The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

 

1969 was one of the most bipolar years in history – it simultaneously represented the best and worst mankind had to offer. The same year that brought us Woodstock and the Moon Landing also brought us the Zodiac murders, Charles Manson, and Altamont. The counterculture reached its peak with Woodstock and then quickly dived into obscurity; until the only remnants were a bunch of burn outs roaming aimlessly through the country.  The movie that best represented this turbulent time in US history was Easy Rider – the two protagonists have essentially dropped out of society and are more interested in driving across country on their motorcycles, doing drugs, and hooking up with random women.  It’s a movie that spoke to a generation that had become greatly disillusioned with the American Dream.

It was in this environment that The Valley of Gwangi was released, which to a 1969 audience must have felt a bit old hat. After all, a movie that features cowboys and dinosaurs is the type of fare children would have watched in the 1950s (when both westerns and monster movies were extremely popular).  The Valley of Gwangi was not the first movie to combine the western genre with science fiction – there was an independent feature released in 1956 titled The Beast of Hollow Mountain. In that movie, two rival ranchers encounter an allosaur that is eating their cattle. However, it is also an incredibly dull movie – the title creature doesn’t appear until the final fifteen minutes.  It is interesting to note that The Valley of Gwangi and The Beast of Hollow Mountain stem from the same source – an unrealized Willis H. O’ Brien project called Valley of the Mists. The project went into preproduction, at RKO, in 1941, but was cancelled when the studio changed ownership.  O’ Brien passed away before his dream project was fully realized, though some of his ideas were used in Mighty Joe Young.  In 1969, O’ Brien’s protégé, Ray Harryhausen, decided to take a crack at the project and the results were a mixed bag.

The biggest flaw of The Valley of Gwangi is its derivative nature – it is essentially a remake of King Kong (with Gwangi in the role of Kong).  A struggling wild west show discovers an allosaur in a hidden valley, proceeds to trap it, and then brings it back to civilization to put on display. The allosaur escapes its cage and runs amuck through a Mexican city before coming to a fiery end.  It not only apes King Kong (pun intended) but other Ray Harryhausen movies as well: in the movie’s climax, Gwangi fights an elephant, recalling a similar scene in Harryhausen’s superior 20 Million Miles to Earth. 

The other major distraction is the obvious dubbing of lead actress, Gila Golan. It’s obvious the filmmakers hired Golan for her looks; she is a lovely decoration. However, the filmmakers didn’t do her any favor by giving her a shrill, hoarse voice that tends to be grating at times – it is a very poor attempt at a Texas accent.  Golan was from Israel, and her heavy accent made her dialogue incomprehensible at times. Still, couldn’t they have chosen a softer, more pleasant voice. 
A potentially moving scene, where Tuck confides to TJ about possibly settling down, is completely undermined by the atrocious dubbing. James Franciscus gives it his all – and nearly sells the scene- but he cannot overcome this huge handicap. T.J. often comes off as being a total shrew – between her constant nagging and flip-flopping, it’s hard to really sympathize with her.  This is a problem, because TJ is supposed to be the heart of the story; the one character who can look at things from a more moderate perspective.   When it looks like a fight might break out between Carlos and the other stuntmen, TJ breaks it up and insists they must stick together.   

Tuck is one of the more interesting characters in the entire Charles H. Schneer/Ray Harryhausen filmography.  Tuck is a grifter – he works for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where his job is scout, and buy, potential acts from other shows.  He is hoping to buy Omar, the Wonder Horse from TJ’s Wild West Show, but she is less than thrilled to see him. Tuck is TJ’s ex–lover – he used to work for her Wild West Show as a stuntman but left her dry to pursue a different career path.  Of course, it’s only a matter of time that the two of them get back together.  Tuck may be a scoundrel, but we immediately sense that he is not the SOB that he appears to be.  The screenwriter relies on a tried-and-true gimmick of showing us Tuck’s good side – having him befriend Lope, an orphaned boy, who Tuck meets while trying to find the arena.  This is designed specifically to elicit a positive response from the viewer, “Look! He has befriended that lonely Mexican Boy; he can’t be that bad of guy!”  Whether this is successful or not depends on how you feel about Lope – I personally never had an issue with the character, he is agreeable enough. Plus, it is cleverly set up that Tuck and Lope are kindred spirits – they both have survived by grifting. Lope makings a living by charging tourists outrageous prices for his services, while Tuck was able to survive by bullshitting his way through life.  Tuck, like Lope, never had a real education, he is a man of pure instinct. He has been on his own his entire life, which is why the idea of settling down frightens him. He is great at grifting, but being the head of a household is truly a frightening concept to him. 

