Thrilling Jungle Adventure

Southland Times, Issue 23650, 27 October 1938, Page 14

Thrilling Jungle Adventure

New Zealand Screen Actor

All film actors are not effete, as Colin Tapley proved when he made “Booloo.” Tapley believes that the supposedly mythical White Tiger is no myth at all, but that some natives have seen it. Are Hollywood actors effete? asks Myrtle Gebhart in the World’s News. Well, we present to you New Zealander Colin Tapley, just returned from the peninsula Malayan jungle, where scenes were taken for “Booloo.” There the temperature ranged from 100 to 110 degrees, accompanied by extreme humidity which made the day almost unbearable. Wild animals, reptiles and venomous insects were constant dangers. In the conservative British way, he says: “It was not a picnic.” The expedition was gone 10 months, the personnel including Tapley, the only white actor in the picture, Clyde Elliott, the producer-director, two cameramen, and two assistants. In Singapore they hired porters, and trucks carried the equipment, but when they reached the wild country they transferred the paraphernalia to elephants. I wondered how the big cameras, lights and generators, microphone booms.

and all the sound gadgets could be transported via pachyderms. “Why, an elephant can carry 800 pounds easily,” Tapley said. His nonchalance is that British heritage. From others in the troupe I learned of their difficulties fording their equipment by raft over rivers, the fevers when they skirted the mangrove swamps, and how native boys hewed paths through the tangled growth to their central camp, 400 miles from Singapore. The wild beasts, tigers and leopards were kept away from the clearing by the nightly rings of fire. “Natives beat them into the bush, for our photographic ‘shots,’ ” Colin sgid. “Personally, I didn’t meet a tiger, though I was ready and willing. Don’t write me up as a big-game hunter, as I only shot a few porcupines and squirrels.” Colin’s life ras in danger many times —mostly from snakes and venomous insects.

“Elliott and I were seated at a camp table,” he described one memorable moment. “He noticed a virulent large insect crawling over my shirt. Quietly he said, ‘Don’t move.’ Just as it raised its tail to sting, he hit it with a book. “The trouble was,” he continued in the clipped British speech, “he hit me also.And on ny Adam*' apple! He knocked out the spider, also myself. I was ‘out’ for five minutes. The scofpion went into a permanent coma.” I interviewed Mr. Tapley and had a few words with Mr. Elliott on the (Paramount) jungle set. Very picturesque, the scene was, each leaf carefully arranged. “Nice, eh?” Mr. Tapley remarked. “Here in Hollywood you can make your jungle as you want it, for effect. You can put a tree here or a liana there. You can achieve symmetrical balance.” Upon the expedition’s return to Hollywood it was decided tc eliminate an entire sequence taken in the jungle, involving the adoration of a native maid. It annoys censors if a nice young Englishman, engaged to an English girl, gives the nod to a jungle queen. Close-ups were being recorded, amid all that luxuriant, artificial foliage. Colin Strode into the tent and out of the tent numerous times. The “native”—a Hollywood Polynesian, or maybe he was a Hawaiian,. I never did find out—time and again rushed to the tent-flap and told the hero that the white tiger had been

seen. . Through numerous rehearsals and six “takes,” Colin—clad in shorts and tan shirt and pith helmet—registered excitement. Yes. they suffered for their art. But you know how an Englishman understates. “No, I did not shoot any big game,” Colin insisted. "A squirrel or a porcupine, now and then, to give a fillip to our monotonous menu of canned meats, soups and canned vegetables. “Porcupines?” he replied to my questionably uplifted eyebrows. “Very good, really delicious. We also sampled the native foods—the mango and the guava, their yams and breadfruit, fish baked in

plantain leaves. “We lived in the native bamboo huts, raised high on stilts, and very clean. “Our porters, hired in Singapore, were paid the equivalent of £2 a month. When we reached the wilds money meant nothing. “Salt—nails—cigarettes! “Each day we gave the natives their rations. They loved to eat salt by the handful, to smoke our cigarettes, and they thought that pounding nails into logs was a diverting new game. “Though they are primitives, wearing only a loin cloth, they are really quite clean, and they are very docile. When the interpreter ordered them to beat the wild animals into the bush, in order that we could get our long-lens camera ‘shots,’ they obeyed, but shook their heads in wonderment, considering it just another ‘crazy white man’s idea.’ “No, they had never seen a motion picture, and we were advised not to show them a film, as it might excite them.

