Safari in Color

Millions of U.S. hobbyists like to make their own movies, but none carries the hobby as far as Edgar M.(for Monsanto*) Queeny, 53, board chairman of the $221 million Monsanto Chemical Co. In his spare time as an amateur photographer, Queeny spent nine years making 100,000 hard-to-get still shots of wild duck, finally put the best into a 1946 volume called Prairie Wings. Two years ago, with the same perfectionist's zeal, he set about making sound movies of African native and animal life.

For four months Queeny traveled through Africa on an 8,000-mile safari, equipped with the blessing of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, ten 16-mm. cameras, including some for underwater and superspeed shots, specially rigged camera trucks and experimental directional microphones newly developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories. After spending some $300,000 on the project, he brought 80,000 feet of color film back to his suburban St. Louis estate.

There he turned a barn into a $40,000 air-conditioned studio and imported top-notch Hollywood technicians to edit and finish the film. The result: Hobbyist Queeny's first completed movie, Latuko, a 50-minute color documentary about a hitherto unphotographed tribe deep in the equatorial Sudan.

Test of Manhood. Latuko is a largely unrehearsed record of the ceremonies that go with such tribal institutions as initiation rites, hunting, fishing, rainmakmg. The movie is studded with fine shots of African game during an exciting hunting sequence. Its remarkable sound track carries the authentic cries of wild animals, the natives' strange lingo, the pulsing of their drums.

This week Latuko is being held over for its fourth week in two St. Louis neighborhood theaters, where it has been outdrawing movies from Hollywood. Eager film distributors are negotiating with Queeny for the rights to show the picture on a nationwide schedule. If he closes such a deal, the profits, like those of the St. Louis test run, will go to the Museum of Natural History.

Possibly because of the film's obvious earnestness and calmly informative narration, no St. Louis moviegoer has protested its plentiful shots of bare-breasted women and unadorned men or its savagely raw scenes, e.g., as a test of manhood, a young warrior taps the jugular vein of a bound cow, lets the blood flow into a gourd and gulps it down.

With Bow & Arrow. Out of his original 80,000 feet, Queeny already has finished a second film, a two-reeler on the ancient music of a tribe in Uganda, near Lake Victoria. He plans a feature-length "fantasy" showing how the Wakamba tribe hunts elephants with bow & arrow, another two-reeler about a strange signaling bird that leads natives to caches of honey, and possibly still another feature on the safari itself. Beyond that, Queeny wants to ride his hobby on another expedition. "I don't know yet where it will be," he says. "It will be some place where we can try to do things with film and sound that haven't been done before."

*His mother's maiden name, given by his father, John F. Queeny, to the little chemical company he founded in a small woodett factory in St. Louis in 1901.

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