Odongo

Rhonda Fleming got a day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars back in August, and it gave me the opportunity to watch a movie I had never heard of: Odongo. Needless to say, it's another of those movies where it's with good reason that I'd never heard of it.

Odongo is another of those movies set in Africa in that short era when Cinemascope was around but before decolonialization, so that you could have white people living in exotic locations that viewers would never see otherwise, at least in the establishing shots. The white guy living here is Steve Stratton (MacDonald Carey), who deals in exotic animals and has a sort of game reserve that presumably brings in money by showing wealthy westerners exotic animals on safaris. Stratton has a couple of Africans working for him, including the juvenile titular Odongo (a Zanzibar-born child actor named Juma). Odongo seems to have a way with animals, although not quite to the level that Audrey Hepburn does in Green Mansions.

Rhonda Fleming plays Pamela, who gets a job at Steve's reserve as the veterinarian, something that ticks Steve off to no end since he was expecing, well, a man. He doesn't think women are fit for work like this. It doesn't help that Pamela thinks Steve treats the animals badly and doesn't much care for Steve's treatment of both her or the African workers either. But she hasn't yet learned how to survive in this part of Africa well away from civilization.

Another of the locals working for Steve commits the sort of offense that really does merit getting sacked, but when Steve fires him, the guy isn't very happy about it, and decides to take it out on Odongo for no good reason. He also decides he's going to get revenge on Steve, doing it by opening up all the pens where the animals are being kept, and then taking Odongo hostage and threatening Odongo's life! Steve and Pamela are going to have to save poor innocent Odongo.

Odongo is one of those films that plays to all the tropes and stereotypes westerners had about Africans in those days, with the result that it's not very good. It's fairly predictable too, and to top it off, it includes a subplot about some of those wealthy whites who come and visit, something that really doesn't have much to do with the rest of the movie.

I'm not certain if Odongo is available anywhere, but even if it were, I sure wouldn't seek it out again.