Oh, and just a trifling bit of bondage!
If you’re a nascent fan or scholar of the old-fashioned movie serials, Lost City of the Jungle (1946) might be for you. Featuring fabulous B&W cinematography, similarly B&W characters which, painfully enough, gain credibility in the light of recent political events, a repetitive episodic plot that features a cliff-hanger every twenty minutes or so, wretched science, and the occasional plot hole, the repetitive parts are to be endured while we wait for the action – how did the good guys avoid being blown apart in the exploding boat? – to refloat our spirits.
The story concerns the search for an element that can be used to build an effective defense against atomic weapons – and one man’s search for it in order to sell it to the highest bidder, enabling war and world domination. Yeah, it’s silly.
The characters are static and predictable – no growth here! But the storytellers are to be congratulated on avoiding some chauvinistic ditches that they could have driven this vehicle into. For example, Queen Indra, a white woman ruling a small kingdom in the Himalayas, is no pushover, but an active, aggressive, and intelligent schemer – and perhaps the one exception to my observation that the characters are static. Another is the character of Tal Shan, played by Chinese born Keye Luke, which is a major part, if not quite leading.
It’s all your basic morality tale, as the personality flaws of the bad guys let the good guys win. There’s a lot of flaws, it has a share of chauvinism, even if it avoided some of the worst, but the scenery is gorgeous and the cliff-hangers are fun.
