Eyes Across the Jungle

At the meeting point of two of our on-going series, "The Camera Moves" and "Reverses", comes this thrilling, snaking, erotic trick shot.
Juliet Clark

Two-thirds of the way along The Road to Singapore (1931)—not the Hope and Crosby entry, but one of those tropical-hell melodramas that proliferated like exotic weeds in the early thirties—comes this sequence that happens to travel between the Camera Moves (this would be #7) and Reverses (#3) series. Restless wife Doris Kenyon has just rebuffed local lothario William Powell; they've retired to their respective bungalows, but “there’s no use trying to sleep with those drums going.” So the camera snakes across the jungle, performing a series of switchbacks between live action and papier-mâché landscape to arrive at a long-distance eye-lock that signals the inevitable.

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