1958 -THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, is a failed attempt to say something about elephants.

It's hard to bring any enthusiasm to writing about a film that is a boring failure.  A bestselling novel by the author Roman Gary is turned into a mess of a film by the director John Huston.  If you are going to make a movie about saving African elephants from hunters,  Probably hiring  Huston who among other things was a big game hunter may not have been a great approach

This was filmed as an independent production from Darryl F. Zanuck.  Zanuck had stepped down from running 20th Century Fox and now acting as his own producer hired Huston to direct it.  But it appears Huston didn't bring a lot of interest or enthusiasm to the film. The story moves along from one boring scene to the next.  The novel of The Roots of Heaven was a metaphor for saving humanity but the end result of this film seemed more like a poor man's 1940's Tarzan movie with Tarzan leading an elephant charge against some evil African bad guys for some reason.

Apparently the film was the typical on location troubled production.  The temperatures during the days were over 100 degrees and the nights weren't much better.  The acting is not great nor is it terrible it just has that "phoned in" or is it "paycheck" approach to performing, nobody really seems to care. The water and the heat made a lot of the cast and crew ill with the exception of the big drinkers, Trevor Howard, Erroll Flynn and Huston who fortified themselves with booze

  

The film shot for five months on location then everyone stumbled back to Paris to finish the film so Zanuck could be with his current mistress Juliet Greco who appeared in the film where she mostly struggled to act.  Orson Welles is prominently featured in the credits but he was probably in the film a whole fifteen minutes.  In interviews John Huston had spoken about how he failed to make a decent film and would have liked to remake it.  But this was a case of just being a little to late for that.

The screenplay was by Roman Gary and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the running time is 126 minutes.