wash all the ants away.

Pulp Pedigree:

The basic plot for The Naked Jungle comes from a short story written for Esquire magazine by German writer Carl Stephenson. Esquire was not a pulp magazine in either size or content usually, but this particular story is classic pulp. A man fighting by his wits in the dark jungle, facing a horde of killer animals, armed only with a revolver and his intellect. This story easily could have appeared in Argosy or Adventure. The original story does not include the dramatic love story and is instead entirely focused on Leiningen’s vicious fight with the soldier ants.

The release of the film in 1954 also coincides nicely with the rise of the men’s adventure magazine in the early 1950’s. These magazines were different in terms of size from the old pulps and were printed on better quality paper, but they carried much of the same content as the 1930’s and 1940’s pulp mags did. Adventure, horror, westerns, and hardboiled mystery all continued to thrive in the MAM era. The Naked Jungle and the original story upon which it is based are strong examples of a particular subgenre that exploded during this time; the killer animals attack genre.

If you’ve ever seen a goofy old magazine cover showing incredibly aggressive animals attacking a man as he desperately fights back, you know exactly what I’m talking about. “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!” is probably the most famous of these. Gila monsters, snakes, sharks, alligators, and even herbivorous creatures all got in on the action, seemingly desperate to taste human flesh. The ferocious ants of the film are perfectly in line with that tradition. These ants are even intelligent enough to use leaves as boats to defeat Leiningen’s trenches, which seems preposterous but is a plotline that would be perfectly at home in an old adventure magazine. The story may have been published in Esquire, but this movie is capital p Pulp.

Side note: the movie is also commonly cited as one of the influences on Indiana Jones. This is particularly noticeable in the fourth film where Indy and the gang are in South America and a bad guy gets eaten alive by a swarm of killer ants. That scene is right out of The Naked Jungle.

Worth Your Time?

If you like classic movies, jungle adventure stories, or killer animal/bug stories, then The Naked Jungle is well worth your time. If all you want is man vs ant action then the first part of the film may bore you, but give the two leads a chance to draw you in. Their performances are excellent and the conflict between them is fraught with sexual tension. It’s a very adult movie in some ways, despite being a pulpy adventure story. Heston is firing on all cylinders and Parker easily matches his intensity. There’s also a sense of creeping dread as the characters slowly realize that something is deeply wrong out in the jungle and then come to fully understand just how much danger they are in. Give the film a chance and I think you’ll be well entertained.

For more discussion of The Naked Jungle see the below discussion between Terrance Layhew, John Borges, and Matt Pagourgis on the film and its relationship to Indiana Jones.