Jerry Hopper’s Secret of the Incas is today best known, if at all, as one of the progenitors of Raiders of the Lost Ark(1981). It was shown on the set of the later film to the cast and crew by Spielberg and Lucas, who took powerful licence from both the costuming of hero Harry Steele (Charlton Heston) for the look of Indiana Jones, and his method of finally locating a treasure via artefacts that, pieced together properly, use light beams to pinpoint the hidden riches. The inspiration, whilst specific, can be overstated, insofar as Secret of the Incas is a far more sedately paced affair, and wasn’t particularly original in itself: thirty years’ worth of matinee series and B-movies sporting similar tropes and flourishes already predated Hopper’s film, in stuff like The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1940) and dozens of others. What undoubtedly made Secret of the Incas stick firmly in the minds of the Movie Brats who pieced together Raiders was its methodical, almost realistic approach to this dog-eared fare, and its peculiarly serious tone, combining already-familiar serial shenanigans with a committed approach to character. Raiderssuggests the deeper impact of Incas’ approach to its adventurer hero, a morally questionable and expedient figure going through a forced evolution by battling a doppelganger villain for possession of a sought-after totem.
Heston, at his youthful best before his encounter with Cecil B. DeMille shocked him into a frieze of adamantine import, exhibits here, as he did in the equally influential George Pal-Byron Haskin adventure flick The Naked Jungle (1954), neurotic perversity and darkness underlying his titanic physique. Steele is, at the outset, running a two-bit taxi and tour operator service in Cuzco, a remote Peruvian town in the Andes. Whilst the theme of the stranded American soldier-of-fortune in Third World dives was exceedingly common in adventure films of the period, this edition depicts Steele’s life on the fringe of this remote world, scrounging and surviving by honest and dishonest means, with some originality. Steele pretends that his tour operations are sponsored by the airlines, and puts the make on any eligible, or ineligible, women who pass by, which here includes Mrs Winston, the intrigued female half of an American tourist couple. That lady is played by Glenda Farrell, the former fireball of ‘30s flapper feminism here still sparking the screen with her expressive eyes and lusty lilt of the mouth as she still lets her mind wander beyond the parochial confines of ‘50s matron status. Steele is, however, always hoping for the day when someone might fly a private plane into the local airport which he can then steal. Steele’s sleazy aspect as a gigolo, fraudster, and potential thief makes him one of the more refreshingly scruffy heroes of the silver screen, particularly as he finds himself saddled with another, slightly more glamorous but equally determined survivor: Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey), a Romanian refugee who’s keeping one step ahead of Eastern bloc authorities in her mission to reach America.
Steele has a rival, Ed Morgan (Thomas Mitchell), heavy-laden with shadowy paternal intimations as he tries to bully Steele into accepting him as a partner in his long-nursed ambitions: a rifle bullet, fired by a desperate would-be assassin (Kurt Katch), sings past Steele’s ear and alerts him to Morgan’s intention to cut himself in on Steele’s dream, largely because his own dreams have added up to nothing and he’s stuck running a seedy pool hall and playing two-bit kingpin. Steele had found part of an Incan relic that can if pieced together properly guide him to the hiding place of a golden sun dial whose disappearance is linked in legend with the decline of the Inca nation. When the remainder of the crucial relic is discovered by American archaeologists and put on display in the local museum, Steele is able to piece the evidence together, whilst Elena’s arrival trails Cold War dangers that provide Steele with the ideal opportunity, and the necessary light aircraft, to snatch the relic. Director Hopper was only a couple of years into his studio career, but as with many jobbing filmmakers of the period, he had already crammed several films into a brief time. Hopper’s direction ambles along without great distinction or inspiration, but the film’s relative placidity helps to exacerbate the peculiar levels to its drama, and Hopper’s early work in documentaries is reflected in the lustrous bursts of location footage, particularly in the climax as columns of Peruvians trek into Machu Picchu for a socio-religious reawakening. The script was provided by two wordsmiths of Hollywood genre film with well-calloused typing fingers, Sidney Boehm and Ranald MacDougall: Boehm was between stints writing noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and the sci-fi spectacle of When Worlds Collide (1951), whilst MacDougall was another noir veteran who nonetheless specialised in literate and well-fleshed adventure movies: having first gained note with the script for Mildred Pierce (1945), MacDougall’s hand would also scribe The Naked Jungle, The Mountain (1956), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1958), Cleopatra (1963), and Dark of the Sun (1968). The schooling of both writers in noir’s overt linkage of psychological distress with fiscal desire here informs Secret’s balance of pulp necessity and dramatic intimacy.
