![]() With Parkhurst dead, Hayward is now in charge, and suddenly he isn’t so eager to go home anymore. And Parkhurst himself ends up on the lion’s menu when he leaves camp for the nearest city without checking first to see whether or not the steam engine he’d been using to shuttle himself back and forth had enough fuel for the journey. The boss-man is forced to reconsider his position, though, when workers start disappearing, only to show up later as mangled, half-eaten carcasses stashed in the underbrush around the campsite. In fact, it is Parkhurst’s opinion that Hayward himself started the rumors in the hope of getting the job called off so that he could finally go home to his wife Alice (who will be played by Barbara Britton when at last we meet her). Parkhurst and the engineer quickly discover that rumors of a killer lion have been circulating among the men, who understandably contend (in the words of the foreman) that “their contract didn’t say anything about man-eating lions.” But Parkhurst (self-important, stiff-upper-lip fucker that he is) doesn’t believe a word of it. Then one day, the laborers Hayward shipped in from India lose all interest in their jobs. But thus far, his current job has been rather smooth sailing, though it is progressing a bit slowly for Parkhurst’s taste. The trans-Africa railway project is sort of a last chance at glory for Hayward, whose previous engineering efforts back home have mostly not turned out as planned- the implication is that his heavy drinking may have had a little bit to do with that. Hayward begins the movie as the number-two man on the project, working under the supervision of Major Parkhurst (Ramsay Hill, from Panther Girl of the Congo and When Worlds Collide), a stuffy executive type from the home office of the construction firm owned by Hayward’s father in law. And so, just this once, I’m setting aside my prejudice against jungle movies to bring it to your attention.īwana Devil’s plot is very similar to that of the recent Ghost in the Darkness, and concerns the havoc wreaked on the efforts of engineer Robert Hayward (Robert Stack, best known for his role as Eliot Ness on “The Untouchables,” though if you were as big a dork as I was in the mid-1980’s, you might also remember that he was one of the voice-actors for Transformers: The Movie) to build a railway across central Africa when some of the local wildlife takes it upon itself to reintegrate Hayward’s workers into the food chain. Given the great importance of idiotic gimmicks in the marketing of exploitation movies of all genres over the years, I think it ought to be pretty obvious what a milestone this movie becomes on the strength of that pioneer status. Bwana Devil, as the more erudite of you may already know, was the first feature-length movie ever shot in 3-D. I’m going to make an exception, though, in the case of Bwana Devil because of the tremendous significance of this all-but-forgotten film in the history of exploitation cinema as a whole. The genre as a whole just doesn’t interest me. Cobb and Bette Davis appeared in movies made overseas but one of the more unusual examples of American actors appearing in an international production is Barry Sullivan and Martha Hyer in Pyro…The Thing Without a Face (1964, aka Fuego in the European market), directed by Julio Coll and filmed in Spain.Generally, I don’t bother with old-school jungle adventure movies. Some of the more famous former studio contract players who escaped and reinvented themselves in Europe were Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef, Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda. Some movie actors could see the writing on the wall and began to pursue film offers outside Hollywood and the U.S. ![]() The early 1960s was a turbulent time for the film industry and the Hollywood studio system was becoming a relic of the past as television and other competitors in the entertainment field lured audiences away.
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