ADVENTURE GIRL (1934)

The backstory on this is complicated and rather more interesting than the movie itself. Silent movie actress Joan Lowell published a memoir in 1929 called Cradle of the Deep, which purported to tell of her adventurous life as a child spent on a schooner with her sea captain father. The book was a bestseller but was later exposed as mostly fiction. Years later, Lowell went to sea with her father (by now over 70) and two sailors on a 48-foot boat called the Black Hawk, intending to recreate some of her adventures for the movies. This is the result of that shoot. Even though the film begins by telling us that this is a "reenactment" and even refers to a "fictional" portion of the story, the publicity when the film was released sold it as a documentary. It certainly is presented as such, with all the footage shot without sound (with sound effects and occasional background dialogue added later) and narrated like a travelogue by Lowell. But it also feels like a matinee serial, complete with bad guys and cliffhangers.

Joan, her father Nicholas, and sailors Bill and Otto take off from New York in their boat; the first cliffhanger involves a big storm at sea (which has obviously been re-created, with some shots showing a clear and bright sky in the background) as Joan bravely leaps into the water to save one of the sailors. With the boat needing major repairs, the gang discovers a shipwreck graveyard where they salvage some supplies, primarily a new mast. Joan finds a pirate's treasure map showing a valuable giant emerald buried in the jungles of Guatemala, and she decides she wants to find it. After fighting thirst and watching a mongoose battle a deadly snake, they wind up in the jungle village where the emerald is hidden. Joan gets the permission of the village matriarch Princess Maya by lying about her intentions, and when her machinations are exposed, the villagers attempt to burn her at the stake. At the last minute, Bill saves Joan and they make a fraught escape down a river back to their boat.

This comes off like a Tarzan movie with three big differences: 1) there's no dialogue, only narration; 2) it purports to be true; and 3) the "heroes" are actually the bad guys, attempting to desecrate the villagers' land--in a Tarzan movie, Joan would be the villain whose plans Tarzan would be foiling. To her credit, Joan realizes she's doing wrong and leaves the emerald behind. I can't imagine that any savvy movie viewer would think this was a documentary--the cameras follow Joan and Bill into the jungle, but they also follow the villagers who are trying to thwart her. The attempted burning, which serves as the climax, is not terribly convincing. Most of the natives are actual villagers, though Princess Maya is played by Ula Holt, a California-born woman who would play in a real Tarzan serial (New Adventures of Tarzan) the next year. The experience of watching this is more interesting than the movie narrative itself. Pictured at top are Bill and Joan. [TCM]