1950's adventure movies set in foreign lands almost always end with the man searching for gold ending up having a heart of gold. Gold treasure is what lifelong Africa resident and animal hunter “Lonni” Douglas (Robert Mitchum) is reluctantly after, yet his greedy partner (Walter Slezak) wants to be anything but poor. Hunting big game and selling wild animals to the zoo doesn't exactly bring a lifetime of riches. "White Witch Doctor" has the advantage of three plotlines, one involving the search for gold within the territory of an allegedly deadly African tribe, the other having an inexperienced nurse, Ellen Burton (Susan Hayward), trying to make amends and further her late husband's doctoral work in the jungles, and the tribes themselves and their daily rituals.
"White Witch Doctor" is probably the only movie where you will hear Mitchum speaking the Congo's language, the Bakuba, one of 2,400 different dialects of which Ellen knows only one. A lot of the film is studio-bound Congo with some rear-screen vistas, and a fake gorilla! I did expect a fake gorilla, I suppose, but the lion was very real so maybe Frank Buck was keeping the lion tame for some wild scenes where it attacks a Bakuba boy. Meanwhile, that boy suffers a near-fatal injury from the lion's attack and so unless Ellen can heal the boy, and if Lonni can dissuade his greedy partners from entering the territory and steal the gold, all will be well.
"White Witch Doctor" is quite absorbing despite its near-artificiality in its depiction of its wild environment. Mitchum stands tall and shows some level of heroism. Susan Hayward shows strength, possesses selfless determination in her Ellen character, and I could imagine these two characters trying to make it work in the Congo. The film may not be director Henry Hathaway's greatest hour but as drama with spades of adventure, a quietly stirring music score by Bernard Herrmann, not to mention a more civilized and humane way of presenting African tribes and their rituals than say a Tarzan movie, it is worthwhile and you will not lose interest.
