Secrets of Life (1956)

True Life Adventures are all about taking a closer look at the world around us. This time, though, we’re going to take a really close look at the world around us.  Really, really close.  Let’s hope it doesn’t bug us too much!

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We’re back in action with our fourth feature-length True Life Adventure! And the gang’s all here: James Algar writing and directing, Winston Hibler narrating, Paul Smith doing the music. This one doesn’t even have a clear throughline, other than “things most people don’t notice about the world around them” So, this should be interesting!

Despite being a little disjointed, this one gained positive reviews. Critics really felt like they learned something important in an entertaining way. That’s what this series is all about! They even liked the use of humor and music this time! We’re slowly but surely making progress.  But does this mean there will be a use of music that can rival the scorpion hoedown?

STORY

We start on our old friend the magic paintbrush, painting the story of life itself, which looks a lot like red swirls. Hibler talks about how the world is constantly changing, as evidenced by deserts with fossils of marine life and glacial activity. The water cycle takes water from the seas and rains it back down, mud pits and heat vents spew chemicals into the air. But the greatest example of growth and change in our world is the wide variety of plants that emerge from tiny seeds.

Milkweed and cottonwood blow their fluffy white seeds away so that the wind can carry them off to be planted. That’s normal enough. Wild oats, though? Not normal. They have little arms that let them walk around on the ground until they sink into the earth. I do not like it. It is incredibly unsettling.  Heronsbills are even worse. They have little corkscrews and little arms, so they can walk on the ground and then drill themselves into the dirt. Both species of seeds can manage this by detecting temperature changes so they know when it’s time to go, which is pretty cool but it’s just so creepy looking.

Pine trees are also sensitive to temperature but in a very different way. They only open during forest fires! They say in nature ruin brings about creation, and nowhere is that truer than here. This is how forests rebuild after a calamity like that… or, as the movie calls it, a “holocaust” which… loaded language much? Once the seeds are spread, they push into the ground at the expense of anything in their path. And so begins a time-lapse montage of plants growing and opening. It’s a really nice use of a relatively new technique. But did it have to last for six minutes? There’s only so many times I can watch a flower opening to bolero music.  The montage finally ends and we enter a cornfield.  As the corn plants mature, they form tassel-like flowers that produce pollen.  The pollen travels down the corn silks into the immature ear.  The kernels along the ear are actually the seeds, which are fertilized by the pollen so the corn plants can reproduce.  So, congratulations.  Every time you eat an ear of corn you’re murdering its babies.  You monster.

The magic paintbrush takes us into the film’s second segment: insects. Hooray. We segue in by seeing all the different tricks the plants have to ensure that they get pollinated. Salvia uses a trigger that lowers onto an insect’s back to cover it with pollen, irises make the insects get all the way inside, and cacti actually hug their little insect friends. It’s rather cute. Squash flowers are a little terrifying, because they actually close over the insects and make them chew their way out. Of course, regardless of the tricks the plants use, one pollinator stands above all the rest in terms of sheer efficiency.

Hibler makes a point of telling us about how many plant species would be extinct without honeybees. It hit like a punch in the gut because of course, nowadays our little bee friends are an endangered species. Save the bees, guys we need them. Like, really badly. The reason they’re so very important is because they don’t pollinate by accident like other insects. Bees actually feed the pollen to their young and use the nectar they collect in the process to make honey. But the process of getting it is fraught with danger. There are pitcher plants that trap and digest bees, and rain to drown them. Finally, though, the bees make it back to their hive.

This next segment uses a lot of fairy tale imagery to describe the way the worker bees serve the queen, which I appreciated.  It brought me back to The Living Desert and its jousting tortoises, though it’s a lot more subtly done here.  The queen is the most important member of the hive because she’s the only one that can provide the hive a royal heir. In other words, she alone has the ability to reproduce. The workers spend their time creating flakes of wax from their bodies and sculpting them into hexagonal honeycombs. It’s an ingenious structure that humans have adopted when things need to be small but strong. The bees pack each hexagon with food and then set to making honey. At the time this was filmed, scientists had so little idea how honey was made that they couldn’t even make it synthetically. I’m pretty sure this has since changed but hey, I don’t know any of this either. What the filmmakers did know is that the bees buzz their wings at nectar to evaporate the water and then digest it. Something in their digestion changes the nectar into honey.

