Congorilla (1932) User Reviews

Unga bunga bonga boo.

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 4/10 · 15 January 2003]

The 1930s saw a vogue for documentary films about remote corners of the world, with an emphasis on wild animals, exotic terrain and primitive people with unusual cultures. Despite the logistics of transporting a film crew to a distant and dangerous place, and then bringing 'em back alive (with the film footage), such films were often much cheaper to make than were conventional Hollywood features ... because there were no expensive sets, costumes, or high-priced movie stars.

The most successful makers of such films (artistically and financially) were the team of Martin E. Johnson and his wife Osa, who made several documentaries (sometimes with blatantly staged events) in Africa and Asia. The Johnsons' safari films were extremely popular, inspiring several parodies ... most notably Wheeler & Woolsey's "So This is Africa", in which the very sexy Esther Muir plays a character named Mrs. Johnson-Martini (instead of Martin E. Johnson, geddit?). Although several other filmmakers were producing safari documentaries at this time, the Johnsons' films were the most popular in this genre because they relied heavily on humour. Viewed from our own more enlightened (I hope) standpoint, this is a serious flaw in the Johnsons' documentaries: there are too many scenes in which the funny little brown or yellow people are made to look complete idiots who are easily outsmarted by the clever white bwana Johnson and his wife.

One definite asset of these movies is the presence of Osa Johnson. Ten years younger than her husband, she manages to seem young enough to be his daughter. While certainly not as attractive as the shapely blond Esther Muir, Osa Johnson was a pert brunette who gave ingratiating performances in front of the camera in all the films she co-produced with her husband.

'Congorilla' is probably the best of the Johnsons' films. The shots of the Congo are interesting and have some historical value as evidence of what this environment looked like in 1930. The shots of the Pygmies and other natives are also interesting, although these suffer from the Johnsons' penchant to stage events in a manner that makes the natives look 'wild' and alien.

The best (and funniest) scene in 'Congorilla' is an improvised sequence in which Osa Johnson attempts to teach a jazz dance to some Pygmy women. (The dance is the Black Bottom, no less ... the same dance which Bob Hope famously taught to Daisy and Violet Hilton, the conjoined twins.) Wearing jodhpurs, riding boots, and a pith helmet, Osa Johnson starts scat-singing while she does high steps and slaps her knees in her attempt to teach this dance to the African women. Meanwhile, they just stand there staring at her, apparently wondering what this crazy white woman is trying to accomplish. It's a very funny scene, but it has unpleasant undertones. Osa Johnson is doing a dance that was invented by black Americans: the implication seems to be that black Africans should instinctively be able to perform this dance after a brief demonstration (using natural rhythm, I guess) because it's in their blood, or something.

I'll rate 'Congorilla' 4 points out of 10. This film says a little bit about African life in the 1930s and rather more about American cultural perceptions in that same decade.

Wild life before ethnographic's

[carvalheiro · 20 November 2007]

"Congorilla" (1932) by Martin Johnson and his courageous and beautiful wife, it was as movie an entire discovery of the potentiality from African jungle. The fragility of the rushes on African jungle as pictures from the trip are good enough for open the curiosity to this kind of life where the day slows easy and the contrast with the past and the present is almost nothing in terms of time for the help from these tribal peoples from the bow age and encircled timber huts within a strange magnetism from the sunset on the savanna.

Just in time of first Tarzan's and from the novels written in the spirit of Livingstone and Stanley from XIX Century explorers, but here concerning wild life as true first ethnographic view helping contact with Pygmy's for instance in the spirit of Jack London. Osa is shown when the team of explorers was in a given savanna, searching the lions and after while she is before one of it, in the moment of preparing the jump for the attack, just before the shootings of protection.

