Friday, April 6, 2012

April 6: The Jungle Book (1942 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★★

I think this is the best type of movie you can find from Zoltan Korda: mildly entertaining with some visual interest and lacking in overt (and, ironically, adopted) xenophobia.  The British colonial burden is happily missing The Jungle Book, and we’re left with a framed story of Mowgli and his dealings with treasure hunters; nice humans; and Shere Khan, the tiger.  It’s a children’s story about growing up, dealing with the enemy and finding your own place in the world.  In Technicolor.

I remain surprised at Korda’s ability to conflate exotica for its visual interest – his vision is almost postmodern.  The pink-tinged jungle here holds tigers, panthers, deer, snakes, wolves and elephants, and villagers prepare a human sacrifice in front of a statue of Buddha before exploring a local ruin replete with faces from Angkor Wat.  The emphasis here is on the curiously exotic, and Korda assembles things that look good on screen in order to engage and entertain, and as long as viewers don’t look too hard for character depth or complex plot, they’ll enjoy the pagent that this film is.

But Korda's is not a contemporary sensibility, and I’ve seen as much of his work as I want to see for now.  The Hitchcock and Powell & Pressberger  of his era were able to provide us with films of insight and longevity, but Korda’s work feels dated, stale and even, at times, racist.  This and two of the other Korda films I watched are the boxed Eclipse set called Sabu!  I think the films in the set are well-chosen for the series as none of them would warrant a separate release and Criterion treatment.  

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