Wonderful character development!

Truly Dreadful Film

Lack of good storyline.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This remarkably silly, hackneyed adventure movie takes hilarious liberties with its source material, an uplifting account of two nuns' mission to bring modern medicine to the Congo. By the time it reached the screen, it had Susan Hayward as a headstrong young nurse, and Bob Mitchum as a treasure-hunter escorting her through Bakuba country. The script is unbelievably clunky, with Mitchum having to translate all the Congolese dialects into English for Hayward! Haha, how rubbish! Fans of Walter Slezak won't be surprised to find him playing a slimy, greedy, reptilian, overweight villain, albeit this time in a safari suit.Hathaway mixes hard-won documentary-style footage with alarmingly transparent studio crap as Hayward wins over natives with her "big magic" (I'm going to ask my GP for some "big magic" the next time I see him) and Mitchum acts like an insensitive oaf over her dead husband, just because she won't immediately sleep with him. Needless to say, they can't recreate the magic of their only other teaming: the previous year's 'The Lusty Men'. In fact, this is more like a dry run for Hathaway's confusing, über-dreadful, greed-is-bad yawnfest 'Garden of Evil'. There's the odd concession to classy entertainment – a few spectacular location shots and a nice tour of a makeshift hospital, seen through a dozen veils – but that's about all. The set-up is laboured, the situations as artificial as the environment, the resolution laboured and rushed. The film's calling cards and its wildcards are wasted with startling profligacy. Cult character actor Timothy Carey has about a minute's screen-time. Even the mighty Mitchum is lacklustre, injecting just a few moments of the requisite cynicism before going back to counting the zeroes on his cheque. For Mitchum completists (like me) only.(1.5 out of 4)

Susan Hayward plays a missionary nurse sent to Africa to help a female doctor with a jungle hospital. Robert Mitchum is a wild game trapper and partner of Walter Slezak in seeking gold in the pre-World War I Belgian Congo. They escort her to the hospital as a pretext to search for gold rumored to be with a not very friendly tribe.Politics is touched upon ever so briefly in this film. If it were made today the film would be a lot more explicit about the holocaust that was the Belgian Congo. Slezak makes a remark to Mitchum during the beginning of the film saying that they have to move fast since the Belgian government was taking over the running of the Congo. Just before World War I that is what happened. Up to that point the Congo colony was PRIVATELY run for King Leopold with no responsibility to anyone, but the king. Slezak's concern was that law and order was coming to the Congo.The King had died around that time and reports about atrocities committed in the Congo by Leopold's hired help were shocking the civilized world. As well it should have been shocked. Torture, murder, maimings were routine occurrences. The report was put together by Roger Casement who later was executed for treason for his support of Irish freedom. The Bakuba tribe where this gold was allegedly from had real good reason to fear white folks at that time.The American cinema had grown up post World War II as far as it's treatment of Africa. We Americans were a pathetically ignorant group about Africa and in many respects we still are. Our ideas about Africa came from Tarzan movies. But MGM gave us King Solomon's Mines and UA gave us The African Queen and we finally saw the real Africa.The female missionary role was old hat by now. But Hayward is a nurse, not a psalm singer like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen. Africa and the Belgian Congo in particular needed more of her kind and less of Hepburn's.Mitchum is good as the cynical hero who is won over by the love of a good woman. Walter Slezak plays another of his patent brand of shrewd villains. Slezak was always good, and when he was a villain he was never a stupid one.It's not as good as African Queen or Kings Solomon's Mines. Rates right up there with Mogambo though. Susan Hayward would return to Africa in Untamed and Mitchum would explore the jungle again in Mister Moses.I wish the film could be done today with the politics more fully examined, but for the Fifties this was a step in the right direction.

Lonnie Douglas (Robert Mitchum) and his partner, Huysman (Walter Slezak), guide a dedicated nurse Ellen Burton (Susan Hayward) to the distant jungle outpost where she, as a volunteer, has been sent to give medical aid to the natives.. But Huysman and Lonni also have plans of their own: it is said that there is hidden gold in the Bakuba country, and they are determined to find it...They penetrate the remote interior of the Belgian Congo by means of a primitive canoe propelled by a native crew... At one of their portages Ellen cures a native chief's wife (Dorothy Harris) and the witch doctor, seeking revenge for her interference, tries to kill her with a tarantula, but she manages to escape its poisonous bite...Later, Lonni saves a boy who has been severely injured fighting a lion... The lad is the son of the Bakuba king and wears a necklace made of gold nuggets—the treasure Lonni and Huysman are seeking... Perhaps this is the opportunity they've been waiting for, Lonni thinks, and devises a plan for using the Bakuba boy to get the gold...There have been quite a number of Adventurers ladies, the most notably adventurous of whom has perhaps been the aggressive and resilient Susan Hayward who was at her best not in the Oscar-Winning vein of 'I Want to Live,' but roughing it out in the jungle in films like 'White Witch Doctor.'She was quite capable of blasting Jack Elam with a rifle at the end of 'Rawhide,' and in 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' she was tough enough to send the witch doctor packing and go to work with a knife on Gregory Peck who will otherwise die from the infection that was building up in him... Hayward was the great outdoor actress—indoors, she was often a bit too much to take...This was Hayward's second movie with Robert Mitchum... They were teamed in Nicholas Ray's rodeo movie in 'The Lusty Men' (1952).Africa was the real star of "White Witch Doctor," with beautiful color shots of the Congo and Bakubas caught in their colorful dances, taken by Leon Shamroy, three times an Oscar winner...

I rather enjoyed this film even though it was a little slow in some places. The cinematography alone should have garnered an Oscar nomination (if it didn't) as the settings in Africa were brilliantly and beautifully photographed. The story revolves around a nurse played by Hayward who goes to Africa to assist a woman doctor in taking care of the sick people there. Susan Hayward plays the nurse and upon arrival meets a businessman played by Robert Mitchum. He thinks she's crazy for staying and she's definitely going to stay! Hayward's and Mitchum's lives become endangered when someone decides to make greed the name of the game. Definitely worth watching and sorry it is not available on video.