Lawbolisted Powerful

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Richard Burin This remarkably silly, hackneyed adventure movie takes hilarious liberties with its source material, an uplifting account of two nuns' mission to bring modern medicine to the Congo. By the time it reached the screen, it had Susan Hayward as a headstrong young nurse, and Bob Mitchum as a treasure-hunter escorting her through Bakuba country. The script is unbelievably clunky, with Mitchum having to translate all the Congolese dialects into English for Hayward! Haha, how rubbish! Fans of Walter Slezak won't be surprised to find him playing a slimy, greedy, reptilian, overweight villain, albeit this time in a safari suit.Hathaway mixes hard-won documentary-style footage with alarmingly transparent studio crap as Hayward wins over natives with her "big magic" (I'm going to ask my GP for some "big magic" the next time I see him) and Mitchum acts like an insensitive oaf over her dead husband, just because she won't immediately sleep with him. Needless to say, they can't recreate the magic of their only other teaming: the previous year's 'The Lusty Men'. In fact, this is more like a dry run for Hathaway's confusing, über-dreadful, greed-is-bad yawnfest 'Garden of Evil'. There's the odd concession to classy entertainment – a few spectacular location shots and a nice tour of a makeshift hospital, seen through a dozen veils – but that's about all. The set-up is laboured, the situations as artificial as the environment, the resolution laboured and rushed. The film's calling cards and its wildcards are wasted with startling profligacy. Cult character actor Timothy Carey has about a minute's screen-time. Even the mighty Mitchum is lacklustre, injecting just a few moments of the requisite cynicism before going back to counting the zeroes on his cheque. For Mitchum completists (like me) only.(1.5 out of 4)

sferber "White Witch Doctor," which premiered on July 1, 1953, is the type of movie that I can enjoy greatly while watching it, all the while knowing that I am not watching anything great or extraordinary. And the main reason for that enjoyment, in this case, is the presence of Miss Susan Hayward in the title role. Has there ever been an actress who combined such drop-dead good looks with extraordinary acting ability? Not for me, anyway! Hayward's sheer presence in a movie makes it hard for me to be objective in a critique; I can enjoy anything she appears in, just by looking at that marvelous face. Anyway, you know where I'm coming from. In this picture, Hayward plays a nurse who ventures into the Congo in 1907 to help out at a remote mission. Her guide is Robert Mitchum (her costar in 1952's "The Lusty Men"), who takes her into this Bakuba territory with an ulterior motive: the finding of the gold deposits that supposedly reside there. Along the way, the two encounter just about every safari-movie cliche in the book: the mad gorilla (actually, a man in a gorilla suit), a charging lion, totem fetishes warning journeyers to "STAY OUT," angry witch doctors, a rope bridge, wildly dancing natives and the like. (Sorry, no quicksand.) At one point, Hayward awakens in her tent to find a tarantula crawling on her (a "gift" from a jealous witch doctor), almost a full decade before James Bond, in "Dr. No," faced the same dilemma. I wish I could say that Susan's nurse character faces the predicament with Gems' cool, but in a situation like that, how many people could? Neither Hayward nor Mitchum travelled to Africa to make this picture (this is NOT "The African Queen"!), but there is a lot of location photography of a very beautiful order. The studio sets and actual locales are very well integrated, so the picture never really looks phony. Mitchum here plays a very likeable character, with little of the sluggish moroseness so characteristic of many of his other roles. And Hayward, "the Brooklyn Bombshell," is simply wonderful as Ellen Burton, the American nurse on her first trip into the wilds of Africa. She manages to impress the viewer and the natives alike with her medical abilities and her courage, despite an understandable scream or two when faced with the odd spider, snake, or spear-wielding native. Hayward, 35 when she made this picture, is given many close-ups that reveal what a remarkable beauty she was. In that tarantula scene, for example, director Henry Hathaway shows her lying asleep in bed, her long titian tresses framing her face in close-up, and she really does look stunning in beautiful color. Though the picture doesn't enable either of the two leads an opportunity for any great thespian displays, both manage to make the best of things, pros that they are. The picture really is a rather pedestrian affair, albeit one with great photography and yet another moody Bernard Herrmann score, but it is totally redeemed for me by the presences of the two leads...especially Hayward's. "White Witch Doctor" would make a wonderful double feature with Hayward's other African picture, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," or perhaps with a picture that came out the following year, "The Naked Jungle," featuring another redheaded beauty, Eleanor Parker, stuck in the jungles of South America. I'm not sure that "White Witch Doctor" is in the same league as those other two, but it still makes for a marvelous entertainment, and is eminently suitable for the kiddies, as well. I thoroughly enjoyed it...but, like I said, you know where I'm coming from!

Nazi_Fighter_David Lonnie Douglas (Robert Mitchum) and his partner, Huysman (Walter Slezak), guide a dedicated nurse Ellen Burton (Susan Hayward) to the distant jungle outpost where she, as a volunteer, has been sent to give medical aid to the natives.. But Huysman and Lonni also have plans of their own: it is said that there is hidden gold in the Bakuba country, and they are determined to find it...They penetrate the remote interior of the Belgian Congo by means of a primitive canoe propelled by a native crew... At one of their portages Ellen cures a native chief's wife (Dorothy Harris) and the witch doctor, seeking revenge for her interference, tries to kill her with a tarantula, but she manages to escape its poisonous bite...Later, Lonni saves a boy who has been severely injured fighting a lion... The lad is the son of the Bakuba king and wears a necklace made of gold nuggets—the treasure Lonni and Huysman are seeking... Perhaps this is the opportunity they've been waiting for, Lonni thinks, and devises a plan for using the Bakuba boy to get the gold...There have been quite a number of Adventurers ladies, the most notably adventurous of whom has perhaps been the aggressive and resilient Susan Hayward who was at her best not in the Oscar-Winning vein of 'I Want to Live,' but roughing it out in the jungle in films like 'White Witch Doctor.'She was quite capable of blasting Jack Elam with a rifle at the end of 'Rawhide,' and in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' she was tough enough to send the witch doctor packing and go to work with a knife on Gregory Peck who will otherwise die from the infection that was building up in him... Hayward was the great outdoor actress—indoors, she was often a bit too much to take...This was Hayward's second movie with Robert Mitchum... They were teamed in Nicholas Ray's rodeo movie in 'The Lusty Men' (1952).Africa was the real star of "White Witch Doctor," with beautiful color shots of the Congo and Bakubas caught in their colorful dances, taken by Leon Shamroy, three times an Oscar winner...

julianhwescott I rather enjoyed this film even though it was a little slow in some places. The cinematography alone should have garnered an Oscar nomination (if it didn't) as the settings in Africa were brilliantly and beautifully photographed. The story revolves around a nurse played by Hayward who goes to Africa to assist a woman doctor in taking care of the sick people there. Susan Hayward plays the nurse and upon arrival meets a businessman played by Robert Mitchum. He thinks she's crazy for staying and she's definitely going to stay! Hayward's and Mitchum's lives become endangered when someone decides to make greed the name of the game. Definitely worth watching and sorry it is not available on video.