Walk Into Paradise

Walk Into Paradise (1957)

Last frontier of the real witch doctor!

Steve McAllister, an Australian official for The New Guinea Administration, gets orders to investigate an oil discovery by Ned 'Shark-Eye' Kelly in the interior. He selects his native policeman, Sergeant-Major Towalaka, to accompany him on his "walk into hell" and then finds that a French lady doctor, Louise Dumurcet, is to go with them part of the journey. They find the malaria-stricken Jeff Clayton in a deserted village and he joins the trek. They are captured by jungle-natives but are released after Dr. Dumurcet cures the fever-stricken children of the chief.

Date of release
1957-09-08
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Adventure
Director
Lee Robinson, Marcello Pagliero

Casting

Interesting facts

Walk Into Paradise is a 1956 Australian-French international co-production adventure film directed by Lee Robinson and Marcello Pagliero and starring Chips Rafferty and Françoise Christophe. It was shot on location in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and was one of the most popular Australian films ever made until that date.

Development

Chips Rafferty and Lee Robinson had produced two earlier films starring Rafferty, The Phantom Stockman and King of the Coral Sea. Their formula was to set the action in an exotic location and for this third movie they chose New Guinea, where Rafferty and Robinson had both served in World War Two.

In May 1954 Rafferty and Robinson returned to Wewak from a location trip up the Sepik River. They announced they planned to film at Kambaramba, a village on the swamp lagoon, at the end of July with a cast and technical crew of 40. It would be the location of their next film. They were so enthused they planned to make several movies in New Guinea.

Filming was delayed. Richard Boone and Chips Rafferty became friends making Kangaroo together. In December 1954 Boone announced he would act in the film, then called The Head Hunters. Filming on this project was also delayed reportedly due to poor weather.

The movie was based on a story by Robinson and Rex Rienits wrote a script. However Robinson later said they "weren't able to use" what Rienits had written. Robinson elaborated:

The emphasis was to exploit all of the values around the story. And whether it was wrong or not wrong, I worked for a long time to an old Hollywood motto. They say, "Don't give people a new background and a new story concept at the same time, because you'll only confuse them. They can't handle that.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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