The Living Idol (1957)

Director: Albert Lewin
Writer: Albert Lewin
Stars: Steve Forrest, Liliane Montevecchi, James Robertson-Justice, Sara Garcia and Eduardo Noriega

Index: 2025 Centennials.

The Living Idol is at once emphatically of its time and also a frequent anomaly for the films of two countries. It’s an anomaly because it’s a Hollywood film with four of the five actors on the poster not American. It’s an anomaly as a horror film shot in Mexico that’s presented in both colour and anamorphic widescreen. It’s an anomaly as a Mexican cultural story, albeit one that’s told by a British archaeologist. It’s only of its time because all the exotic scenes aren’t exotic so much as exotica and it’s about folklore and reincarnation.

The British archaeologist is Professor Alfred Stoner, played by James Robertson Justice. It’s he who takes Juanita and Terry Matthews up the sixty-two steps inside the Pyramid of the Magician to trigger the story.

You see, while Terry is impressed by a stone jaguar idol, Juanita is horrified by it. She stares in abject terror and then flees down the steep steps in her high heels. We’re soon told that, a thousand years ago, a young lady of her age in a blue outfit like hers, was sacrificed on top of that pyramid and eaten by the people. Stoner wonders if she experienced a racial memory.

I should pause to explain how good and how bad this is already.

Justice is Justice, as he was in everything, a force of nature in human form. Juanita is the only daughter of Stoner’s long term assistant, Manuel. We aren’t told why she has a French accent, but Liliane Montevecchi was a French dancer oddly cast as a Mexican maiden.

The history Terry has with these characters isn’t clear, but he’s some sort of reporter and he’s known them forever, so long that Juanita has been in love with him since she was a little girl of eight but is only now ready to tell him.

On the flipside, we’re actually in Mexico and the pyramid is really a pyramid, at least from the outside. MGM shot on location at ancient Mayan city complexes like Uxmal and Chichén Itzá, though some scenes were in a studio.

The cinematography was by Jack Hildyard, a British legend who won his Oscar for a film in 1957, merely The Bridge on the River Kwai rather than The Living Idol. He makes this picture look utterly gorgeous and we rarely see these sites so majestically framed.

While Albert Lewin is credited as director, for the final time, he had an able assistant in René Cardona, the director of so many great Mexican films, of its Golden Age and beyond.

So there’s lots of good and bad here, but it has a frustrating habit of alternating.

For every neat trick the professor pulls, like using a tortilla to pull an image off a stone like a brass rubbing—Manuel eats it—there’s a wild display of unashamed exotica, like the masked festivities at a fiesta in the hacienda, where a dancer in a jaguar mask hones in on Juanita.

For every scene beautifully shot at a cenote or a Mayan pyramid, there’s an endless lecture on human sacrifice, where Stoner even trawls in Jesus and the Nazis but eventually brings it back to Mayan jaguar gods.

And for every delightful piano performance by Montevecchi, there’s Steve Forrest battling a stuffed leopard that we’re asked to believe is a live jaguar that Stoner has released from the zoo in what he calls a “desperate move”.

You see, he firmly believes in reincarnation. Clearly to him, the jaguar has to be the latest incarnation of a jaguar god released from the pyramid statue, Juanita the latest incarnation of his sacrificial victim. Their destinies are set unless he can orchestrate a generational battle between man and jaguar to save her.

I’ve read and seen more outrageous takes on folk horror but this one is certainly out there. We’re presumably tasked with deciding if this is happening how the professor thinks or if he merely went batshit crazy long ago. Is Juanita depressed because she’s doomed to sacrifice or because Terry responded to her confessions of love by flying off to Korea until she grows up? Is Manuel tragically crushed by a monumental stone with a jaguar motif because it’s trying to get to her or because he’s old and slow?

There are many reasons for me to watch The Living Idol but I’m watching for Steve Forrest’s centennial. Terry Matthews is an unusual lead because it’s fundamentally about Juanita but is driven by Prof. Stoner. For all that the latter has a serious part for him to play at the end, it feels like he’s just there for much of the movie for reasons not obvious. Maybe it was just fate.

He brings a traditional machismo to Terry, a tough American who nonetheless works with his brain. He looks great and would always be the hero when needed, so it’s not hard to see why Juanita fell for him so hard so long ago. It probably wasn’t ever a thought that he’d need to battle a live jaguar for her sanity but he’s up for the challenge anyway. The only challenge he can’t meet is pronouncing “Manuel” in the narration. Every time it’s “Manual”.

It’s the sort of manly role I know him for but in a very different context, as the captain who flies a rocketship to find Amazon Women on the Moon. His career ranged from highlights like So Big in 1953, which won him a Golden Globe as a New Star of the Year, to Mommie Dearest, which won him a Razzie as Worst Supporting Actor.

He was born in Texas as one of thirteen kids but bizarrely wasn’t the most successful actor among them, as Dana Andrews was one of his elder brothers. Nonetheless, he had a screen career that lasted from Sealed Cargo in 1951 to S.W.A.T. in 2003, the feature film adaptation of a televion show of his from the seventies.

He was discovered by Gregory Peck on stage in a summer stock production of Goodbye Again and signed to MGM. However, he was stuck in small or supporting roles, so by the mid-fifties was acting as much on television as in movies, with the former often being more notable.

Major film roles in movies like Heller in Pink Tights, Flaming Star and The Longest Day were maybe outshone by major television roles like The Baron, Dallas and S.W.A.T. The Baron was his first series lead and the first British drama to be shot in colour. He had two roles in Dallas, a dream season character then Jock Ewing, after Jim Davis died. He led the S.W.A.T. team with his signature cry of “Let’s roll!”

Outside those, he had a memorable lead in a Twilight Zone episode and he outdrew Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, but he may still be best remembered as Joan Crawford’s lover in cult biopic Mommie Dearest.

He died in 2013 at eighty-seven.