''Stark Mad'' is a 1929 American sound ( All-Talking)

pre-Code Pre-Code Hollywood was an era in the Cinema of the United States, American film industry that occurred between the widespread adoption of sound in film in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship gui ...

adventure film produced and distributed by

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (WBEI), commonly known as Warner Bros. (WB), is an American filmed entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California and the main namesake subsidiary of Warner Bro ...

, directed by

Lloyd Bacon Lloyd Francis Bacon (December 4, 1889 – November 15, 1955) was an American screen, stage, and vaudeville actor and film director. As a director, he made films in numerous genres, including westerns, musicals, comedies, gangster films, and c ...

, and starring

H. B. Warner Henry Byron Warner (né Lickfold; 26 October 1876 – 21 December 1958) was an English film and theatre actor. He was popular during the silent era and played Jesus Christ in '' The King of Kings''. In later years, he successfully moved int ...

Louise Fazenda Louise Fazenda (June 17, 1895 – April 17, 1962) was an American film actress, appearing chiefly in silent comedy films. Early life Fazenda was born in her maternal grandparents' house in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of merchandise bro ...

, Jacqueline Logan and Henry B. Walthall. This lurid jungle melodrama was an attempt to emulate the then-popular jungle horror films being made at the time by

Tod Browning Tod Browning (born Charles Albert Browning Jr.; July 12, 1880 – October 6, 1962) was an American film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, and carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number of films of var ...

and Lon Chaney. The film was unusual in that it is set in the jungles of Central America rather than Africa.

Plot

James Rutherford has organized an expedition to the jungles of

Central America Central America is a subregion of North America. Its political boundaries are defined as bordering Mexico to the north, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. Central America is usually ...

to find his missing son, Bob, and his guide, Simpson. Professor Dangerfield intercepts the party, bringing with him Simpson, whose experiences in the jungle have made him a raving maniac. They go ashore and decide to spend the night at a Mayan temple. After Bob's fiancée Irene disappears, they come across a large ape chained to the temple floor, and Captain Rhodes, commander of the yacht, is abducted by a strange monster with great hairy talons. Messages are found warning the party to leave. Sewald, an explorer, is mysteriously killed by an arrow. Simpson's sanity returns, and he saves the party, revealing in flashback that he had lost his mind after murdering an old demented hermit who had been living in the ruins, because the fiend had murdered Rutherford's son Bob two months before.

Cast

as Professor Dangerfield *

as Mrs. Fleming * Jacqueline Logan as Irene * Henry B. Walthall as Captain Rhodes * Claude Gillingwater as James Rutherford *

John Miljan John Miljan (November 9, 1892 – January 24, 1960) was an American actor. He appeared in more than 200 films between 1924 and 1958. Biography Born in 1892, Miljan was the tall, smooth-talking villain in Hollywood films for almost four deca ...

as Dr. Milo * Andre Beranger as Simpson, A Guide *

Warner Richmond Warner Richmond (born Werner Paul Otto Raetzmann; January 11, 1886 – June 19, 1948) was an American stage and film actor. He began his career as a stock theatre actor and appeared in films in both the silent film and sound eras. His career spa ...

as First Mate *

Lionel Belmore Lionel Belmore (12 May 1867 – 30 January 1953) was an English character actor and director on stage for more than a quarter of a century. Life and career Onstage, Belmore appeared with Wilson Barrett, Sir Henry Irving, William Faversham, Lil ...

as Amos Sewald *

Charles Gemora Carlos Cruz Gemora (June 15, 1903 – August 19, 1961), commonly known as Charles Gemora, was a Hollywood makeup artist renowned as "the King of the Gorilla Men" for his prolific appearances in many Hollywood films while wearing a gorilla suit. ...

as Gorilla ''(uncredited)''

Preservation status

The film was released in both a sound version and a silent version for theaters not converted to sound. Both sound and silent versions are lost. The soundtrack, which was recorded separately on

Vitaphone Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National Pictures, First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone is the last major analog sound-on-disc sys ...

disks, may survive in private hands.

References

External links

* 1929 films Lost American adventure films Films directed by Lloyd Bacon Warner Bros. films American black-and-white films 1929 adventure films 1929 lost films English-language adventure films 1920s English-language films 1920s American films {{1920s-US-film-stub

Plot

Cast

Preservation status

See also

References

External links