Fernando Lamas and Rhonda Fleming starred in this Pine-Thomas Production set in the Amazon tributary source country in Brazil. Jivaro is not about the Jivaro Indians who are the native inhabitants, but rather about the danger they are to anyone else. Clearly they are not a people to be messed with especially on their own turf.

It's on his turf that Lamas trades with the Jivaro, at his trading post on one of the Amazon tributaries. Lamas also owns a boat that makes The African Queen look like the Queen Mary. And on it he brings a passenger in the form of shapely Rhonda Fleming who has come unannounced to the area seeking her fiancé Richard Denning who 'owns' a big plantation.

Denning barely owns the clothes on his person. He's a dissolute drunk who came to the area seeking fame and fortune and he's still seeking it in the form of ancient Inca treasure in some lost city deep in the middle of Jivaro country. He's writing lies to Rhonda and taking up with native girl Rita Moreno.

And Denning has up and gone into the Jivaro country before Fleming arrived. Fleming also has Lamas and Brian Keith both panting hot and heavy after her, Keith a lot more crudely.

Jivaro is a competent well made action film with a dash of romantic pentagon in the mix. The credits don't list where Jivaro was shot and I doubt Paramount spent the money to go to the Amazon head water country. But Pine-Thomas did a very good job in recreating it, they were good that way, made competent pictures that looked good and never strained Paramount's budget.

I'd give this one a look.

A Pine-Thomas film, produced and released by Paramount Pictures. Copyright 1 February 1954 (in notice: 1953) by Paramount Pictures Corp. New York opening (flat) at the Palace: 12 February 1954. U.S. release: February 1954. U.K. release on the lower half of a double bill: April 1954. Australian release (flat): 11 March 1955. Sydney opening on a double bill at the Victory. 8,228 feet. 91 minutes. U.K. and Australian release title: LOST TREASURE OF THE AMAZON.

SYNOPSIS: A cool but not overbright beauty comes looking for her fiancé who is lost in the Amazon jungle.

NOTES: Paramount's last 3-D feature played flat in most situations, though it did have some 3-D showings in Britain and the U.S.A.

COMMENT: Not exactly one of the Most Boring films ever made, but it certainly runs the Top of the Tedious pretty close. The swaggering Fernando Lamas, one of the most egotistical yet least personable of Hollywood's minor stars, is here joined by that regular Pine-Thomas lesser (if luscious) light, Rhonda Fleming in a cutdown variation of King Solomon's Mines.

Even in its 3-D version, the film comes across as a lackluster, snail-paced affair. It doesn't help that there are few 3-D effects - a shrunken head is thrust at the camera and a chair or two is thrown into the lens - and that the 2nd unit work is so grainy it was obviously blown up from 16mm. Many scenes like those with long-winded Lamas and frippery Fleming on the boat are completely superfluous and unnecessary. One wonders why the editor left them in, especially as at 91 or 93 minutes the film is too long for a "B" feature anyway. The support players come across as a trifle more interesting than the pedestrian principals, though only villainous Brian Keith gets much in the way of a dramatic opportunity. Cult hero, Lon Chaney, is confined to just one scene - true, it's one of the most exciting in the movie - near the beginning, while Rita Moreno has virtually no part at all. Ludwig's direction manages the difficult feat of bringing a dull script to an even less animated life. Production values are strictly "B".

In short, a waste of time. Even the Amazonian locations look synthetic. Although mildly stimulated by the opening scenes, desperate action fans will have deserted the movie long before the long-promised jivaro-attack climax. Maybe rabid followers of the loquacious Lamas and/or that equally dreary, equally unconvincing heroine, Miss Rhonda Fleming, a so meticulously groomed fashion clotheshorse of the studio backlot jungle - maybe fans of these two spoilers will get something out of Jivaro. Maybe.

Okay so Fernando Lamas is no Bogart, and Rhonda Fleming is no Hepburn. The premise is different, too. No war, or at least not of the civilized kind. This deals with the possible dangers that Lamas and Fleming find as they trek down the river on Lamas's boat to take Fleming to her plantation owner finance, Richard Denning. But with Denning involved in a hunt for missing treasure, this opens up temptations for the lusty Lamas and the tempestuous Fleming whose red hair is no match for the red jealousy of native girl Rita Moreno, playing another one of her spitfire parts but barely saying anything, wearing hideous outfits and a hairstyle that makes her look like Flora Robson in "Caesar and Cleopatra".

Gorgeous colors about in this exotic setting makes me curious of how it would be in the initial 3D format. It does indeed look like a painting come to life which is an interesting perspective of the exotic nature of the story. Brian Keith and Lon Chaney Jr. also appear in supporting roles, with Keith obviously lusting over Fleming and Chaney, laughing maniacally in his one scene, serving no purpose other than to show the roughness of life in this deadly Brazilian paradise.

Visually, this is quite stunning, but cardboard characters and a rip-off plot from "King Solomon's Mines" makes this a standard, cliched action picture, no worse and certainly not better than the dozens of others of this nature released in the mid 1950's to bring audiences into the theater. Take away the minor romantic elements and the color, and you're left with a Jungle Jim or Bomba programmer, easily forgettable and not at all taxing on the brain.