“Entertainment?” Colin shrugged. “Oh, we took books along, we read and we slept a lot. I also made IS-millimetre camera films.

“At one spot we were just 50 miles from the equator. Though the average heat is only about 100, the humidity makes it a real discomfort. We could work only from 7 to 11 in the morning, when the sky would get patchy with clouds, obscuring the light. Then came the rains! Monotonous sheets of drizzle, an oppressive blanket. “The barbaric beat on tom-toms, the pungenF aromas from the forests, and the buzzing insects at first kept us awake at night. Soon, however, all that became a soothing lullaby.” Elliott and Tapley discovered Suratna Asmara, a native of Sawah Lorento, Java. She had danced in Singapore, and in India she l.ad given a command performance before the Maharajah of Patiala.

The studio cabled permission to bring her to Hollywood. But when her family of 40 relatives insisted upon accompanying her to “the wicked place” the deal was jinxed. In fact, in the Hollywood editing and revision her scenes were eliminated. So all that the dusky damsel has left of her movie debut is an idyllic memory.

Much has been speculated and written about the disappearance of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, in November, 1935, when the titled aviator was lost on an England-to-Australia flight. Several expeditions have attempted to find his plane's wreckage. A wheel and part of undercarriage, discovered off Aye Island, have been identified by the Lockheed Company as. remnants of his ship, Lady Southern Cross. f, ‘ Elliott and Tapley explain his disappearance: “The nativ s believe that there is a wide area in the Malay Archipelago where there’s a ‘down drift,’ and there ‘strangers from the sky’ are sucked down. That superstition is a folklore legend. We tried to find a trace of him, but all we could gather was a report that natives in a remote village had seen a brief glimpse of his plane, "The big bird in the sky.’" No women accompanied the heroes from Hollywood. Quoting Elliott: “The jungle is no place for a woman. Take a woman on an expedition into the wilds and you borrow trouble. I did twice. I never will again. Men can stand the canned food, the heat, the smell of the savages, all of the discomforts. But i omen get the heebiejeebies, particularly at night when the insects’ drone and the babel of jungle sounds rasp their nerves ragged." The story of “Booloo”—the correct spelling is “Bulu,” meaning, literally, “fur and feathers’’—concerns the efforts of a young English writer to prove the strtement made by his father, an explorer, as to the existence of the white

tiger. ' ' The museum questions the book that the young man has written, recording his late father’s exploits. The hero invades the Malayan jungles, captures a white tiger, vindicates his father’s name, gets his papa’s plaque restored to its niche of honour in the Geographic Museum. In the fade-out he weds the English girl with whom he has maintained contact via short-wave radio, relayed from the British outpost stations. “The white tiger is not a myth,” Tapley assured me, "though it is very rare. It is found .in : the Saiki country, where the natives regard it as sort of holy-cow, and, with their petty but poisonous blowdarts, pop hunters who attempt to find it.” Tapley—lean, bronzed, muscular, a sight to delight feminine eyes accustomed to Hollywood’s collar-ad heroes—was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, and educated at Christ’s College. His father, while Mayor of Dunedin, and owner of a big shipping business, was decorated by the King for aid given to the first Byrd South Polar expedition. Colin became interested .in amateur theatricals and played in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. A job as salesman for a grocery firm was so monotonous that he went to England and enilisted in the Royal Air Force. Invalided in 1930 when a wing fell from his plane, he wanted to return home.

Unwilling to cable his father for financial help, he shipped as a deck hand. Learning by radio that his father was on a committee meeting the ship, he persuaded the captain to let him wear respectable clothes and stand at the rail with the passengers. Sheep farming occupied him for a time. When that bored him he played in amateur theatricals over New Zealand.