I found this movie playing on the 'Movies!' TV network. It was great fun watching it, because it hit theaters in 1951 when I had just started first grade. By today's standards, being in black and white and with sometimes cheesy special effects, it is a primitive movie. But it represents that era very well. I enjoyed watching it.After Johnny Weissmuller, former Olympic swimming champion, had made a number of Tarzan movies, he became Jungle Jim in a series of movies, this being one. The actual setting for this movie is never stated but it looks to be either the jungle of Africa or the jungle of South America. Some of the scenic shots show very dark-skinned indigenous people, while most of the characters look like they could be from the Americas. Nevertheless it was shot in the Simi Valley area, many of the scenes looked like terrain from some of the western movies of the 1940s and 1950s. But hang a few Palm fronds onto Oak trees and presto, it looks like the jungle. Weissmuller as Jungle Jim was about 46 during filming and looked his age, although in good shape for his age. There are several scenes where he has to swim, either to rescue a damsel in distress or for underwater activities.The story involves a lady journalist traveling to find an American athlete and war veteran lost over the jungle some 9 years earlier. When Jungle Jim saves her, he helps her with the search. In the process they find the lost aviator, who had taken up with a village and taught them techniques like irrigation and blacksmith skills. Plus their village had a sidewalk! But they also encountered a ruthless, rogue Chemist who had discovered a particular radioactive ore that when processed a certain way could turn plain sugar into perfect, valuable diamonds. (That is about as likely as is cold fusion.) So together, the two men and the lady must defeat this guy to save the people and prevent the world market being flooded with diamonds.Bob Waterfield was the lost aviator, Bob Miller, wearing an authentic WW2 A-2 aviator jacket, and Sheila Ryan was the lady journalist, Anne Lawrence.

the most interesting thing about the movie is the performances. There mostly pretty bad. Johnny Wessimieser may have had one really goodgreat movie but here hes barely wood-perhaps because he actually has to talk in the movie he acts as if he is afraid of it . Everyone Else to Bob mMller as a football player is also bad-the natives the villain everyone is pretty much terrible. That said Shelia Ryan, is pretty great in the movie-either that or she is just head or heals better then anyone else in the movie that it just looks great. Shes spunky, generally funny and has a good late 40s sense of power and accomplishment even if she just mostly gets dragged around in the film. its not in any means a good movie, yet i can't hate it.

The "Jungle Jim" series is apparently where Johnny Weissmuller's career went to die after he got too fat to play "Tarzan" anymore. He's actually in fairly trim form for this in his two shirtless scenes, but it's also pretty obvious that he's sucking in his gut. (I don't blame him; if I were over 30 and had to be shirtless on film, I'd suck in my gut too). But most of the time he still cuts a pretty dashing figure in his "Jungle Jim" outfit, so he has that going for him. One thing is clear from this: Weissmuller was no actor. When he can't hide behind the monosyllabic grunts of the Tarzan role, he can barely deliver his lines in a professional manner. But that's OK, because hardly any else here is an actor either. If you doubt this, just consider the part of the villain played by Lyle Talbot. Talbot, never more than a "C" list actor (he had some parts in Ed Wood movies if memory serves me) effortlessly makes absolutely everyone else in the move look and sound wooden and stilted by comparison, and Talbot has some of the most ridiculous dialog in the movie. The plot, such as it is, isn't bad. It offers action, intrigue, a little suspense, some disguised social commentary, and a typical "Quest". It even has an element of the fantastic. There's a totally gratuitous dinosaur fight, with stock footage lifted directly from "One Million B.C." and an even more superfluous octopus/shark fight which makes no sense at all, except as an excuse for Jim to show how tough he is. (I wasn't even aware that shark and octopus were enemies in the wild, and what are they doing in Africa??). And there's a jungle laboratory where enslaved natives dig in the mines for a villain who creates diamonds out of igneous rock. So no, it's not H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it is meaty Saturday afternoon matinée fodder. Jim defeats the villain by being manly and dashing (and judo throwing bad guys over his hip or shoulder over and over) , but he doesn't get the girl, because Jim don't play that - the other manly and dashing white guy in the film (a real life football player playing a missing football player; he's even more wooden than Johnny ) gets her while Jim beams approval. For what it was, it was a pleasant trip back to the matinées of my youth. If I had a chance to see another "Jungle Jim" movie on a slow weekend night, I just might.

I was getting a little worried, almost an hour into the picture and Jungle Jim (Johnny Weissmuller) still hadn't tangled with a wild animal yet, but at 58:08 he makes short work of a shark - no battle actually, he just stabs it! That was right after the shark beat up on an octopus, so maybe he was too tired to fight. What's curious to me was how a shark and an octopus found their way into an African river. Besides the battle of sea creatures, we're also treated to a tussle between a pair of dinosaur impersonating lizards, one of which had a dimetrodon fin attached to it's back. Pretty cool stuff for a kid watching this stuff back in the 1950's, because after all, I was one of them.As for the movie's main plot, you really have to pay attention to let the whole thing sink in. An evil scientific genius (Lyle Talbot) discovers that boiling igneous rock will release the liquids and gases in it's magma composition, and when common sugar is added, a residue of carbon from the burned sugar is held suspended by the magma. Then when the whole solution is immersed in cold water, what's left is re-crystallized into synthetic diamonds - Whew! When I tried it, I only got a hot, wet rock. You know, I think they made all that up.There must have been a reason each Jungle Jim movie offered a different female lead, this time it was Sheila Ryan as spunky photographer Ann Lawrence. They're out to find a former All-American football player who went missing in the jungle some nine years earlier. The opening film credits state 'Introducing' Bob Waterfield, a real life pro player and coach for the Los Angeles Rams. The 'introduction' tag is usually meant to herald an up and coming new star, but in this case, Waterfield's performance was decidedly less successful than his football career. At least Rick Vallin turns up one more time as yet another tribal chief named Bono, causing me to wonder where the current rock star Bono's name actually came from - Hmm. And say, you know who else gets an opening film credit - Tamba The Chimp!! I got a kick out of an early scene when Miss Lawrence first meets Jungle Jim when he saves her from drowning. Admiring his features, she asks him to 'turn your head to the right', to which he turns his head left! Having seen about a half dozen Jungle Jim films recently, I have to admit that once viewed, they're largely forgettable, but at least when they're on they offer a lot of fun, even if some of it is just plain goofy. This one though, I must say probably had the best ending of one so far. Not only does Ann Lawrence get to kiss Jim's co-hero Bob Miller (Waterfield), but Tamba gets to plant one on Jungle Jim himself!