Did you Know?

that the book Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson (1841-1922) was made into a film in 1959 starring Audrey Hepburn and Tony Perkins and was filmed partly in British Guiana? An exotic romance set in the dark, mystical green Amazon rainforest of South America, the novel is narrated by a man named Abel who as a young man had lived among the Indians. He tells of Rima, a strange birdlike woman, a creature of the forest, with whom he falls in love, but whom is feared by the superstitious Indians. Through his relationship with her, Abel discovers the greatest joy and the darkest despair.

The film opens with an acknowledgment to the governments of British Guiana, Venezuela and Colombia where filming took place.

The journey of W.H. Hudson's novel Green Mansions from page to screen took over half a century to complete. Published in 1904, the book was written from the point of view of Abel Guevez de Argensola, a political refugee in South America who spends time among native tribes of the Venezuelan rain forests and encounters a strange jungle girl named Rima, last of a race of "bird people" who lived in harmony with nature. Hudson was a naturalist and Green Mansions was a mix of fantasy and romance, with Rima a more mysterious female version of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli.

Film rights to the novel were first purchased in 1932 by RKO Pictures, where Merian C. Cooper was making King Kong. Green Mansions was seen as a natural follow-up to the fantasy-drenched jungle adventure of Kong, so Cooper had a screenplay written and sent crews to South America to film location footage in Technicolor, intending to cast Dolores del Rio as Rima. But a regime change at RKO put Cooper out of power. The Green Mansions footage was destroyed, leaving $100,000 in development debt attached to the project, a figure that stymied numerous attempts to relaunch the project over the years. James B. Cassidy purchased the screen rights in the 1940s, intending to make the film with Fredric March or Ronald Colman, who had starred in the romantic fantasy Lost Horizon in 1937. Cassidy's attempts, however, were unsuccessful and he sold the rights in 1945 to M-G-M, where Louis B. Mayer had at least eight screenwriters take a crack at the story between 1945 and 1953. Alan Jay Lerner delivered a screenplay that would have been directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by Arthur Freed (though not as a musical), but a switch in studio heads put the project in limbo.

Green Mansions was finally taken up by actor and director Mel Ferrer, a man in a unique position to solve the problem of casting Rima. As an actor Ferrer had starred in Scaramouche, the unusual romantic fantasy Lili and Knights of the Round Table; as a director he had made films such as The Girl of the Limberlost (a story with some thematic similarities to Green Mansions) and the mystery The Secret Fury. He had also had the good fortune to marry Audrey Hepburn in 1954 and had helped her make important career decisions that consolidated her position as an independent player in Hollywood. By 1958 their positions were largely reversed and Hepburn held the clout, while Ferrer's dual careers were running lukewarm at best. Hepbum owed M-G-M a film and in a meeting told head of production Sol Siegel that she would star in Green Mansions if Ferrer could direct the film. Ferrer had been a fan of the novel since college and had long wanted to film the property: after marrying Hepburn he became convinced she was the ideal choice to play the ethereal "bird-girl" Rima.

If anyone has any memories of this film being made in Guyana in 1959 do please email me.