Green Mansions

Green Mansions (1959)

W. H. Hudson's unforgettable story of love and adventure in the South American jungles!

A young Venezuelan idealist flees his native land to escape a revolution. Hoping to find peace, he goes to the mountains and the forests of the Amazon. There he encounters Rima, the Bird Girl, an orphan living a life of nature, who is feared by a local jungle tribe.

Date of release
1959-03-19
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (34)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Adventure, Drama, Romance
Director
Mel Ferrer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $3.3M

Green Mansions is a 1959 American adventure-romance film directed by Mel Ferrer. It is based upon the 1904 novel Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. The film starred Audrey Hepburn as Rima, a jungle girl who falls in love with a Venezuelan traveller played by Anthony Perkins. Also appearing in the film were Lee J. Cobb, Sessue Hayakawa and Henry Silva. The score was by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Bronislau Kaper.

Production notes

In 1933, after the success of the film Bird of Paradise (1932), RKO Pictures tried to reunite the star couple Dolores del Río and Joel McCrea in Green Mansions. However, the project was canceled. Twenty-five years later, the project was resumed by Edmund Grainger and Mel Ferrer with MGM.

Ferrer traveled to Venezuela to select possible filming locations, but concluded that the jungles there were too dense and dark to allow their use in the action sequences of the film. He did arrange for nearly an hour of jungle footage to be filmed south of Orinoco and in the Parahauri Mountains, much of which was incorporated into the film. The action sequences were filmed on indoor stages and at Lone Pine, California.

Ferrer had several snakes and birds native to the Venezuelan jungle captured and shipped to Hollywood for use in filming. He also brought a baby deer to the residence he shared with Hepburn, and they raised it for several months before filming so that it could be used in several scenes where Rima interacted with the forest creatures.

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

Recommended