Review of The Spiral Road

We stumbled into this DVD late at night to see another "Rock Hudson" movie. Surprised to see so many big stars, above all Burl Ives, we hung on. The first signs of trouble were the disjointed wooden statements delivered by the characters, the colonial officials, the grumpy yet wise comments of the old jungle doctor Jansen, the searching questions of the bright young good looking doctor Drager. Psychological character development was limited to ping pong ball like arguments hit back and forth between protagonists. The movie narrative itself jumped over location and time like the characters were beamed into far out places by chief engineer Scotty on starship Enterprise. Sometimes the uniforms and outfits were sweat soaked, sometimes even after strenuous jungle hikes one could see not a drop of sweat and perfect ironed creases. What became more and more bothersome was the innocently displayed colonial mindset of the script, all smothered in sweet Christian concepts of "loving the savages" even against their will. All the natives, including the dwarf like sidekick Stegomyia, are portrayed like stoic or foolish subhumans. Of course the evil voodoo witch Burudi was played by a European actor in black face, or as in this case "brown face". Even the local beauty who simply walks into the Dr. Drager's tent, he who suddenly has become the newly-wed selfish God doubter, even she is nothing but a tool in the movie, to make a statement, without having any human qualities. She might as well have been gift wrapped with a card around her neck "here, take me, I am your jungle play thing". Dr. Drager 'notices' her, files her away mentally under "available female" and then takes her a week later or so, and tells his wife about it just as nonchalantly. When he's finally alone out in the old railroad car in the jungle, he suddenly has lost all his brain powers and acts in the midst of a hostile jungle and the mysterious appearances of the witch man and his followers as if he's in the safety of his living room back home in Holland. Lured into the jungle and then abandoned by the native voodoo leader, he grows a long full beard either in days while stumbling around in circles, or, if it took him "real time" to grow that beard he must have been out there in the jungle for at least 6 months. We don't know how he feeds himself, how and when he sleeps, because the natives are all around. At some point a sly native steals his rifle when Drager falls into exhausted sleep( 6 months old beard, how come the natives didn't steal the rifle sooner, or did he not sleep for 6 months?). And miraculously, the western self made man, who is brought to the verge of insanity, re-discovers God right about when the white colonial search party (no sweat stains on shirts)finds him, so he can collapse on his knees and exclaim as a testimony in everybody's presence "thank you, oh God". Equally miraculously his wife Els shows up in the rotting moldy rail road car (that is a 10 day journey away from the nearest settlement) to help him through his feverish nightmares on the way to recovery. The movie script is, if nothing else, manipulative, planting false clues (in the early "conversations" on world views) only to jerk you around to the real message of the movie. In a less gentle appraisal, the movie comes across as sleazy, arrogant, stilted, pompous and totally unbelievable. Yes it was fun to hear Burl Ives' burly character statements, but even they wear thin after a while. A thoroughly disappointing movie that leaves one with a bad taste in the mouth.