Jacaré

Famed big game hunter Frank Buck (Bring 'Em Back Alive) narrates and appears in this thrilling adventure documentary! Jacaré is the "authentic pictorial story of men against the jungle...the first motion picture made in the great Brazilian jungle of the dark Amazon." It opens with Buck at his desk, telling his secretary that he is unable to join the Amazon expedition because of "important affairs in Washington." Going in his stead is James M. Dannaldson, a Buck protégé with "an uncanny knack for handling wild animals" and "hard as nails" Brazillian naturalist Miguel Rojinsky. The two men brave the Amazon rainforest, filled with boa constrictors, eagles, water buffalo, ocelots and jaguars. "Dumb animals are not really dumb at all," says Buck, "but man can usually outsmart all of them!" Surely one of the most exciting sequences is when Dannaldson wrestles with a 28-foot-long anaconda wrapped around him (though accounts vary whether the snake was drugged or not.) Finally, they meet the deadly creature that gives the film its name. Jacaré is Portuguese for "alligator", but as Buck tells us, "his real name is murderer...killing is all they think about. They're like something out of Earth's dim dawn...created long before mankind was given a soul." By film's end Buck is "homesick for the jungle" and promises to join Dannaldson and Rajinsky "real soon" so he can "bring 'em back alive." (His next film, 1943's Tiger Fangs, would feature Buck in a far more prominent onscreen role.) James Dannaldson would later become an animal handler on films as diverse as The Land Unknown (1957), The Spider (1958) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and would make appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. One notable element of Jacaré is the score by the legendary Miklós Rózsa, a seventeen-time Academy Award nominee who composed the soundtracks to The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Spellbound (1945) and Ben-Hur (1959), among many others. His music for Jacaré is strikingly similar to his score for The Jungle Book, which had been released earlier that year. Tragically, Jacaré director Charles E. Ford died of peritonitis shortly after returning from the Amazon once filming was completed. He was 43.