Eventually, the queen leaves to start a new kingdom, sending her subjects into a frenzy to find a new queen. To do this, they pick some larvae and build jumbo-sized combs for them to grow in. Then they secrete a mysterious substance (literally, Hibler calls it a magic potion) called royal jelly that enables the larvae to reproduce. The first one that hatches is the queen, and her first royal act is to murder any pretenders to the throne. That’s my kind of queen! Sometimes, though, two queens hatch at the same time. When that happens, the general plan is the same: stab the pretender to death. So the two queens fight and eventually one of them succumbs to the other’s powerful poison stinger. Long live the queen!

Life goes on. And then a forest fire blazes. So that could make life stop going on. What is it with the True-Life Adventures and forest fires? These little bees are fearless, though: they stand in lines buzzing their wings, trying to cool off their hive so the beeswax doesn’t melt. Bless them, they’re trying. It doesn’t work, and the wax cracks and takes their food supply with it as “womp womp” music plays. You know what I’m talking about. To protect their honey, the bees gorge themselves and swallow as much of it as they can. I guess that’s one way not to lose it. Eventually, the fire burns itself out, and the bees get to work rebuilding.

Bees may be the best pollinators, but they’re hardly the only ones. They’re not even the only ones to make honey. Ants also do their part to make sure life can continue… which apparently sometimes involves eating so much their abdomens distend and hold food for the rest of the colony. Gross. Those are called honey cask ants, but there are dozens of jobs for an ant to do. Some cut leaves to grow fungi to eat while tending the crop to avoid other kinds of mold. Others control pests like termites by attacking them as they leave their own nests. These soldier ants are so fearless they can go after blister beetles, whose corrosive poison can actually burn a human. Some even attack grasshoppers! Where was this guy during A Bug’s Life?

No matter what their job or species, ants are great at digging. It’s fairly common knowledge now that ants can lift several hundred times their own body weight. Still, it’s pretty cool to see them lift huge rocks out of the way of their tunnels and pile them up to keep water out. If only they had such a brilliant defense against intruding ants. But alas, some black ants get into a red ant colony in the hopes of devouring their larvae. The red ants mobilize to get their young to safety, and the war begins. Little ant pincers snap on anything they can reach: legs, heads, bodies, whatever. One red ant carries the heads of some black ants like trophies, which is kinda morbid. Eventually, though, both sides decimate each other. So I’m really not sure if anyone actually won.  The black ants are already having a bad day. It’s about to get worse. In their determination to wreck the red ants, they left their own nest completely empty. It’s the perfect opening that a blind snake needs to gorge himself on the black ants’ young. On their way home from the wars (Hibler’s words, not mine), the black ants find the snake and lunge. Ant bites aren’t going to do much against a snake’s armorlike scales, but they can twist the thing around. Finally, it decides it’s not worth the trouble, unties the knots in its body, and dips.

Suddenly, it’s time for our third segment: the world of water. This is probably my favorite segment because I love the ocean, but I have to admit it’s weird that there is absolutely no segue. At least have a dragonfly buzz us back in time to when life began in the sea or something. The narrator does talk about how life began with microscopic protozoa in the ocean that evolved into more complex life forms. It would be tricky to make a transition from bugs into that but anything would have been better than nothing. Anyway, waves crash into the shore a lot and we delve into their depths to hang out with some fish.

Our first aquatic creature is a male stickleback fish. They are super progressive because they stick a middle fin up at nature’s traditional gender roles. It’s the male that builds the nest, well before he even starts searching for a mate. Eventually, he attracts a female but she’s not happy about the construction of his nest. Spurred on by her nagging, he rebuilds everything and she agrees to mate with him. But this crazy female decides she’s going to eat her eggs as soon as she’s laid them, so Daddy Stickleback has to chase her off to protect them. Then the eggs hatch and the fry try to swim away from the nest, forcing their father to scoop them up in his mouth and spit them back where they belong.

The life of a fish is a dangerous one, with lots of enemies to contend with. Dragonfly juveniles, called nymphs, will eat anything they can get their extendable jaws on. And that might be the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen. There’s also diving spiders, who wear bubbles on their heads to supply them with oxygen as they build their webs on water plants. At one point, her bubble flies off, prompting the funniest line in the movie: “oops! Bubble fingers!” I don’t know why that made me laugh so hard, I really don’t. Eventually, she rebuilds her helmet and finishes building her web. Some fish have special defense mechanisms to help them cope with the horrors around them. Archerfish shoot pressurized water out of their mouths hard enough to knock insects out of the trees above. And if you thought my transition was bad you should see the movie.

