Ouanga is the anti-White Zombie, decidedly unromantic and supplanting that film’s “Sleeping Beauty” trappings for a harsh tale of lust and miscegenation in genuine Caribbean locations. The color line is now everything as Black plantation owner and voodoo priestess Clelie Gordon (Fredi Washington) feverishly pursues the forbidden love of a white man (Philip Brandon) and calls out her Black zombies to cinch it. To square the circle, Clelie’s Black overseer, LeStrange (Sheldon Leonard), burns for the haughty and indifferent Clelie only to be rebuffed. The backstory of Ouanga is even more scandalous.
In 1933 a United Fruit Company banana boat left New York transporting George Terwillger’s movie company to Haiti to film Drums in the Jungle. On board were African American stage actress, Fredi Washington, and her supporting man, a young Jewish stage actor named Sheldon Leonard. Washington would be acclaimed the following year for her role in another miscegenation drama, Imitation of Life (1934), while Leonard’s greatest accolades as the producer of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) and I Spy (1965–1968) were decades away. Upon arrival in Port-au-Prince the prop man promptly stole sacred relics. “This is very bad!” moaned director Terwilliger. Death threats caused the company to abandon Haiti for Jamaica where they encountered a typhoon, mud, heat, stinging insects, disease and death. Two of the local supers drowned in a mud bog, the makeup man succumbed to yellow fever, the sound man broke his neck, the key grip bled to death on a Kingston beach after being attacked by a barracuda. Is it surprising that director George Terwilliger never made another picture?
Ouanga was not seen in the U.S. until 1941 when it was censored by the Breen Office and released as The Love Wanga on the States’ Rights circuit. The sole surviving 35mm copy was even further reduced by a sub-distributor, leaving Ouanga 15 minutes shy of the original 70-minute version released by Paramount as a British quota quickie in 1935. —Scott MacQueen
Director: George Terwilliger. Production: George Terwilliger Productions. Distribution: A Paramount Release. Producer: George Terwilliger. Screenwriter: George Terwilliger. Cinematographer: Carl Berger. Cast: Fredi Washington, Philip Brandon, Marie Paxton, Sheldon Leonard, Winifred Harris. 35mm, b/w, 56 min.
Restored from an abbreviated 35mm 1951 acetate reissue print. Laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio.
