Believe It or Not (Second Series) #5 (1932) User Reviews

Iron Maidens And Rolling Tires

[boblipton · 5/10 · 23 March 2024]

A woman shows up in Robert L. Ripley's office, and he has nothing better to do than shows her around his collection of oddities and motion pictures of the same.

Ripley speaks like he is reading his words off a card in a plodding and nasal voice that might make the modern viewer wonder why anyone would wish to hear him go through a list of things that includes rocks that float in water and a man who lives in the wild in Pennsylvania. If so they would reckon without the enormous power of sheer celebrity. Ripley's syndicated newspaper feature had been running since 1918, and was seen by easily a hundred million people daily. Indeed, it is still running. Sheer curiosity would make this a novel way of seeing the hand-drawn feature with a sense of confidence in its claims.

Poor Entry in the Series

[Michael_Elliott · 11 April 2010]

Believe It or Not (Second Series) #5 (1932)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Pretty weak entry in the series has Robert L. Ripley talking to a female reporter who wants to hear some of those "believe it or not" stories. We get to see the shrunken head of an Indian as well as an iron execution chamber, which was invented by the man who ended up being the first one killed in it. In North Carolina we find a hermit who has lived outside for over forty-years without ever getting a cold. Overseas we meet a sidewalk doctor who sucks the headache out of a person's head. We get more bizarre stories like these but none of them are overly interesting and for the most part this seven-minute short goes by very slowly. I'm not sure how much thought went into the "story build-up" of having the reporter actually interesting in what's going on but it adds nothing but then again, the actual stories here aren't too good either. There's a weird animated sequence with tombstones that say strange things on them but none of them are that funny.

You can believe it or not...

[classicsoncall · 5/10 · 7 April 2024]

As I write this review, some of these 'Believe It or Not' stories are making the rounds on Turner Classic Movies. I thought they would be more interesting than what this one proved to be, but you have to keep in mind they were made in the early 1930's and documentary film making was in its infancy. Robert Ripley himself appears in the vignettes, but you don't see him speaking on camera at all. This episode takes us to Africa and the Holy Land, starting off with a tribe of fierce fighters called the Tuaregs, who supposedly made it routine to plunder camel caravans. That's when my antenna first went up, as I had to wonder how Ripley managed to get them on film. In Algeria, there are glimpses of an old mosque, and the narrator seemed to make light of the fact that often times, in order to rid a member of his harem, a warlord would simply throw her off a high roof. This episode also offered a bit on a so called 'nilometer' in Egypt, by which a pharaoh would levy a tax on how high the water level got on a cliff bordering the Nile River. During a drought, no tax was required. There was also mention of the Tree of Abraham, considered to be the oldest living thing at the age of thirty five centuries!!, and a glimpse of the olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ prayed prior to His crucifixion. I don't know how to take any of these stories credibility wise. Of course, being so old, some may not even be verifiable.