Click on a picture to enlarge it

Alligators and Crocodiles in Movies   Distant Drums (1951)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   v Distant Drums is a mix of western, action, and jungle adventure, with a love story thrown in so we can look at someone more attractive than a bunch of dirty soldiers in a swamp. It's all filmed in glorious Technicolor. Florida and the Everglades look great here. But the movie is a bit of a cliche - the kind of movie where the sound effects are cut out and somebody says "Something's wrong. It's too quiet. I don't like it." (We hear that a couple of times.) The movie is probably only notable because it is the movie that first recorded and used the Wilhelm Scream, an over-the-top sound of a screaming man which has became a stock sound effect and a Hollywood sound designer in-joke. The scream was voiced by actor and singer Sheb Wooley (probably best known for his song "The Purple People Eater.") It was named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 western, but this was the original use. It has been used in more than four hundred movies including the Star Wars movies, the Lord of the Rings movies, the Indiana Jones movies, and movies made by Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton among many others. It often seems that sound designers feel like they have to use it in every movie at least once. In Distant Drums, a man pulled underwater by an alligator makes the scream, but often when it's used in a movie, we see a man who is shot and falling or someone flying through the air or falling from a great height when we hear the screaming sound effect. (Click here to see and hear the scream in Distant Drums, along with a woman's scream that nicely echoes it. There's also a fun compilation video on YouTube that shows a lot of examples of the Wilhelm Scream used in movies.) Basically, Gary Cooper plays U.S. Army Captain Quincy Wyatt in 1840 Florida during the war against the Seminole Indians. He leads a small group of soldiers to blow up a fort but afterwards they are forced to hike 150 miles through the miserable swamp that is the Everglades to get back to safety along with several civilians they rescued, all the while chased by painted-up Injuns on the warpath. And yes, they play drums to communicate with distant Seminoles. (These are the typical racist depictions of Native Americans of that era, I'm afraid.) We first see a large alligator eating a small one. Then, when the soldiers are hiking through the Everglades, Captain Wyatt's love interest Judy is frightened by some alligators in the water so he carries her in his arms. She turns around in time to see the gators attacking a soldier. He's the guy who does the Wilhelm Scream. Judy does plenty of screaming herself. Then we see some murky footage of a man and an alligator underwater, and then some incongruous film of some gators at an alligator farm somewhere eating some meat. We're supposed to be naive enough to believe that the farm alligators belong in our movie, but it's easy to tell that they're from somewhere else. Finally, at a Seminole villiage, Wyatt and the men go inside a hut where there is a large pen full of water and alligators with several U.S. Army hats floating in the water. Apparently this is how the Seminoles get rid of their prisoners - by throwing them in an alligator pit. If I were using a sound effect to express my reaction to that, the Wilhelm Scream would probably be the most appropriate.