Studio: Paramount
Running time: 103 minutes
Elephant Walk (1954)
“One man claimed the land. Two men claimed the woman who lived there. Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Finch, and Dana Andrews star in this action-packed drama set in Ceylon. Taylor plays a newlywed who accompanies Finch to his sprawling tea plantation called Elephant Walk...and falls for overseer Andrews. But this love triangle is soon dwarfed by other events. A cholera epidemic breaks out, drought blights the land and herds of thirst-maddened elephants devastate the plantation in a thundering stampede. This famed sequence is a triumph of moviemaking. The palatial ‘bungalow’ is reduced to rubble as onrushing elephants pound across polished floors, rip walls from their foundations and knock over kerosene drums to ignite a terrifying inferno. You have to see it to believe it!” [From the DVD]
Cast
Ruth Wiley: Elizabeth Taylor
Dick Carver: Dana Andrews
John Wiley: Peter Finch
Appuhamy: Abraham Sofaer
Dr. Pereira: Abner Biberman
Atkinson: Noel Drayton
Mrs. Lakin: Rosalind Ivan
Strawson: Barry Bernard
Ralph: Philip Tonge
Gregory: Edward Ashley
Chisholm: Leo Britt
Rayna: Maylee Haulani
The Madhyma Lanka Mandala Dancers
Crew
Director: William Dieterle
Producer: Irving Asher
Screenwriter: John Lee Mahin
Based on the Novel by: Robert Standish
Cinematographer: Loyal Griggs
Art Directors: Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson
Set Decorators: Sam Comer and Grace Gregory
Special Effects: John P. Fulton and Paul Lerpae
Process Photography: Farciot Edouart
Musical Score: Franz Waxman
Editor: George Tomasini
Costumes: Edith Head
Did You Know?
MGM loaned Elizabeth to Paramount for $150,000 to make Elephant Walk—more than ten times her salary at the time. She received approximately $42,000—with her home studio pocketing the difference. Elizabeth’s role was originally intended for Vivien Leigh (“Vivien Leigh was my heroine,” she said. “She was innocence on the verge of decadence, always there to be saved.”), who was forced to drop out of the picture due to ill health. As Elizabeth and Vivien looked remarkably similar, especially at a distance, only ten percent of the footage shot on location in Ceylon had to be reshot. Vivien is still visible in a handful of long shots filmed on location. Most of the Edith Head’s costumes were salvaged, too; only six had to be completely remade.
Elizabeth suffered among the first of what she described as her “really ludicrous series of accidents” while posing for Elephant Walk promotional photographs with her leading men, Peter Finch and Dana Andrews. She shared that, while an “airplane propeller [was] trained on” the trio as they sat in a stationary jeep to give the illusion that the wind was blowing through their hair, a “tiny piece of metal” became lodged in her eye. “My dear, you have a foreign object in your eye,” a doctor informed her. “Anybody I know?” she asked.
The sliver of metal had rusted in her eyeball and had to be removed with “a tiny needle with a knife at the end”. Elizabeth, who was awake during the whole ordeal, likened the sound as “rather like eating watermelon on a minor scale.” A few days later, on her first Mother’s Day, Michael Jr. accidentally “cracked” his mom in the eye with his fist, and the eye had to be operated on in the hospital. “Both eyes were bandaged and it was two weeks before I would find out whether I would lose that eye.”
Coming in at $3 million dollars, Elephant Walk was Paramount’s most expensive film to date.