White Goddess (1953)
aka Ramar of the Jungle
#3991
Date: 7-26-2012
Directed by Wallace Fox
Featuring Jon Hall, Ray Montgomery, M'liss McClure
Country: USA
What it is: Jungle TV-movie cobbled together from TV episodes
Two doctors explore the jungle in search of a white goddess in the hopes of discovering her secret of eternal youth.
This movie almost ended up on my "ones that got away" list, and therein lies a tale. The movie first entered my hunt list with the title RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE, which matches the name of the TV series from which episodes were culled to produce it. Yet, IMDB did not list a movie with the same title, and though I found ample evidence that several movies were culled from the series, none of the lists I found made any mention of one of them having the same title of the series. It wasn't until I was preparing to move it to my "ones that got away" list that I found the clue I needed; a check against CITWF indicated that RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE was a rarely used alternate title to a movie called WHITE GODDESS. A listing of that movie did exist in IMDB, and the cast and the plot description indicated I was on the right track.
However, it quickly became clear that the movie itself wouldn't be easy to find; I found no sources for it. Still, I've had this problem before with movies culled from TV series; if I could find the individual episodes that made up the movie, I could watch those. After a bit of searching, I discovered the names of the episodes; they were "Evil Trek", "Tribal Feud" and "White Savages". All of these episodes were conveniently located on YouTube.
So I'm cheating a little once again, but I've made a habit of it in these cases, so why stop now? At any rate, I get the impression that the series, though not badly done, largely existed to regurgitate all the usual jungle movie cliches. Some of the movies culled from the series didn't have any fantastic content, but this one features the youth-preserving drug that centers around two of the episodes. All in all, it was okay, but little more than that. Still, the fact that I was able to solve the mystery surrounding it and keep it from falling into my "ones that got away" list does give me a certain sense of victory.
