Wonderful character development!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

I like the Incas and Machu Picchu; but this film is not even as good as the Donald Duck version that I once read in Comics and Stories. It just lies there dead in the water. A sleazy version of Indiana Jones by the not-so-great actor, Charlton Heston, who plays the aptly named Harry Steel, does not help. Nor does the casting of a heavy, Tomas Mitchell, as a fat old rival for a rare Inca treasure. Robert Young is ok, as is the B actress female lead. The photography is good, but the FOUR musical solos by the Inca singer (one would have been MORE than enough) led me have several gin and tonics to get through the film. