Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil created a sensation at the 1952 box office as the opening shot, or opening spear-toss, in the new 3D movies craze. Better movies would soon surpass it, but nothing can take away its status as the first 3D color feature. The folks at 3-D Film Archive have been doing heroic work for several years in restoring 3D movies for Blu-ray. They were probably wise to tackle later movies first, but finally, here’s a watchable presentation from Kino Lorber.
The impressive opening credits of the action 3D movie Bwana Devil trumpet that the film was shot in the Belgian Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and California. That’s the first exaggeration. Writer-producer-director Arch Oboler had visited Africa in the late 1940s and shot some color animal footage and a public dance, which is shown all too briefly via rear projection or superimposition. As far as the actors are concerned, they never set foot outside the hills of the San Fernando Valley.
Arch Oboler is dramatizing the famous incident of two man-eating lions who hunted workers along the Kenya-Uganda railroad in 1898. Supervisor John Henry Patterson shot the animals and wrote a memoir, The Man-eaters of Tsavo (1907). The lions were skinned and their stuffed remains can be found at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. The same events inspired The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), a film written by William Goldman, directed by Stephen Hopkins, and starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.
By focusing on these events, Bwana Devil becomes Oboler’s fanciful glimpse into British colonial history in Africa. The railroad is depicted accurately as a British project that employs imported Hindi workers from India, played by true Indians. Dignified examples of the Masai tribe are seen in a couple of scenes, speaking in their language through a translator, and they give the 3D movie its title by blaming the English for the lion attacks. They associate the “devil” lions with the “Bwana” (white foreigners), since both showed up at the same time. They think one brought the other. That makes an interesting symbolic critique.
From the “Bwana’s” point of view, the lions symbolize the wilderness that must be conquered, or rather, exterminated, for “civilization” to continue. It’s intriguing that Oboler not only includes a dialectic, but allows Robert Stack’s character to embody it. “Civilization. That’s a noble word, but not enough to keep me rotting here,” he says early on. When the Masai tell him to go home, he becomes inarticulate and blurts, “We have as much right –” then halts himself and changes course, resorting to angry bluster because he has nothing else to say.
Stack’s Bob Hayward enter Bwana Devil‘s story roaring drunk and acting in a loud, disrespectful, un-British, American manner to the upright, uptight Major Parkhurst (Ramsay Hill). The jolly, avuncular Dr. Angus MacLean (Nigel Bruce), with white mutton-chop whiskers and Scots accent, cuts Hayward slack as a young laddie separated from his bride. Parkhurst can only get into a snit and whine that he’ll report this disgraceful behavior.
Hayward is the son-in-law of the bigwig who has the contract to build the railroad. Hayward calls it “a stinking little engine going from nothing to nowhere. Why? So that Mr. Conway and his friends can drag the ivory out easier? So that a pack of idiots can ride down here in comfort and shoot their brother monkeys out of trees?” That Darwinian reference is also a sore point to Parkhurst, who declares, “Mr. Hayward is not a man made of the materials for African colonials.”
Hayward comes across as an ambivalent, self-loathing colonial in a position he resents, and this must be the socially conscious Oboler’s strategy not only for offering an American hero to US audiences but for critiquing the enterprise. As Wikipedia’s article on Patterson’s memoir states, “The railway project was controversial and the British Press referred to it as ‘The Lunatic Express’, as critics considered it a waste of funds, while supporters argued it was necessary for transportation of goods.”
After many deaths, Hayward unwillingly takes on the authority he’s allowed himself to be drafted into and which he visibly despises. He poses petulantly, fetchingly, shirtlessly. He finds some release when his wife Alice (Barbara Britton) suddenly shows up for the sequence advertised in the posters as “A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!”
Over Bwana Devil‘s 80 draggy minutes, two tame-looking lions kill most of the cast in hasty, confusingly edited, sometimes absurd attacks. In the final scenes, it’s left to an angry, determined, shaken Hayward to confront his demons and stand up for colonial civilization in a poorly staged confrontation with the creatures – if only he can get his troublesome rifle to shoot properly. Hmm.
Bwana Devil has never had a high reputation, as critics in 1952 were aware of its shortcomings. So will be today’s viewers, though the colonial theme sticks out more intriguingly than the palm fronds. Oddly, the best viewing option is the flat 2D version, where Joseph Biroc’s photography looks clear, and the Ansco Color stands out. That doesn’t make the action go faster, but at least it looks pretty. By contrast, the 3D version (with anaglyphic glasses provided) washes out the color except for a few blue turbans, and backgrounds tend to be fuzzy. There were still a few malarial bugs in the system. The Blu-ray includes a third version designed for 3D televisions, if anyone still has one.
In a bonus essay, 3D movies expert Mike Ballew summarizes how Milton Gunzberg, a screenwriter and 3D enthusiast, developed the particular technique he patented as NaturalVision to interest Hollywood producers. The first person to take him up on it was Arch Oboler, one of the era’s most creative and independently-minded radio writers. Hayward’s stinging rhetoric about the pack of idiots shooting their brothers is very Oboler-esque.
Arch Oboler’s career in low-budget and indie films had already led him to write and direct five films. While Bwana Devil was his most technically ambitious, it doesn’t compare in atmosphere and drama to the others. However, like them, it’s about angst-ridden, doom-laden characters. Also, it contains a ghastly (off-screen) child death, and that harks back to his controversial initial script for the Lights Out radio series, the June 1936 play “Burial Service”. Oboler would make one more 3D feature, The Bubble (1966).
Actor Robert Stack had been kicking around in movies for over a dozen years and was well-known for his terse, he-man charisma. Not long after Bwana Devil, he’d be Oscar-nominated for Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and then become a TV star as Elliot Ness in The Untouchables (1959-1963). Later generations know him from the Zucker/Abrahams parody film Airplane! (1980) and as the host of TV’s long-running Unsolved Mysteries (1987-2002). We may safely call him iconic.
As remastered by 3-D Film Archive for Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray, Bwana Devil probably looks better than ever. While it’s a largely underwhelming viewing experience dramatically and technically, we’re grateful to have this bit of film history available and presentable after 70 years.