The best thing one can say about Angel on the Amazon, a 1948 film directed by John H. Auer, is that it boasts its fair share of surprises. A mediocre jungle adventure unexpectedly changes into a mediocre romantic drama, and then unexpectedly changes again to a third genre by its conclusion. There is at least some ambition to the story, developed by Earl Felton and scripted by Lawrence Kimble. The execution, however, is dreadful.

Pilot Jim Warburton (George Brent) crashes a plane in the Amazon jungle, where his party are rescued by a mysterious woman. Later, in Rio, Warburton meets the woman again – named Christine (Vera Ralston) – and desperately tries to uncover her secrets. The film was produced by Republic Pictures, whose low-cost production values earn Angel on the Amazon a certain sort of scrappy charm. Unfortunately Auer’s direction – or a lack of shooting time – render everything at a crushingly slow pace and a lack of energy. The film is only 86 minutes long, yet it drags terribly.

Sadly the film captures George Brent in his latter post-war career, where the films got cheaper and less successful. He is wildly unappealing as a romantic lead, and his scenes with Ralston feel at best uncomfortable and at worst a little predatory. Their dialogue and banter fall flat. Meanwhile Constance Bennett plays Warburton’s associate Dr Karen Lawrence as all banter, snapping each line in whip-smart fashion but flailing without an opposite number with which to play. It is slightly strange that her character is in the film at all, since narratively she fails to really serve a purpose. Shame, then, that she is the most engaging presence on the screen. Ralston certainly is not: a former Czech figure skater, she is effective when being detached and mysterious but visibly ill-equipped when required to emote.

With the regular shifts in genre, Angel on the Amazon gets rather muddled very quickly, and a weak script is forced to rely on monologues and flashbacks to explain precisely what is going on. The rhythms are all off-kilter – hence, I suspect, the dragging pace – and it rapidly becomes a struggle to care.

One can at least say that Angel on the Amazon fulfils its intended purpose, which as a B-picture is to fill 60-90 minutes of time prior to a main feature. This sort of filler product was Republic’s bread-and-butter. Achieving a satisfactory result in 1948, however, falls far short of entertaining an audience more than 70 years later. There are plenty of B-movies that do work for a 21st century audience: indeed, some of Hollywood’s all-time best films were made by passionate mavericks on shoestring budgets and lax studio oversight. Angel on the Amazon simply fails to hold up.

For a time the film was seen as something of a rarity, without any real distribution on home media. A blu-ray release in late 2023 by Australian distributor Imprint Films changed that, including the film on a four-disc boxed set alongside Daughter of the Jungle (1949), Fair Wind to Java (1953), Elephant Walk (1954), and Safari (1961). It is wonderful to see such films become available – and so carefully restored – but sadly while the image is crisp there is nothing Imprint can do about what the image depicts.