The animal rights film is a genre that, much like the cause it espouses, never gets the attention it rightfully deserves. Rarely does one see the stirring example of filmmakers such as Bill Travers and his wife Virginia McKenna, who parlayed their success as the stars of Born Free (1964) into a passionate crusade against wild animals in captivity through a series of dramas and documentaries that helped to foster empathy and enlightenment for generations of apathetic zoo visitors. With the recent uproar over the sport killing of a famous wild lion in Nigeria, I was reminded of the neglected anti-hunting film, John Huston's The Roots of Heaven. It was producer Daryl F. Zanuck, who purchased the rights to Romain Gary's novel after it won the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary award and promptly hired Huston to adapt it to the screen. Famous for his reputation of always having things his own way, Zanuck uncharacteristically gave Huston free reign on the project, on the condition that his protegee, French chanteuse Juliette Greco be given the female lead. Greco, whose natural beauty and compelling charisma on camera, proved to be a worthy addition to Huston's eclectic cast of character faces. For his protagonist, Huston had originally wanted handsome headliner and real-life African conservationist William Holden, who proved unavailable. Instead he chose British leading man Trevor Howard, an authoritative and effortless performer who brings a poetic dignity to the heroic idealism of Morel, a zealous and often ridiculed enemy of elephant slaughter. Top billed is Errol Flynn, all too convincing as alcoholic ex-soldier Forsythe. This part mirrors the broken-down lush he played in Zanuck's The Sun Also Rises (1957), as well his own debauched lifestyle that would soon kill him within 18 months of the film's release.Flynn is joined by his Sun co-star Eddie Albert as a ambitious photographer, as well as the oleaginous Orson Welles, a close friend of the former swashbuckler, who used Flynn's yacht in his film The Lady From Shanghai (1948). Cast here in the cameo role of an arrogant American television correspondent, Welles becomes the de facto mouthpiece of director Huston when he refers to the killing of an elephant as a sin, words that Huston himself had uttered when referring to the big game hunting he himself had endorsed while on location in Tanganyika filming The African Queen in 1951. Despite never having personally killed an elephant, some thought Huston was a hypocrite for making a film decrying the African hunt, but his sincerity is ably demonstrated by a deliberately ethical choice to depict only violence done to humans on-screen. His experiences in Africa must have also had an obvious impact on him personally, when after the film he gave up the shooting of wild animals altogether. Photographed on location in French Equatorial Africa, by Huston's frequent cinematographer Ossie Morris (The African Queen, Moulin Rouge), the exotic scenery captured is a stunning Technicolor record of the threatened wildlife from a time when the incursion of tourism, due to the post war boom in transcontinental travel, was just beginning to see the tragic massacre of numerous indigenous species. The Roots of Heaven, a wordy and worthy film, was never meant to be a rip-roaring adventure. It is rather a sober and passionate cry for environmental awareness, at a time when atomic destruction rather than animal extinction, consumed the thoughts of humanity. Huston accepted blame for the film's failure at the office, but he always believed that the story, although a bitter pill for audiences to swallow, still had merit and could be re-made successfully. As with most films in his oeuvre, The Roots of Heaven, depicts the courage of those who dare to challenge a blood-thirsty system, an inspiring theme that we as custodians of a fragile planet would do well to embrace, now more than ever.
