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Queen of the Amazons (1946)
Topic Started: Aug 18 2012, 09:49 AM (923 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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Robert L. Lippert presents
Queen of the Amazons (1947) Dir. Ed Finney

As I finished Unknown World last night, I remember thinking, "Well, that's the worst movie I'm going to see for a while." I think I topped it the very next morning. Man, am I on a roll, or what?!?

Patricia Morison's fiance has gone missing in the jungle, so she hires Robert Lowery to put together a posse or a caravan or a safari or something to go find him. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack!" she's told, but they quickly discover footprints, his lucky coin, a matchbook that has "Lulubelle, Dishwalla 5-2424, after 7 o'clock" written in it, I dunno, some other stuff too. It leads them to... the LAND of the AMAZONS, presided over by Zita, their caucasian queen, who's been playin' patty-cake with Pat's fiance all along. Turns out he's a secret agent on the trail of ivory poachers, and it FURTHER turns out that one of the safari guys is secretly a villain and nobody's gettin' out of Amazonia alive if HE can help it. Of course, he didn't know he was gonna have to contend with Battlin' Bob Lowery, now, did he?

Even as stupid, no-budget jungle films of the 1940s go, this one is in a class by itself, Balconeers. Originally clocking in at a hefty 61 minutes, it was re-released at a breezy 53 minutes, the version (in a beautiful, beautiful print) including on the VCI "Movie Bad Girls" DVD. None of us miss the other 8 minutes, let me tell you.

Stock footage is to be expected in these things; it was cheap, it was time-consuming, it was a way of offering wild animals in movies filmed a mile and a half from Los Angeles City Hall. What's not to be expected, however, is a film so stuffed with stock footage that, if you deleted it from the print, wouldn't leave enough to make a 60 sec. commercial for Malt-O-Meal. There was so much stock footage in this movie, I was expecting Joe Palma to show up as Shemp. There's so much stock footage in this movie, some prankster at VCI gives "Stock Footage" an acting credit on the back of the DVD case. The cast gets on a boat, somebody says, "Look!" and we get stock footage. Somebody else says, "Look over THERE!" and we get more. Somebody else says, "Magnificent!" and we get more. The first person says in a huff, "Well, I still think this first, uh, thing I pointed out is, y'know, really nice to look at!" and we go back to that. And so on. Then they get off the boat, and the Colonel says, "I had a sense of foreboding. Even the monkeys jabbered as if to warn us." Cut to shot of jabbering monkeys with worried looks on their furry li'l faces. And so on, and so on. John Miljan, who plays the Colonel, serves as narrator, too, and appears to be narrating the film in character as we go along, pointing out all that nifty stock footage, explaining the plot, and patiently telling Miss Morison over and over that the African chiefs would be wildly disappointed if their white guests won't stand there and shut up while the tribe does a "ritual dance" shot on film that's much grainier than the rest of the movie.

Robert Lowery at one point is attacked by a lion that's wearing a restraining collar.

(I needed to work that in somewhere, and had no place to segue to it... I mean, how do you put that in context in a film like this, I ask you?)

Okay, this review is turning out to be longer (and maybe stupider) than the movie, so let's move on to... (ready for this?) Almira Moustafa, the "actress" playing the Queen of the Amazons. The air quotes have not been built that are large enough to hold the parentheticals around the word "actress" in describing her. "Fairly good-looking woman with a speech impediment" would be much more accurate. "Wu stew fink I'm howding him heaw against his wiw?" she asks Miss Morison, a reference to the fiance. Or maybe that's a compliment on Pat's hairstyle, I'm no interpreter of Amazonian languages.

The film features tigers, lions, leopards, elephants, giraffes, and a reference to Haitian voodoo. Clearly, it takes place in some sort of zoological park behind the United Nations building. I didn't even know they had one.

(Okay, there I go again, demonstrating my lack of cohesive segue skills. I'll work on it.)

By the way, the "Amazonian tribe" consists of (get this) one other person besides the Queen. Yeah, a tribe of two.

Queen of the Amazons - which I found to be a fun movie indeed, which'll give you an idea of what we consider "fun" around here - is paired with something called Sins of Jezebel, starring Paulette Goddard, on the VCI disc. Can't WAIT to get to THAT one.
Edited by Laughing Gravy, Jan 23 2016, 06:08 AM.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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panzer the great & terrible
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The absolute nadir of Paulette's career was the "Peyton Place" LP in which she played one part and you, the listener, was supposed to supply the other. I used it on my radio show to supply distaff thrills to my no doubt eager listeners.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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Laughing Gravy
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I didn't rewatch this for Bob Lippert Theatre - I simply couldn't - but I did add a poster.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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