I rather like James Franciscus as Tuck – he is a step up from all the other leading men in Harryhausen’s filmography.  Franciscus was basically a pint-sized Charlton Heston – I suspect that he often was given roles that were initially meant for Heston (two of them would later co-star with each other in Beneath the Planet of the Apes).  Like Heston, he was in great shape and made for a convincing action star.  More importantly, Franciscus brings an impish sense of humor to the proceedings, which is greatly needed in a movie like The Valley of Gwangi.  When TJ and company are trying to capture El Diablo, a small horse, Tuck manages to capture it but TJ shouts at him to let it go and he happily obliges; TJ realizes her faux pas when she sees it run off.  There is also a sense that, despite the ridiculous material, Franciscus is giving it his all – it would have been easy for him to phone in his performance, or devolve into self-parody, but he is committed to giving the best performance possible. It’s also interesting to note that Tuck’s character arc is the polar opposite of the protagonists in Easy Rider; Wyatt and Billy drop out of society and that is essentially their arc. Tuck, on the other hand, begins the movie as an outcast but gradually assimilates back into society – to the point where he becomes a surrogate father to Lope.

After Tuck and TJ have made up, it is revealed that TJ has a potential ace up her sleeve; a tiny horse named El Diablo.  The best word to describe El Diablo is “charming.” It’s one of Harryhausen’s lesser creations, but it still works in the context of this movie.  TJ’s idea is to have El Diablo dancing in a glass cage that is saddled on Omar’s back. While riding to the arena, Tuck meets a British paleontologist, Professor Bromley, who has stumbled upon ancient hoofprints belonging to an extinct horse called the Eohippus. It turns out that El Diablo is an Eohippus, which leads to Tuck and the Professor asking, “Where did it come from?” They try to get an answer out of Carlos, an ex-member of a gypsy tribe who now works for TJ, but he shrugs them off.  It also turns out that Carlos’s former gypsy tribe view El Diablo as a curse and want to return it to the “Forbidden Valley.”  Professor Bromley then conspires with the gypsies – he helps them steal El Diablo and, with Lope in tow, follows them to the Forbidden Valley. Tuck gets wind of this plot, but is too late to stop the theft and he chases after the gypsies. 

This also leads to an annoying subplot where Carlos, out of pure spite, fingers Tuck as the one responsible for the theft – he claims Tuck knocked him out and conspired with the gypsies to steal El Diablo. TJ and company, naturally, believe Carlos and brand Tuck a “no good horse thief.” Of course, this gets cleared up rather quickly, which begs the question: why introduce this subplot in the first place?  Though, it is to the movie’s credit that Carlos is never painted as a total villain. Sure, he blatantly lies to smear Tuck’s character, but he does it for two obvious reasons:  Carlos has strong feelings for TJ and wants to be with her, but Tuck’s arrival dashes all of that. He just can’t believe TJ would pick this conman over him.  The other reason is that Tuck’s, and the Professor’s, interest in El Diablo threatens the plans he has made for himself. After the gypsies run off with El Diablo, Carlos can only watch helplessly as his dreams go up in smoke. Naturally, he blames Tuck because it was Tuck who showed El Diablo to the professor.  Yet, Carlos greatly redeems himself later in the film by constantly putting himself at risk to save others; most notably, when he saves Lope from a pterodactyl.

