Jacaré(Film, 1942)

Jacaré (also called Jacaré, Killer of the Amazon) was a film made in 1942 of James Dannaldson’s expedition to the Amazon. Clyde E. Elliott, Charles E. Ford and James Dannaldson led the film crew, which shot some 260,000 feet of film on the lower reaches of the Amazon River in Spring 1942. To Elliott's great relief, the film was not "doctored" with scenes made at the studio of white girls lost in the jungle, a process, he claimed, by which Paramount ruined his previous film, Booloo, made in 1938. Dannaldson, a biologist formerly associated with the University of Southern California, became an actor for Jacaré, who goes up the Amazon to catch specimens. The other leading members of the cast were a 22-foot anaconda, many caymans (Amazonian alligators), jaguars, water buffalo, anteaters, tapirs and capybaras. Elliott and his colleagues, with two American cameramen, spent three and a half months at Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, usually within a day's journey of the city, so that they could return to civilization for the night. Their chief expense, aside from film and equipment, was insurance, the premiums protecting negative, cameras and personnel. A crew of thirty-five natives, who acted as bearers and an... ()