George Reeves In "Jungle Goddess"

Above, George Reeves and Wanda McKay in Jungle Goddess.

Rather than waiting to watch Jungle Goddess tonight during dinner, I just completed watching it. It is the second movie in the George Reeves Double Feature DVD that arrived in the mailbox yesterday.

Trudging through the poverty row jungle of Lippert Pictures in 1948, we find in this movie George Reeves and Ralph Byrd in search of an heiress (Wanda McKay) missing since before World War II in the African jungle.

This was a much more serious movie than Thunder In The Pines. The production values were a little bit better with soundstage jungle sets mixed in with stock footage of animals and native dancing. It was actually produced before Thunder In The Pines (in June 1948). At least they had enough money to have an airplane interior set available.

According to Wikipedia:

In Africa, pilot Mike Patton [Reeves] is persuaded by an acquaintance, Bob Simpson [Byrd], to conduct a search for a missing heiress whose plane supposedly went down in the jungle, resulting in her never being seen again. 

Encountering an indigenous tribe of natives, Bob recklessly shoots a man. He is taken before a woman, Greta, who is being treated like a high priestess. Bob is sentenced to die, but when she gets Mike off to herself, Greta pleads with him to help her escape. 

During a struggle, a gun goes off and a guard is left dead. With the tribesmen in pursuit, Mike and Greta are betrayed by Bob, who has gone mad. But after he is killed by a spear, Mike and Greta make it to the plane and safely get away.

Wikipedia noted:

The Los Angeles Times called the film "so corny" the audience the reviewer saw it with "died laughing when they weren't razzing on it."

When Greta tells Mike how she ended up in the jungle with the natives and becoming their "jungle goddess", her dialog sounds like she was reading from an encyclopedia. She asks Mike what had happened to the world since she disappeared. He tells her about how the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor and that the war had ended a couple of years before. He said that the war would still be going on if it weren't for the atomic bomb (the anti-nuke crowd won't be happy with that statement).

Unlike the female lead in Thunder In The Pines, Wanda McKay was actually an attractive woman.

In this movie, Reeves sounded more like his Superman in manner and tone at times. It had been years since I last saw this movie on a Los Angeles independent television station's late, late, late show.

Although this was also a low-budget poverty row movie, Jungle Goddess still was entertaining and moves pretty quick. 

George Reeves Double Feature DVD

My DVD of two George Reeves "classics" arrived in the mail today.

It is a two-feature set of movies from 1948 produced by Lippert Pictures of Thunder In The Pines and Jungle Goddess. They are both very low budget movies that Reeves made three years before the Adventures of Superman.

Above, the DVD case. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

I've seen both years ago on the late, late show on television. Those were the days when Los Angeles still had independent stations that played old movies in the middle of the night.

Tonight, I watched Thunder In The Pines featuring Reeves with Ralph Byrd (who played Dick Tracy in the movies). The movie was presented in "glowing sepia-tone".

According to IMDb:

Loggers Jeff Collins [Reeves] and Boomer Benson [Byrd] compete for a mail-order bride by means of a timber-cutting contest. 

The "bad guy" in the movie was played by Lyle Talbot (as Nick Roulade).

The movie is a light-comedy that was set in a forest area where logging was taking place. However, there are no actual forest location scenes and the scenes of actual logging were all stock footage with Reeves or Byrd superimposed in some. The rest of the movie was shot in a sound stage at Nassour Studios on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.

One laughable scene was when the French mail-order bride arrived at the train station. Stock footage of a locomotive in a forest area was used until the train's arrival. No studio train was shown, the only indication of its arrival (or that there was even a train there) at the station were some smoke (or steam) at the bottom of the screen.

Still, despite the low budget production (a few notches above anything Ed Wood produced), it was still entertaining and Reeves and Byrd were good in their light-comedy roles.

The DVD has some biographical information on Reeves by some friends of mine as extras. The DVD was produced around 2007.

About the DVD: I bought it used (but in great shape) through a private party via Amazon.com for $8.00. A "new" (I don't know just how "new" it really was) copy was listed for over $160! It is a rare DVD put out by a small independent company. For $8.00, I figured I'd take my chances and ordered it. It played just fine.

I plan to watch Jungle Goddess (also starring Reeves and Byrd) tomorrow evening.