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"Goona-goona epic" refers to a particular type of native-culture exploitation film set in remote parts of the Far East, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and the South Pacific. These include documentaries (often of questionable authenticity) and dramas, both of which rely heavily on travelogue and stock footage scenes (and sometimes fabricated scenes) of semi-nude native peoples performing exotic rituals and customs.
In Hollywood trade magazines "goona-goona" was a descriptive word for films or photos showing women of color with bare breasts, [1] usually in a supposed spirit of ethnographic interest like National Geographic .
The word goona-goona comes from the 1932 film Goona-Goona, An Authentic Melodrama of the Island of Bali by Andre Roosevelt and Armand Denis. [2] Supposedly "goona-goona" is an aphrodisiac or "love powder" made from a narcotic plant. In Indonesian, the word is spelt as "guna-guna" and actually means a type of evil magic [3] or a love spell cast upon an unwilling victim. [4]
Carl Henry Vogt, known professionally as Louis Calhern, was an American stage and screen actor. Well known to fans of film noir for his role as attorney Alonzo Emmerich, the pivotal villain in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for portraying Oliver Wendell Holmes in the film The Magnificent Yankee later that year.
Sir Alexander Korda was a Hungarian–born British film director, producer, and screenwriter, who founded his own film production studios and film distribution company.
Henry Koster was a German-born film director. He was the husband of actress Peggy Moran.
Douglass Rupert Dumbrille was a Canadian actor who appeared regularly in films from the early 1930s.
William Riley Burnett was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, the film adaptation of which is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies.
Legong: Dance of the Virgins is a 1935 synchronized drama travelogue sound film in color, one of the last feature films shot using the two-color Technicolor process, and one of the last films shot by a major Hollywood studio without any dialogue. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects. It is a drama based on a Balinese native tale, with travelogue elements depicting Balinese culture. Legong and the follow-up travelogue drama Kliou, the Killer were the last mainstream silent films to be released in the US.
Marc Allégret was a French screenwriter, photographer and film director.
George S. Barnes, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer active from the era of silent films to the early 1950s.
Sam Katzman was an American film producer and director. Katzman's specialty was producing low-budget genre films, including serials, which had disproportionately high returns for the studios and his financial backers.
William H. Daniels ASC was a film cinematographer who was best-known as Greta Garbo's personal lensman. Daniels served as the cinematographer on all but three of Garbo's films during her tenure at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including Torrent (1926), The Mysterious Lady (1928), The Kiss (1929), Anna Christie (1930), Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936) and Ninotchka (1939). Early in his career, Daniels worked regularly with director Erich von Stroheim, providing cinematography for such films as The Devil's Pass Key (1920) and Greed (1924). Daniels went on to win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on The Naked City (1948).
Bruce Bennett was an American film and television actor who prior to his screen career was a highly successful college athlete in football and in both intercollegiate and international track-and-field competitions. In 1928 he won the silver medal for the shot put at the Olympic Games held in Amsterdam. Bennett's acting career spanned more than 40 years. He worked predominantly in films until the mid-1950s, when he began to work increasingly in American television series.
H. Bruce "Lucky" Humberstone was an American film director. He was previously a movie actor, a script clerk, and an assistant director, working with directors such as King Vidor, Edmund Goulding, and Allan Dwan.
A jungle girl is an archetype or stock character, often used in popular fiction, of a female adventurer, superhero or even a damsel in distress living in a jungle or rainforest setting. A prehistoric depiction is a cave girl.
Lewis D. Collins was an American film director and occasional screenwriter. In his career spanning over 30 years, he churned out dozens of Westerns.
Armand Georges Denis was a Belgian-born documentary filmmaker. After several decades of pioneering work in filming and presenting the ethnology and wildlife of remote parts of Africa and Asia, he became best known in Britain as the director and co-presenter of natural history programmes on television in the 1950s and 1960s, with his second wife Michaela.
Melville Jacob Shyer was an American film director, screenwriter and producer and one of the founders of the Directors Guild of America. His career spanned over 50 years, during which he worked with Mack Sennett and D. W. Griffith.
Garry Marsh was an English stage and film actor.
Harry C. Neumann of Chicago, Illinois, was a Hollywood cinematographer whose career spanned over forty years, including work on some 350 productions in a wide variety of genres, with much of his work being in Westerns, and gangster films.
Duncan Sutherland was a Scottish-born art director, based in England where he designed the sets for over eighty films and television series between the early 1930s and mid-1960s. Sutherland spent much of the 1940s employed by Ealing Studios where he worked on films including It Always Rains on Sunday and The Loves of Joanna Godden.
Harry Fischbeck (1879–1968) was a German-born cinematographer who emigrated to the United States where he worked in the American film industry. He was employed by a variety of different studios during his career including Universal, United Artists and Warner Brothers, but primarily for Paramount Pictures. One of his first credits was for the historical The Lincoln Cycle films directed by John M. Stahl.