Edward Finney’s Queen of the Amazons is tailor-made for the bottom half of a double bill in the cheapest theater in town. It’s pretty terrible, but worth watching if you’re a fan of cheesy movies with lots of stock footage.
This is the kind of programmer in which a character will exclaim — “Uh oh! Locusts!” — and the scene will cut to some grainy footage of locusts (or something) teeming and swarming in the air. Cut back to our intrepid explorers. “We’d better camp here tonight until the locusts have passed,” the safari leader says. “This bad place for camp, bwana. It’s lion country,” responds the chief bearer.
Will there immediately follow some stock footage of lions? Will there also be a dramatic lion hunt lasting a couple of minutes that is composed entirely of stock footage? I don’t want to give anything away, but … yes, there will be.
Liberal use of stock footage is nothing new, especially in jungle movies (if you’ve ever watched several of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan movies in a row, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about), but Queen of the Amazons takes it to extremes I’d never thought possible. Certain reels of Queen of the Amazons contain more stock footage than original material, and the plot of the film (Roger Merton is credited with writing both the story and the screenplay) seems built around stock footage, rather than the other way around.
Take, for instance, the fact that while most of the film takes place in Africa, the first reel takes place in India. This seems due less to story concerns and more to the fact that the filmmakers had some cool footage of tigers, restive Punjabis, and an elephant tug-of-war available to them.
The plot of Queen of the Amazons, what there is of it, concerns a young woman named Jean Preston (Patricia Morison), whose fiancé, Greg Jones (Bruce Edwards), disappeared on safari in Africa. She globetrots from the subcontinent to the dark continent in search of him, finding a crew of misfits along the way; a chubby cook named Gabby (J. Edward Bromberg), an absent-minded entomologist called simply “the Professor” (Wilson Benge), a strait-laced military man named Colonel Jones (John Miljan), and a great white hunter named Gary Lambert (Robert Lowery) who hates women and thinks they’re a nuisance.
In the not-quite-there feminism typical of ’40s programmers, Jean proves Gary’s assumptions wrong after handily beating him in a shooting contest, but later in the picture the latter-day Annie Oakley is completely useless when a lion attacks Gary, and she stands there with a semiautomatic clutched loosely in her dainty hand, screaming her head off.
There’s also the matter of a contraband ivory trade, a murderer who may be a member of the safari, and the Queen of the Amazons herself, “Zita” (Amira Moustafa), leader of a “savage white tribe” of women shipwrecked as children. I’m a big fan of dishy gals from the ’40s and ’50s dressed in skimpy jungle gear, so — despite her total lack of thespian ability — I enjoyed Moustafa’s role in the film, although her handmaiden looked about as exotic as a Peoria hausfrau spinning Les Baxter records at a tiki party.
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