A very good depression-era propaganda film disguised as an anthropological and natural study which lies somewhere between King Kong and a Margaret Mead journal. As Mr & Mrs. Johnson travel upland and upriver they encounter flying snakes, various simians and apes, climbing fish, tree oysters and indolent natives. A scientist with a fake German accent gives explanations. Assumed to be filmed on location, the natives converse in rehearsed, broken English and are dressed according to Christian decency. Lowell Thomas' narration is quite humorous at first until the real reason for their expedition is divulged. The film culminates in the American management of the capture of a 300lb. orang-utan (literally meaning the "wild-man of the jungle") who will live the rest of his life in "some American city zoo lazily eating bananas". The scene is powerful and disturbing.
Plot summary
The last travelogue/documentary/exploitation film shot by the husband-and-wife team of hunters/trappers/explorers/film-makers Martin and Osa Johnson, albeit Mrs. Osa Johnson pieced together another one of all-archive footage, taken from previous films, in the early 1940s. This time out they are in Borneo searching for an orangutan to capture and sell to a zoo, but film everything in natural sight and stage a few other items. Martin Johnson died shortly after the Borneo expedition but his widow sold the footage to 20th Century-Fox's newsreel department and they took it from there. The fad for semi-real/semi-staged exploration/exploitation films was long over by 1937, and the people at Fox decided to jazz this up a bit in hopes of getting better bookings...and the Johnson-name still had an audience of its own. Lowell Thomas, a newsman who practically made an icon out of T. E. Lawrence all by himself and the lead commentator on Fox newsreels, was assigned the narration, after the studio editors finished cutting-and-splicing the Johnson footage down to something usable, and then another Fox-newsreel regular, Lew Lehr, was added to provide some comic-counterpoint to Thomas's doomsday narration. Lehr, as was his usual wont, employed his German-accent character, for the interruptive comments, few of which were all that funny...and absolutely none of which were expected to be taken seriously by the 1930s audience. The studio didn't reckon on this film being seen decades later by critics who knew not the era in which the film was released, and had no idea of who Lew Lehr (or Lowell Thomas) was...and evidently little knowledge of what constitutes propaganda. The only propaganda connected to this film was that done by the sales department of 20 Century-Fox in selling this film to the exhibitors.
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humorous and disturbing
Literal exploitation film
This film is presented as a documentary but is mostly fake. The white heroes parachute in to a Borneo town. An urban, English-speaking Indonesian dresses up as a Dayak tribesman and they pretend they have discovered him in the jungle by pure coincidence. Filling time for the camera, they pointlessly lecture the locals about how to build a raft. A bunch of simians from all across the country are captured and collected on a set, which is purported to be a jungle scene. It's all quite silly until we get to the orangutan hunt which occupies the second half of the film and appears to be sadly real. The orangutan is claimed to have been terrorizing the local village, which is ridiculous. They simply wanted an orangutan to sell to a Western zoo and we see him heroically evade capture for three days until they inevitably pin him in.