As previously mentioned, the sea is the birthplace of life. Kelpfish are proof of this: they’re the descendants of the fish that grew feet. They, too, have the ability to walk along the bottom. Evolution endowed all kinds of species with crazy colors and shapes, making the ocean a fascinating place visually. There are myriad types of jellyfish, mellobees that flap their bodies to float around, feathery barnacles that rarely leave their shells. Anglerfish lure in prey with appendages on their heads, and was I the only one who didn’t know there were shallow water anglerfish? I thought they were all weird glowy things in the deep, dark ocean. Apparently not. They’re still ugly, though. And one of them gets the hiccups.

Next, we’ve got several species of crab. Decorator crabs cover themselves in seaweed, shells, and other stuff to attract mates. I was strongly reminded of Tamatoa and now I’ll have Shiny stuck in my head for the rest of the day. Not that that’s a bad thing as we’ll see… eventually. We don’t spend as much time as I’d like on him, though. The film moves rather quickly to fiddler crabs which are described as comedians. I was more reminded of frat boys by the way the movie portrays them, forever waving their huge claws and catcalling to the females in a rather sad attempt at seduction. They also play seductive music over a closeup of a crab to show us what a “ravishing beauty” she is.

Our final denizen of the water world is the grunion, carrying out life’s greatest mission: reproduction. Not sure why the film’s making such a big deal out of mating now when that’s what most of the series has been about but whatever I guess. Females of this species of fish wash ashore to spawn, standing on their tails in little holes in the sand. The males curl around them to fertilize the eggs and protect them from the waves. However, timing is critical here. If they miss the tides, they’ll be stranded on land to die. This terrible fate almost befalls one of the fish, but a well-timed wave sweeps her back to the safety of the ocean.

The finale of the movie impresses upon us the concept of the circle of life. Our world goes through the same processes endlessly, like the waves breaking on our screen. Of course, this is undermined slightly when those waves do change… into waves of lava. It’s the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia all over again, minus the dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs are the best part. But no, it’s not a nonsequitur, we’re seeing one of those cycles in action. The lava flows into the sea and cools, creating new land for life to flourish on in the future.

Like the Vanishing Prairie and the African Lion, this one was a little dry. There were a few gems hidden in there, but honestly? I don’t find plants that interesting, and most of the montages went on way too long. And as I’ve mentioned in past TLA reviews, close-ups of bugs skeeve me out and there were lots of them here. All those little legs and pincer faces… grossness. That said, it was very informative and featured some excellent photography! I just don’ t like bugs.

MUSIC

Other than the magic that was the scorpion hoedown, I thought Secrets of Life used music better than any of the True Life Adventures so far.  It was very cinematic, which is kind of a ‘duh’ but this is technically a documentary and not a movie.  I particularly enjoyed the epic action music that accompanied the war of the ants and the chirpy flute that underscored the honeybees’ daily life.  The bolero with the flowers opening did go on way, way too long, though.

ARTISTRY

Unlike The African Lion where it was a point of pride that nothing was staged, here, most of the film is staged.  When this was filmed, it just wasn’t possible to get such close footage of bees and ants in their nests.  It’s the same thing as the prairie dogs in Vanishing Prairie.  The ants, in particular, were the personal collection of cinematographer Robert H. Crandall, a noted eccentric who kept all kinds of wildlife in his home.  It’s kind of messed up that he’d let his pets tear into each other like that.  However, the photography that I was impressed with was the stuff that’s not animals.  The time-lapse photography of the flowers must have taken days, and the volcanoes erupting are truly majestic.  To add to the impact of watching new earth being made, the filmmakers did the last reel in Cinemascope.  I couldn’t really tell watching it on youtube (now you know my secrets) but I’m sure it was breathtaking on the big screen!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Secrets of Life imparted some really interesting facts and looked great to boot.  Objectively, it might have been the most successful out of the True Life Adventures we’ve seen so far.  However, subjectively, it creeped me out.  A lot.  I’ve mentioned that I’m not fond of bugs and some of those plants were really unsettling.  So I spent a lot of the film with my skin crawling.  So that’s unfortunate.  I fully recognize that this is entirely my problem, so it’s still getting okay marks.  Also, I still miss the irreverence from The Living Desert but it’s probably time for me to get over that.

Favorite scene: The volcanoes.  Watching that was just cool!

Final rating: 6/10.  The most successful yet at what it sought out to be.  It’s just a shame it’s about bugs.

And seriously. Save the bees.