Bwana Devil

Bwana Devil (1952)

The world's FIRST FEATURE LENGTH motion picture in Natural Vision 3 Dimension—A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!

British railway workers in Kenya are becoming the favorite snack of two man-eating lions. Head engineer Bob Hayward becomes obsessed with trying to kill the beasts before they maul everyone on his crew.

Date of release
1952-08-22
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 19m
Genres
Action, Drama, Adventure
Director
Arch Oboler

Casting

Interesting facts

Bwana Devil is a 1952 American adventure film written, produced and directed by Arch Oboler and starring Robert Stack, Barbara Britton and Nigel Bruce. The film dramatizes the true story of the Tsavo maneaters and was filmed with the Natural Vision 3D system. The film is notable for sparking the first 3D film craze in the American film industry. It is the first feature-length 3D film in color and the first 3D sound feature in English.

Production

The film's plot is based on the Tsavo Man-Eaters, a pair of lions who killed workers building the Uganda Railway. The incidents were also the basis for the book The Man-eaters of Tsavo (1907), the story of the events as written by Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson, the British engineer who killed the animals. The story was also the basis for the film The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) with Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.

By 1951, film attendance had fallen dramatically from 90 million in 1948 to 46 million, largely the result of the advent of television. Cinerama successfully premiered in September 1952, but its bulky and expensive three-projector system and huge curved screen were impossible to duplicate in any but the largest theaters.

Former screenwriter Milton Gunzburg and his brother Julian promoted their Natural Vision 3D film process, shopping it to various Hollywood studios. However, Twentieth Century-Fox was focusing on the introduction of CinemaScope and had no interest in another new process, and Columbia Pictures and Paramount Pictures also declined.

Oboler announced the project, titled The Lions of Gulu, in March 1952. He intended to include footage shot in Africa several years earlier. Filming was to begin May in the Natural Vision process. Howard Duff and Hope Miller were the first stars signed, but they both withdrew and were replaced by Robert Stack and Barbara Britton. The title was changed to Bwana Devil in June 1952.

Oboler began production funded by his own bankroll of $10,000. He shot more than a third of the film before receiving any financial backers, and by the time that the film was completed, he had provided approximately half of the budget with his own money.

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

Recommended