While trying to recapture El Diablo, Tuck and company discover the entrance to the Forbidden Valley, and that is when they encounter Gwangi. This is also when the movie begins to work for me; the first half of the film is bogged down by endless exposition and a few melodramatic moments, but once Gwangi enters the movie it is nonstop action.   Gwangi is one of Harryhausen’s best creations. He manages to give the temperamental Allosaur a few quirks – at one-point Gwangi takes a break from the action to scratch his head. The interaction between the live action and animation is nearly seamless – the highlight of the movie is when the stuntmen lasso Gwangi. It is often hard to tell where the live action ends, and the animation begins – Harryhausen not only had to animate the Allosaur but the ropes as well. Next to the Skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts, this is Harryhausen’s best realized sequence.  As was the case with most Harryhausen creations, Gwangi is less of a monster and more of a tragic creature – like King Kong before him, Gwangi is taken from his home and put in cage, where all the locals can gawk at him, after having paid for their ticket. Gwangi kills for two reasons: to feed and when he feels threatened.  He doesn’t have the same volatile temper as King Kong, but you don’t want to piss him off. It would make for an extremely awkward plot if Gwangi fell in love with TJ.  

The most recognizable name in the cast, at least for sci-fi fans, is Richard Carlson, who plays Champ, the MC of the Wild West Show and TJ’s guardian. Carlson was one of the better leading men in 1950s science fiction – he often managed to bring humanity to the roles he played. His characters often displayed a healthy curiosity about the unknown and desperately wanted to understand it; in It Came from Outer Space, his character, John Putnam, contacts aliens that have crash landed in the desert and attempts to help them fix their ship so they can return home.  In Creature from the Black Lagoon, his character, David Reed, is sympathetic to the Gillman. He wants to study it, for sure, but he also wants to protect it from the more opportunistic Mark Williams.  Carlson often brought an air of credibility to the proceedings – if Richard Carlson believed in the title creature, then it must be serious.  Sadly, he is given very little to do in The Valley of Gwangi, except occasionally sneer at Tuck and Carlos. He also has a hard time hiding his embarrassment at having to appear in a movie like this. 

I like Laurence Naismith as the slimy Professor Bromley. In most science fiction films, a character like Bromley would be shown in a virtuous light, but Bromley is stern believer in “the end justifies the means.” He is willing to help to gypsies steal El Diablo so they can lead him to the Forbidden, even if it means committing assault – the gypsies attack and knock out Carlos.  He is able to convince Tuck of his logic – why settle for one El Diablo when you can have a dozen of them?  This was the second movie Naismith made for Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen, he previously appeared in Jason and the Argonauts as the ship builder, Argo. He played a more sympathetic character in that movie. Bromley is not only shady, but he is kind of a scatterbrain – at one point he is stranded in the desert because his horse has died, so instead of accepting a ride of Tuck’s horse, he decides to ride on Lope’s donkey, even though the animal is clearly too small to handle his weight.  When Tuck tries to warn the professor that Gwangi is coming, Bromley is too enamored by the corpse of a pterodactyl that he dismisses Tuck’s warnings. It’s only when Gwangi appears that Bromley understands what Tuck was trying to say. 

While The Valley of Gwangi is highly flawed, I still enjoy it. Charles H. Scheer and Ray Harryhausen considered it the least of their efforts, but I humbly disagree – I think it comfortably belongs in the very middle of their filmography. I would rank it higher than: Clash of the Titans, One Million Years B.C., It Came from the Beneath the Sea, First Men in the Moon, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It’s by no means a classic, but it’s not nearly the disaster many critics have made it out to be. 

Cast: James Franciscus (Tuck Kirby), Gila Golan (T.J. Breckinridge), Richard Carlson (Champ Connors), Laurence Naismith (Professor Bromley), Freda Jackson (Tia Zorina – the witch), Gustavo Rojo (Carlos), Curtis Arden (Lope), Dennis Kilbane (Rowdy), Mario De Barros (Bean)

Director: Jim O’ Connolly
Writers:  William Bast, Julian More
Running Time: 95 minutes