The Barbarian

Ollante, a Spanish girl, reared by a tribe of Brazilian Indians, rescues and nurses Ridgeway Webb, a lost explorer, from the terrors of the South American jungle. Webb discovers that Ollante possesses a vast fortune and decides to obtain it for himself by making her his wife. He takes "the jungle child" to New York and plans to secure her inheritances, then in the keeping of Senor Grijalva, who is associated with the Foreign Exchange Bank of Metropolis. With Ollante, Webb has brought her Tupi "mother" Laila. In spite of attempts to civilize the girl, Webb realizes that she cannot give up the traits acquired by her jungle life. Senor Grijalva refuses to relinquish his hold on Ollante's fortune until she becomes civilized, for he appreciates Webb's unworthy motives. Angered, Webb makes every effort to educate Ollante and bring her up to the station necessary, but the girl has realized his duplicity and, heartbroken, retrogresses. Her husband's one concession is a room fitted up to resemble her hut in the jungle, and here Ollante spends more and more of her time. To celebrate his possession of the inheritance, which he finally gains through fraudulent methods, Webb gives a party in his house. During the evening Ollante is roused by the orgy and, coming downstairs, hears her intoxicated husband denounce her and express the wish that she would go back to the jungle. Ollante steals back to her jungle room and goes through the ancient Tupi ritual of death. At daybreak, Webb, hearing the sounds in the jungle room, enters and ridicules his wife's actions. Sensing finally that she is determined on suicide, he encourages her, and is his drunken maudlin way offers to play the tom-tom while she dances. Ollante then determines to slay her husband, and as she had slain others in the jungle, she dances about them until a favorable moment, when she suddenly springs at him and slowly strangles him to his death.