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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