The Beauty Jungle (1964) is a welcome release to DVD, having been unavailable for many years – I only managed to see the film several years ago as a BFI viewing copy, despatched to the midlands in a pile of film cans.
The film offers a critique of beauty contests (as the DVD cover says, the film is an ‘inside story of the beauty racket’), and reveals the cynicism at the heart of the modelling industry, which glorifies women whilst simultaneously commodifying them. This can be seen in the montage of crass, regionally sponsored competitions such as ‘Cheltenham’s Miss Banana Yoghurt’, ‘Miss Devonshire Cream’ and ‘Pontypool’s Crumpet Queen’, and also in Monte Carlo’s grotesque circus promoting ‘Le Parfum Miss Trapeze’, in which clowns tickle the bikini-clad women with feather dusters in a nightmarish scene. The film offers a cautionary tale that the life of the international jet-set is not necessarily one to which ‘decent’ British girls like the heroine Shirley Freeman (Janette Scott) should aspire. As Shirley says at the film’s conclusion, “You take someone from nowhere, you give her something, and then, when the party’s over, you say ‘you’ve lost, go home’.”
Christine Geraghty argues that compared to the beginning of the postwar period – when cinema could be considered as the ‘entertainment for all’ – by the end of the 1950s it had largely become a ‘marginal pursuit’, with producers endeavouring to find niche markets such as youth audiences, or by presenting big-budgeted must-see, event films (Geraghty, 2000: 20). One of the ways in which British film attempted to broaden its audience in the latter postwar period was by striving for international appeal, or by working with American companies which could offer film distribution in the US. In 1956, for example, the Rank Organisation announced a policy of only producing films which would appeal to international markets and consequently established Rank Film Distributors of America (RFDA) in order to ‘penetrate the US market’ (Murphy, 2001: 90).
Although (in film terms) ‘international’ often refers to part-funding by an American film company, it could also be used to describe a feeling of internationalism conveyed for the most part by including overseas locations, international cast members, and ‘American’ technological advances such as Technicolor, CinemaScope and VistaVision. These technical innovations – which were largely a response to the encroaching dominance of television – arguably favour location filming, as the emphasised artificiality of studio-bound, widescreen Hollywood musicals such as Brigadoon (1954) and the ‘Barn-Raising Ballet’ in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) reveal. In opposition to this, the location filming in Summer Holiday (1963) and The Beauty Jungle, for example, works to the films’ advantage, in offering a ‘tourist gaze’ of Europe (Urry, 2002).
The Beauty Jungle (Renamed Contest Girl for its American release) bridges a wide gap between the traditional British seaside holiday of the immediate postwar era, and the exotic, foreign holiday seen in Summer Holiday, for instance. Starting in the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, and taking Shirley Freeman on a journey from the beauty contests of Butlin’s to an international modelling career, this colourful, CinemaScope film represents the spectacle of the Riviera and Mediterranean which the rich and famous flocked to in the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to gain that longed-for tan.
The film follows the postwar trait of fleshing out its cast with numerous ‘guest stars’, including Norman Hartnell (“the man who dresses the greatest beauties in the world”), the Duchess of Bedford, Stirling Moss, Hollywood actress Linda Christian, and musician Joe Brown (representing the teenage market) as contest judges. The British actor Edmund Purdom who had made a name for himself in American and European films also appears as the Hollywood star Rex Garrick (he was the husband of Linda Christian when the film was made).
The Beauty Jungle treats the cinema audience to ‘tourist gaze’ shots of Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo, where Shirley and her manager, Don Mackenzie (Ian Hendry), ostentatiously arrive in a ‘heli-taxi’ for the ‘Miss Globe’ contest. The numerous contestants for this competition bring an international flavour to the film, coming from places as far afield as Peru, France, Germany, America and Japan.
The film clearly follows neither the styles of Social Realism nor Swinging London, which had put the British film industry on the international map in recent years (despite these styles being arguably more indigenous and domestic in feel), and appears too naïve and gauche to really make an impact as an exposé of the glamour industry. In the film’s efforts to appeal to both British and international markets, and to critique the modelling industry whilst at the same time entertain the audience with glamorous spectacle, the end result is something of a curiosity, and invites repeated viewings. It is a pity therefore that the DVD transfer is in a 4:3 pan-and-scan version, and that a lot of the potential spectacle and subsequent viewing pleasure has been lost (a quick look at the customer reviews on Amazon.co.uk will give you a clue). In an age where widescreen television is the norm rather than the exception, the DVD is already dated, not by the film content – which as a mid-60s curio still has the ability to entertain – but by the more recent home viewing technology.
Here are the opening credits (in CinemaScope!):
Geraghty, Christine, 2000, British Cinema in the Fifties, Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’, London: Routledge
Murphy, Robert (ed.), 2001, British Cinema of the 90s, London: BFI
Murphy, Robert, 1992, Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI
Urry, John, 2002, The Tourist Gaze, (Revised edition), London: Sage Publications
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