Secret of the Incas commences in a Clouzot-like style, weirdly close to the early mood of The Wages of Fear (1953), emphasising the down-and-out fetidness of Steele’s subsistence as a First World runaway and presenting him as a pretty unsavoury character with few redeeming features. Steele’s wilful exile sees him hanging on to his own specific brand of capitalist aspiration, to be realised through opportunist treasure hunting, whilst the local Amerindians want the same object but for broader ends. The film’s thematic and visual textures evolve to touch upon the similar note of hazy spirituality and a Hollywood take on the peculiar mystique of South America found in Mel Ferrer’s adaptation of Green Mansions (1958). The high reaches of the Andes become the cradle for rebirth, of Incan greatness and for individual characters, with Machu Picchu depicted in alternations between location shooting and twilight-bound sets that present a ruined arena littered with strange Dali-like monoliths and structures, Fritz Lang-ish tombs, and cubist bathtubs. Hopper evokes the tenor of the exotic and the arcane as much through aural as the visual, and indeed more effectively, by utilising Yma Sumac’s vocal range in repeated performances as Kori-Tica, a keeper of the Incan faith who, along with her brother Pachacutec (Michael Pate) has attached herself as helper and covert overseer of the archaeological dig run by archaeologist Stanley Moorehead (Robert Young). Sumac’s astonishing voice easily embodies simultaneously the earthy and the eerily rapturous and airily spiritual, even if her presence ultimately drags the film too close to a kind of music video for sub-Les Baxter exotica.
Of course, Steele’s dilemma boils down to losing his soul through pursuit of the relic, with Morgan as the dogging familiar of corruption and aged corsair’s dissolution, or to find fulfilment with Elena, whose own obsession, equal to Steele’s, is to reach the US. Steele takes Elena along for the ride as he ventures into the high mountains and heads for Machu Picchu, and she catches the eye of quietly decent if faintly repressed savant Moorehead, who makes her a quick offer of marriage. She’s inclined to accept if Steele won’t deviate from his course. Maurey’s lustreless take on the international woman of mystery merely exacerbates the greater importance and immediacy of the love-hate affair of Steele and Morgan, who pursues the duo to the ruined city. Obtaining Steele’s gun, Morgan lords it over the younger man with a final show of potency, communicating with a mix of smiles and loathing, their words leaping with jarring discursiveness between amity and brutal threat, the two men intimate in their mutual and self-loathing with flickers of both familial and homoerotic feeling too. Morgan’s desperation finally sees his collapse into trigger-happy, self-condemning violence, before Steele catches him on the vertiginous heights of moral judgement. Morgan, cornered and exposed in his emasculated depletion, releases a confession of lacerating pathos: “You get old. You don’t know when it starts but – then one day, when you’re – when you’re not looking, gravity gets you, Harry, it pulls you down! Even your own weight gets too much for ya! Everything you’ve got goes toward the ground. Gravity’s a terrible thing, Harry.” And, of course, Morgan says this immediately before taking a thousand-foot plunge into a dark ravine. Mitchell, excellent in his role, looking slightly unkempt so you can practically smell the desperation coming off Morgan in spite of his smarmy attempts to play ruthless, helps sell this climax, not exactly subtle but fascinatingly substantial, even penetrating as a portrait of the aged thug in a dead-end, and indeed of an aspect of the human condition, as Steele recoils from this vision of his own future, but perhaps cannot avoid it. Whilst Secret of the Incas is ultimately too restrained and programmatic in its handling, and lacks genuine compulsion and excitement, its unexpected depth and the evident sobriety of its creative team makes clear why it stuck so vividly in the memory of many young viewers, and not just those who would later transmute its raw elements into blockbuster material.
Well, relative sobriety:
