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Ants in your plants, as Sturges would say: It topples a system but saves a relationship, Verhoeven in Starship Troopers is the great heir. The bride from New Orleans (Eleanor Parker) arrives in the South American plantation for the husband she hasn't yet met, he's a turgid autocrat (Charlton Heston) who makes a point of showing his displeasure. Displays of jungle brutality don't scare her, instead the belle's aloof willfulness chips away at his hard façade until he's bashfully quoting Fontaine. "Man's just another animal" in this lush comedy of marriage, which Byron Haskin builds with leisurely sprinkles of delirium before the full surrealism of a rapacious insect army is unleashed. The menace has a name, "Marabunta," a high-angled view reveals a reddish carpet cutting a swath through the verdant landscape. (Fellow pith-helmeted colonialist William Conrad describes it with appropriately pulpy poetry: "A monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! Forty square miles of agonizing death!") Ants march and monkeys get out of the way, except for the stubborn ones at the surrounded manor—the protagonist glares at one of the enemy soldiers under a magnifying glass, soon enough the fancy furniture becomes fuel for a protective bonfire. A forthright camera for the benefit of Buñuel's Death in the Garden (rotund helper slumbering in close-up, tilt down to ants feasting on his legs), wry imagery for days (Heston as bronzed stallion, Parker as caged macaw, womanly virtue as unused piano). In the midst of the frenzy, an easeful account of marital anxieties, with bug repellent succeeding where liquor and perfume failed. "I do believe you're developing a sense of humor." The coda is a simple matter of giving back to the river (cf. Vidor's Ruby Gentry). Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo. With Abraham Sofaer, John Dierkes, and Douglas Fowley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |