Adventure Girl

Another movie I recorded off of TCM knowing nothing about it beyond the synopsis was the 1934 release Adventure Girl. After watching it and looking it up, it turns out the movie has a very interesting provenance.

The movie is narrated by Joan Lowell, who plays herself and declares in opening title cards that she had made a voyage a year before the movie was released (so, 1933) and had adventures so incredible that she had to recreate them for the screen, or else nobody would believe her. This movie purports to be that retelling of true events which, for reasons that should become clear, should have everyone shaking their heads....

Joan Lowell's father Nicholas Wagner was a seaman, retired by the time of the events of the movie, and Lowell decided to give him a sort of present by fixing up an ocean-going schooner and taking Dad down to the Caribbean along with a crew of two men, Otto and former US Marine Bill. (Neither of them were professional actors, as far as I know.) On the way south, the boat gets caught up in a hurricane, this being the days when forecasting the weather in more remote parts of the world was next to impossible. The hurricane leaves them with a broken mast but in just the right place where there are a bunch of "shipwrecks" that are half above sea level that the motley crew can scavenve for supplies.

One such ship, allegedly a Spanish ship from 100 years earlier, has an intact logbook in a strongbox. The final entry purports to be the captain having found a ridiculously large emerald in a Mayan temple but being forced to leave it there because he would have been killed trying to take it at the time. In any case, despite Dad's belief that you shouldn't plunder other men's treasure, Joan is greedy enough that she plans to sail down to Guatemala to find that emerald and retrieve it for her father.

Now, this is part of where my disbelief really kicked in. Another title card at the beginning of the film thanks the then ruler of Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, for allowing them to film in Guatemala using native actors. Yet, if this portion of the story is to be believed, why would the natives want to film a re-telling of it and let Joan get away with it? In any case, this portion of the film deals with Joan and Bill heading up river to the Mayan (well, descendants of the Mayans) village from which they'd do the overland trek to the temple, guided by a Mayan princess and surreptitiously followed by a bunch of men. To get at that emerald would involve desecration of the temple, an act which the Mayan princess says carries the death penalty. And, a bit suprisingly, Joan Lowell says that she knows what she was doing was wrong, something that very few other explorer-type characters in that era would admit. Now, we know that Joan escapes, since the premise of the movie is that this is all a re-enactment of what happened the previous year.

After having watched Adventure Girl, my first thought was that perhaps if there were any incident with natives in a Central American country, it might have been a country other than Guatemala, and that Ubico would have been happy to use Guatemalans to insult another Central American country. The reality, of course, is that this whole thing is a complete fiction. But that's not the end of the story. What audiences of the day would have known, but would be largely unknown to anybody watching in 2026, is that Lowell had already written a completely fictitious "autobiography" back in 1929 that had been easily debunked. The best guess I read is that Lowell did in fact go on a schooner voyage with her father and the other two men in 1933, and filmed establishing material reminiscent of what Errol Flynn would later do in Cruise of the Zaca. This was then supplemented by staged footage that tells the narrative portions of the story. Since the cameras on the schooner wouldn't have been set up for sound, that requires the narration by Lowell. More interesting is that, after Adventure Girl was debunked as utter fiction, Lowell decamped to Brazil and spent the last 30 years of her life there, which from what I've read might make an interesting movie of its own.

As for Adventure Girl, it's ridiculous nonsense, but interesting because it's utter nonsense.