One of the scenes shows us a Pygmy smoking a cigar before the camera and the idea that a black man was like a monkey vanishes slowly of the mind of any viewer, I presume also, because the purpose was indeed approaching cultures and not exactly open another abyss in between. A free style for capturing snapshots over the jungle with people naked and happy in its natural environment but with a rudimentary look. It seems that it was here that we had seen one of the first aerial landscapes taken from a plane on African continent. The separation between race and culture it was here a matter of angle of view not an eugenic standard of the time and such a magnificence was too the subject of these contradictions, but differently understood if above the legacy of the XIX Century and the main activity of Martin Johnson and his wife, in the transit and competitive overview with others in the geographical exploitation of the moment, that it was too about chasing during hunts by local people. With such an imagined savagery with some rules and principles learned in Kansas, claiming a rescue of the forgotten colonized folks in the bush as a new small economy of scale, beginning contacts of other nature intuitively before exploitation or leaving them out of the history for the next generation. Martin Johnson was a voyager very known in the time of hangings and picnics, positioned in his interest for the cultural comparative studies about primitive peoples between continents also at the time of cannibalism and cutting heads as idea profoundly linked with the imaginary of common dealers around the world.

Only good for old film scenes

[mrstrellis2002 · 2/10 · 20 April 2004]

With these people faking so many shots, using old footage, and gassing animals to get them out, not to mention that some of the scenes were filmed on a created set with actors, what's to believe? Old film of countries is nice, but the animal abuse and degradation of natives is painful to watch in these films. I know, racism is OK in these old films, but there is more to that to make this couple lose credibility. Portrayed as fliers, they never flew their planes, Martin Johnson was an ex-vaudevillian, used friends like Jack London for financial gain while stiffing them of royalties, denying his wife's apparent depression, using her as a cute prop, all this makes these films unbearable. They were by no means the first to travel to these lands, or the first to write about them. He was OK as a filmmaker and photographer, but that's about it.

Action-packed documentary of life in the Congo

[raxtonite · 10/10 · 30 August 2001]

Features breathtaking documentary footage of (at the time)never-before-seen aspects of African peoples and animals. The Johnsons never patronised their subjects, but recorded their lives and customs with loving reverence. The footage of the wild animals, especially the gorillas, gives us a glimpse of a world that is rapidly disappearing.

From a time before either WWII or the Great Depression ...

[jesheldon · 29 September 2004]

Unlike some of the posters on this page, I find this and many of the other Johnsons' fine films to be entrancing. Working in a time without the extreme telephoto lenses of recent years and with only very primitive camera and sound equipment, they have managed to create something of lasting value that offers worthwhile insight into the life and time of both the animals and the people they were filming. Both the people and the animals have been altered dramatically since that time.

One writer seems to feel that most or all of their scenes were faked when actually they were quite real but sometimes done with a perspective of entertaining the audience (the filmmakers were, after all, in the entertainment business and the films had to appeal commercially to audiences else there would be no more).

The Johnsons actually had very great rapport with the native people they dealt with and were if fact greatly criticized by the white African establishment for being "too close" to their film subjects. They very much respected these people and enjoyed them and the feeling was reciprocated as can be observed in the films. There was no "put down" either actual or implied despite what some infer from the terminology used.

The Johnsons also accomplished many firsts in their career - first sound film made entirely in Africa; first use of airplanes for wildlife large scale filming; first to fly over both Mts. Kenya and Kilimanjaro; first to show a moving picture on a scheduled commercial airline flight (which flight was captained by Eddie Rickenbacker a well-known figure at the time); first to film many wild and hostile tribes in the South Seas and Borneo.

When they left Borneo (their last film) in 1937 they left the government of that country a gift with a treasure trove of several thousand still photos of people and places which were destroyed by the Japanese occupation during the WWII time frame and a visual record of that time is only now being rebuilt by Malaysia - a country deeply interested in how their culture developed over time,

Those criticizing the Johnsons for "staging" scenes might try to approach elephants in the wild as Martin and Osa did on many occasions to film them since they did not have the zoom-to-the-moon ability of today's lenses. Try staring down a Rhino - as Osa did on several occasions - with only a relatively meagre rifle to protect you when you closely approached such dangerous animals. THEN let's talk about "staged scenes". And, in fact, the Johnsons were both pilots but chose not to fly the planes realizing that they were not exceptional pilots - which skill was required by some of their locales (and considering their aircraft).

Martin and Osa Johnson should rightly be viewed considering the time in which they lived and worked and not with some 21st century judgmental viewpoint. They were truly pioneers in their field and the museum that still exists to showcase their work and times does so perhaps better than these films might. I find the films quite absorbing when viewed with some understanding, though.