Mansions of Color

Audrey Hepburn had a day in Summer Under the Stars this year, and one of her movies that I hadn't seen before was part of the lineup, that being Green Mansions. So I recorded it and watched it to do a post on it here.

Audrey Hepburn gets top billing, even though she doesn't appear until a good half hour in if not longer. The real lead is Anthony Perkins, playing Abel. Abel is a Venezuelan sometime in the early 20th century, at a time when the country has regular military coups. Abel's father was a cabinet minister in one of the governments that got overthrown, and when that coup happened, Dad was killed and it became unsafe for Abel to stay in Caracas. So he makes his way to the part of the rain forest on the border of the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds, having also heard that there's gold in the area.

This being over a hundred years ago, there are still parts of the rain forest where the pre-Columbian civilizations hold sway, or at least Westerners' fictionalized vision of those civilizations. Abel winds up in the lands controlled by one of those civilizations, a tribe led by Runi (Sessue Hayakawa), with Runi's son Kua-Ko (Henry Silva) being Dad's spokesman. Kua-Ko is about the only one to speak Abel's language, and the rest of the tribe is fearful of the white man, so they torture poor Abel by forcing him to stand until he collapses.

But Abel doesn't collapse, and that earns him at least a little respect from Runi. However, in order to save his skin, he's going to have to do a favor for the tribe. They've got an enemy in the forest near their village, and since the forest is off limits to the tribe, perhaps Abel could go into the forest and kill that enemy. Since the choice is doing that or dying -- well, I suppose there might be a third choice if Abel knew his way through the forest to elsewhere -- Abel decides to go into the forest to find this enemy.

What he finds is a little wisp of a woman named Rima (that's Audrey Hepburn, dressed in her Givenchy rags), who saves Abel's life after he gets bitten by a snake. Rima, it turns out, is a beastmistress, in a time when we hadn't yet had the Beastmaster movie so nobody would have used the term. In any case, Rima has a way with animals, who seem to become less of a threat around her. No wonder the tribe is terrified of her.

Abel finds himself falling in love with Rima, because really, this is what happens in Hollywood movies and the plot wasn't ridiculous enough already. It's about to become even more ridiculous when we find out that Rima lives with her grandfather Nuflo (Lee J. Cobb, who at least is playing a white guy and not one of the native peoples) and that there's some conflict between them because Rima determines that Grandpa took her away from her home for, well, reasons. Nuflo doesn't want to lose his granddaughter and feels threatened by Abel, but he's also the only one who knows the way to Rima's birth village. They eventually go to that village, which surprisingly looks like it's in the Alabama Hills instead of the rain forest. Meanwhile, the tribe is going to be coming after Abel if he hasn't killed Rima....

The top review at IMDb has the title, "I can see why this one lost money at the box office." So can I. The movie is a mess, with talented actors expected to play people of a different race; a romantic relationship between Perkins and Hepburn that doesn't really work; and a plot that lurches from one wacky point to the next. And then there's the establishing shots that were done on location. They're nice, except that you can immediately tell which scenes were done on the backlot. Lee J. Cobb, at least, gets the chance to overact, and runs with it. And the less said about the ending, the better. The one saving grace is that there are times when Green Mansions becomes so ridiculous that it's easy to laugh at the movie.

I've said before that pretty much every prominent actor and director has at least one dud in their career. For Audrey Hepburn, Green Mansions is definitely that dud.