JUNGLE BRIDE (1933)

On a passenger liner, drunken young man Gordon Wayne is singing and playing on deck to the mild delight of other passengers. Less happy about the performance is Doris Evans; her brother is locked up back in the States for murder but she's sure that Gordon is the guilty party, so she and reporter John Franklin, to whom she is engaged, are hoping to bring Gordon to justice. In the middle of Gordon's carousing, the ship collides with something, takes on water, and sinks. The next morning, four passengers have washed up on an uninhabited island off the coast of Africa: Gordon, Doris, John, and Gordon's buddy Eddie. John is immediately angry about the presence of Gordon, but Eddie suggests that they'll have a better chance at survival if they can all get along. Like a pre-Code Gilligan's Island, the four manage to provide themselves with shelter and food (mostly of the vegetable kind), and Doris and John agree to a temporary truce with Gordon. Over the next couple of months, Gordon proves to be resourceful by patching up their lifeboat and fighting a wild lion that attacks Doris, and Doris starts to truly thaw towards him, so much so that they eventually sex it up. Some wreckage from the ship drifts in with the mortally injured captain clinging to life. As his last living act, he agrees to marry Gordon and Doris then asks them to set him out to sea on a burning funeral pyre—he is of Viking stock, he claims. John confronts Gordon and the two men duke it out just as a ship sees the funeral fire and comes close to the shore to investigate.

Though there are some pleasures to be had here of the Poverty Row pre-Code fashion, the script is so badly patched together that a coherent plot isn't really one of them. We get virtually no backstory about the murder that Gordon is accused of (and it's not really a spoiler to note that he's not guilty after all) and we don’t learn how the four wound up on the liner together. I'm pretty sure that John is a reporter but he refers to himself as an "officer" as well, implying he has the force of the law behind him. The action might take place on an island or just a shoreline; it makes more sense as an island, but there is a full complement of jungle animals around them, including monkeys, lions, hyenas, and hippos, with, of course, the monkeys providing occasional mild comic relief along with Eddie. (The lion fight, by the way, is a definite highlight.) In the end, when the ship finds them, we're told that it will be back in two weeks to get them, leading Doris to refer to that time as their honeymoon. But what about John and Eddie who are absent from the last scene? And why does it have to come back—there wasn't room for four extra people on the ship? The acting is of average B-film quality. Charles Starrett is a credibly handsome and hunky hero; he went on to a long career in westerns of the 1940s and 50s. Anita Page (Doris) was a big name in the silent era, but by the mid-30s, she had left the screen. She's fine if perhaps a bit artificial at times. Kenneth Thomson is completely negligible as John, and Eddie Borden only slightly less so as comic relief Eddie. When he and Gordon argue near the end of the film, their reconciliation is shot with them looking like they're just about to kiss, and frankly, they have a little more chemistry than Gordon and Doris. The sinking of the ship looks the Titanic disaster as staged by high school students. Straight male reviewers make much of a brief moment of bare sideboob from Page; sadly, no such nudity occurs with Starrett. Very mild fun. One online critic says it should have been called Beach Bride, and I'm inclined to agree. Pictured are Starrett and Page. [YouTube]