Nonureva Really Surprised!

MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

MartinHafer The film begins with an actress being strangled outside a bar. Inside at the time is a drunk cop who is off duty (Tierney). Also inside are a variety of odd characters including a sketch artist, a weirdo (John Carradine) and a blonde dame (Jayne Mansfield)."Female Jungle" is a poor murder mystery. Despite starring Lawrence Tierney, who was fantastic in 1950s film noir, this film suffers from a bad script, some poor acting and lousy direction. What makes it worse, after the murderer is discovered and stopped, the film goes on for another ten minutes or so in order to explain what has happened and why!! To make things worse, it's not particularly interesting or engaging and is a bit of a disappointment....even for a cheapo crime film.

Michael_Elliott Female Jungle (1955)** (out of 4) Det. Jack Stevens (Lawrence Tierney) gets chewed out by his boss after he's in a bar dead drunk while a famous actress is outside being murdered. Stevens is so drunk and after a witness sees him leaving the bar with a blonde, he begins to feel that perhaps he's the murderer. He starts an investigation to try and see what really happened and soon we get more suspects including the woman's press agent (John Carradine), a man (Burt Kaiser) who did her portrait and his wife (Kathleen Crowley). This "B" noir has a terrific cast that do what they can with a lousy screenplay but in the end there's not enough anyone could have done to recover from the very weak story. I think any mystery or noir film is going to be in deep trouble whenever it can't even make the viewer interested in any of the events going on and that's exactly what FEMALE JUNGLE does. There wasn't a single frame where I was interested in who the killer was. I didn't care if it turned out to be Tierney, Carradine or anyone else who happens across the screen. The screenplay makes very little sense and often times it appears none of the pieces really add up until the end when we get the majority of the characters in a single room where we're told what happened. You know a film is in trouble when actors are given long scripts to read at one time just to make sense of everything. Another problem is that director VeSota doesn't really know how to build up any drama or make anything energetic. The movie's pacing is an issue because everything seems to happen at a very slow pace and even worse is the fact that there's just not any life to anything you're seeing. VeSota will always be remembered for his various appearances in Roger Corman films but his director's output didn't really add up to much as he followed this film with THE BRAIN EATERS and INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. Tierney does what he can with the lead role but that's not too much as his character is pretty much the worst written. Some might be surprised to see him playing a level-headed guy but he does what he can. I thought both Kaiser and Crowley were decent in their parts but Carradine has fun playing one character who seems to have at least three different personalities. The majority of the film points the finger at Carradine and depending on what the script is trying to do at the time will depend on what type of performance the actor gives. Jayne Mansfield made her film debut here playing a sexy blonde with a few secrets. The performance isn't that good but she was certainly striking to look at.

manuel-pestalozzi Having seen this movie recently for the first time I found it surprisingly arty. The classification cheap indie doesn't do the picture justice. The photography in sharp black and white – well, far more black than white -, the quirky camera angles and the editing are almost as good as in more famous film noirs of that period like, for example, Kiss Me Deadly.The story has a really uneasy feel to it. I am not sure if all that surrealism is intentional or mainly caused by a low budget, I just know that is is damn effective. The action unfolds in one dark night and feels like a claustrophobic nightmare. There are several similarities to Otto Preminger's Laura, the ever effective John Carradine is cast as a rich, arrogant art critic in the line of Waldo Lydecker. And he delivers all right. But who is Laura? There are three different women who occasionally pop up, dead or alive, in photographs on billboards, in sketches or framed paintings. They are not real but rather like figments in a man's imagination. Maybe they are the same woman altogether? Very confusing. And who is the man who imagines those women? Is it the caricaturist who thinks he is a failure as an artist? Or the alcoholic policeman? I could not help assuming that they were one and the same person, too. Just think of David Lynch's Lost Highway! It is not really clear, what is going on in this picture. People do strange things. Sneaking up to an apartment at 3 a.m. asking urgently, hysterically for a caricature, entering another apartment at 3.30 a.m., having a discussion with a woman in her bedroom while in the background the woman's husband tosses uncomfortably, desperately trying to sleep, entering a third apartment at 3.45 a.m. putting a head on the bosom of Jayne Mansfield who's reclining there - without any explanation. The police detectives refuse to take people to the precinct and want to conduct the investigation into a murder in a sleazy bar near where it happened. These strange scenes are not cheap - they work in a way that you start feeling slightly feverish.The set design is very good. Several fifties interiors and gadgets are nicely displayed. I admire all those movies in which great effect is created with little means. One reason why I like film noir where this tendency at times results in real art.

bmacv There's a persuasive argument to be mounted that the end of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood movie-making can be ascribed not to the studios' divestiture of its theater chains but to the explosion, in the motorized society of the 1950s, of drive-in theaters, where the main attraction was not on the screen. Up to that point, even the lowliest second feature was apt to show at least a modicum of craft and plausibility. The exploitation movies changed all that, ushering in an era when just about anything goes – or, often, nothing.American International Pictures was the outfit that pioneered fodder for the teenage popcorn-and-petting trade. In 1956, it released one of its few features that might be considered even marginally noir – Female Jungle (also called The Hangover). Neither title quite fits, though the second has a bit more claim to legitimacy than the first, which was simply a ploy to pack 'em in.After the gala premiere of her debut film, a starlet leaves a seedy bar and meets her quietus at the hands of a strangler. For the next hour or so, Lawrence Tierney, John Carradine, Jane Mansfield and half a dozen other characters go racketing around through the night on a series of wild-goose chases. Tierney plays an off-duty policeman whose long evening bending his elbow resulted in a blackout; he thinks he might have been the killer. Carradine plays a gossip columnist whose helped the dead starlet's career, only to be jilted. Mansfield (in her screen debut) seems to be playing a call-girl who's in love with an out-of-work caricaturist whose wife might be the next victim of….All that said, Female Jungle remains watchable, if barely. It was AIP's policy to engage a few actors on the way up and a few more on the way down, filling up the rest of the slots with whoever was handy (both the producer and director have parts in the movie). But Tierney, by this time seriously on the skids and persona-non-grata in the major studios, exudes some of his rough magic while Carradine, looking particularly suave, gives it his old-trouper's all. And Mansfield, of course, has her own morbid fascination. There's a peculiar allure to some of this late-50s sleaze; if you're into it, this is the movie for you.