Broadway Jungle
Imagine a movie made by someone who had never been told Imagine a movie made by someone who'd never even seen a movie before. The outcome might be the 1955 film Broadway Jungle
Reviewed by Jerry Renshaw, Fri., Sept. 3, 1999
What's the best film ever made? Some say Jean Renoir's 1939 Rules of the Game; some say Orson Welles' Citizen Kane; some might come up with William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives. Regardless of what the best movie might be, Phil (Robot Monster) Tucker's mid-Fifties Broadway Jungle is clear at the other end of the cinematic scale. There's not a whiff of Welles, Griffith, Eisenstein, or even Corman to be found here. Actually I think that Tucker never even heard of any of those guys.
Imagine a movie made by someone who had never been told how to make a movie and never read a book on filmmaking. Now imagine a movie made by someone who'd never even seen a movie before. The outcome might be Broadway Jungle. You'd be hard pressed to find a more amateurish, sloppy piece of narrative filmmaking, ever, period.
Problem Number One: It takes place in James Ellroy's grimy Fifties Hollywood, so why is it called Broadway Jungle? That's the least of the problems here, though. Tucker apparently never realized that elements like lighting, editing, camera angle, shot composition, and score are as integral to telling the story as the script is. There are lots of long, pointless shots of people smoking cigarettes and of cars driving down streets, reaction shots of other people's faces (or legs!) as characters deliver long passages of dialogue, and shots that cut the characters' heads off, etc. After a while it becomes almost Dada, like a Buñuel film, that is if Buñuel sniffed glue until he only had two brain cells left to rub together.
The plot of Broadway Jungle is some drawn-out crime drama nonsense about a phony director (self-reference?) and some gangsters, but who the hell cares? It's at times exasperating, and at other times just dull, but it's relentlessly, dumbfoundingly awful -- a lot worse than anything the much-maligned Ed Wood ever thought about doing.
Something Weird offers up this stinking' dog of a movie, and if you've got any guts you'll order it from them. Just make sure you're in the right mood for it, and don't say you weren't warned. Poor old Phil Tucker -- when the reviews came in for Robot Monster, his first film back in '53, he tried to commit suicide and failed. He lived and went on to make six more films including this one.
