The Naked Jungle (1954)

Charlton Heston: Christopher Leiningen

Photos 

Quotes 

• Joanna Leiningen : Do you think this moat will stop them?

  Christopher Leiningen : Ants are strictly land creatures. They can't swim. Right, Incacha?

  Incacha : Monkeys not swim also. They cross rivers even so.

  Christopher Leiningen : The intelligence of monkeys is more than ants, less than man.

  Incacha : Is so.

  [laughing] 

  Incacha : When ants come, monkeys run.

• Joanna Leiningen : Everything I say seems to make things worse. I'm trying not to irritate you.

  Christopher Leiningen : I've noticed that. I find it irritating.

• Joanna Leiningen : You've given up.

  Christopher Leiningen : No, I've been beaten. There's a difference!

• Christopher Leiningen : Madam... you've seen my house. It took me seven years to build. To make it what it is, in the heart of the jungle. They laughed at me, up and down the river - but it's what I wanted.

  Christopher Leiningen : [continues]  I wanted it to be filled with beautiful things. I wanted a family I could be proud of in this house that I'm proud of in the land that I took out of the river and the jungle with my bare hands. The only condition I made about anything I brought up the river was that it be new: worth the effort! Madam, this piano you're sitting at was never played by anyone before it came here.

  Joanna Leiningen : [Stands up and confronts him]  if you knew more about music, you'd realize that a good piano is better when it's played. This is *not* a very good piano.

• Christopher Leiningen : I made a mistake marrying someone I'd never met, but you made a mistake coming here.

  Joanna Leiningen : No - I was looking for something, and I was willing to risk anything to find it. The strength and purpose that was missing in my first husband.

  Christopher Leiningen : He was a weakling.

  Joanna Leiningen : So are you! Your weakness is your pride.

  Christopher Leiningen : Yes, I'm proud... too proud to take another man's leavings.

• Christopher Leiningen : Maybe you don't realize what it meant to me to have you come here. I told you, I was 19 when I came out here. Before that, I had no time for women. Afterwards... in the jungle they have a name for the man who goes into the native villages at night. No one calls me by that name. You said I didn't know anything about women. You were right, madam. I know nothing about women. Nothing at all.

• Christopher Leiningen : Go ten miles in any direction from here and it's civilized. But go ten paces beyond where I stopped, and you're in the bush, the living jungle. Where no man has a name, and the only law is to stay alive - even if you live like a beast. In the jungle, man's just another animal.

• Christopher Leiningen : [showing Joanna various parts of his cocoa plantation]  Without these locks, my whole plantation would be six feet under the river - where I got it from.

  Christopher Leiningen : [continues]  It took me five years to get a foothold here. I started with 20 acres and four men. I nearly forgot the English language in that time. I was 19 years old.

  Christopher Leiningen : [continues]  My irrigation moat. Built by men who had never seen one in their lives. I had a hundred men by that time. I used to lose two or three a week. Headhunters.

  Christopher Leiningen : [holding up a handful of harvested cocoa beans]  And this is what we get. Eight hundred Indians working for me on nearly 200,000 acres of river bottom. Eaten by flies, worms, lice... a half-a-dozen diseases men get in the jungle. All for that: so that your friends can drink chocolate with their breakfast in New Orleans.

• Christopher Leiningen : I don't need anyone.

  Joanna Leiningen : Not even for children?

  Christopher Leiningen : I suppose I'm to consider myself fortunate you came down here.

  Joanna Leiningen : Perhaps not right now. But when you know me better you will.

  Christopher Leiningen : Perhaps when you know me better, you won't care to stay.

  Joanna Leiningen : [stands up and confronts him]  If I had thought there'd be any doubt about it, I would never have left New Orleans.

• Joanna Leiningen : You don't like a woman with a temper, do you?

  Christopher Leiningen : I don't mind. I have a temper myself.

  Joanna Leiningen : You surprise me.

  Christopher Leiningen : You're very beautiful. Intelligent, accomplished... there must be something wrong with you.

  Christopher Leiningen : [stands up, continues]  I'm not that lucky to get a perfect woman just like that out of the grab bag. There's something wrong, somewhere...

• Christopher Leiningen : The jungle's corrosive. It swallows up everything... even men sometimes.

• Christopher Leiningen : We do things by schedule in the tropics. We eat early, we go to bed early. Dinner's at seven.

  Joanna Leiningen : What time is bedtime?

  Christopher Leiningen : Whenever you wish, madam.

  Joanna Leiningen : I wouldn't want to upset your schedule.

• Christopher Leiningen : We're going upriver... Where we're going, there won't be anything left alive.