New Picture

The Roots of Heaven (Darryl F. Zanuck; 20th Century-Fox), adapted from Remain Gary's international bestseller (TIME, Jan. 20), appears to be one of those movies that are more exciting to make than to see. To make this one, Holly woodsman Darryl Zanuck and 130 dauntless actors and technicians were flown into darkest Africa to the searing barrens beyond the Hill of the Demons in the French Cameroons. The demons did not appear personally, but the place was hell, all right. By day the temperature stood as high as 140DEG, at night it never sank below 90DEG. Work was impossible after noon, and the film had to be stored in cracked ice. On top of the heat there were insects, malaria, dysentery. By the third day, cast and crew were dropping like flies. In 4 1/2 months of shooting, 30 doctors handled 960 sick calls. Eddie Albert had sunstroke and spent several days in delirium. Director John Huston got a foot infection and broke out in sties. Producer Zanuck developed shingles when it was all over--possibly aggravated by the realization that he had spent $4,000,000 to make an interesting but curiously unconvincing picture.

The hero (Trevor Howard) is a dentist with a thing about elephants. After long confinement in a Nazi concentration camp, he goes to Africa to be near the great beasts--"the image of freedom and space"--and is horrified to see "this gigantic, clumsy natural splendor" being slaughtered to extinction "just to keep the world supplied with billiard balls and paper knives." He circulates a petition to outlaw the killing of elephants, and soon has made himself the standing joke of French Equatorial Africa. Only two people sign his petition: a drunk (Errol Flynn) and a prostitute (Juliette Greco). A missionary tries to reason with him. "You're fed up with men, so you've gone over to the animals . . . But my friend, something much bigger [than elephants] is threatened with extinction." In his crazy way, the dentist knows this too. Man, he rants, is eliminating "all that is beautiful . . . Soon there will be nothing left but us . . . Man in his loneliness has need of all the animals."

Furious, he conducts a one-man raid on a well-known elephant trapper's stockade. He sets fire to an ivory merchant's store. He pumps some buckshot into the backside of a big U.S. TV personality (Orson Welles). Inexplicably, the great man presents the crazy dentist to the U.S. public as a glorious but unsung hero, "a modern Robin Hood."

Next morning the local post office is swamped with cables supporting the elephant man. The world's conscience is aroused--or perhaps just its curiosity? In either case, the dentist has become a celebrated crusader. A naturalist sees in him the hope of the world. "Man," he says, "is destroying the plants, the animals, all the living roots that heaven planted in the earth. Poison heaven at its roots, and the tree will wither and die. The stars will go out, and heaven will be destroyed." And the hero concludes: "Who knows? If man begins by saving the elephants, he may end by saving himself."

These statements, which contain the essential message of the film, have poetic light and spiritual resonance, but they read better than they sound from the screen. Despite intelligent acting by Actor Howard, skillful touches from Director Huston and some awesome landscapes with elephants, this huge (2 hrs. 11 mins.) movie finally seems no more than a literary notion that has apparently suffered, along with CinemaScope and DeLuxe color, a severe attack of elephantiasis.

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