Year:  1955
Rating: 6.0

---

This low budget black and white noir like murder mystery is like a series of hard quick jabs to the body. It comes at you right out of the starting gate with a high-class well dressed blonde cocktail bomb crossing the street in a neighborhood more than a few levels below her status. Slumming it for kicks and strong drinks. She doesn't make it. Someone reaches out and strangles her to death and leaves her body in the street. That attracts a crowd. It usually does. And the cops. And the killer. Inside the bar she was heading for, Detective Stevens was off-duty and drunk. He can't recall anything that he did for the past four hours, but the waitress mentions that he had left with a blonde. He wonders if it is the dead blonde getting all the attention and that maybe he killed her.


The 70-minute film all takes place over the next few hours as Stevens tries to piece his night together before the other cops do. The dead blonde was a movie star in her final role and other characters filter through the night like lost souls with nowhere to go. One of them is another blonde who seems to be interested in everything wearing trousers and she doesn't hide it. She (Candy) is played by Jayne Mansfield in her debut. Another blonde buxom bombshell that the films of the 1950's loved so much. She makes a sultry splash here. The other night I came across an episode of the Groucho Marx show Tell It to Groucho from 1962 where guests play for money for a charity - Jayne was playing the quiz game for cancer - should have been road safety - but she tells Groucho that she and her husband have a 44 room house with 13 bathrooms to keep their ocelots and other pets. So she went on to a rewarding career. I don't think Groucho ever looked up at her face.


John Carradine as an urbane gossip columnist seems a good suspect as does a caricaturist (the producer Burt Kaiser) who has a temper and a pretty wife (Kathleen Crowley) and he is on Candy's mating list. As it turns out so is Stevens. Someone here has to be the killer. Maybe himself. He left Candy - in her apartment - on the couch lying down - skirt askew - for a few hours she claims - what would make a man do that? The film has mood for its budget - you can practically smell the stale cigarette smoke and unfinished drinks - the desperation in the air from a cast of characters who know that this is their life and it isn't what they dreamed of. The rot has begun to set in.


Stevens is played by Lawrence Tierney who just feels menacing like a cement truck heading for a collision. He was a Hollywood tough guy on and off the screen with a series of run-ins with cops, jaws and alcohol. He hit it somewhat big with Dillinger in 1945 and then in a series of hard edged crime films - Born to Kill, Kill or Be Killed and The Hoodlum. But his drinking made problems for him and so by 1956 he was in this low budget film. But he lasted a long while in Hollywood being in Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and acting almost up to his death in 2002. He is intense and good in this film. Female Jungle didn't do particularly well on its release but with video it got a new life and with Tierney and Mansfield in it a bit of a reputation among B noir film fans.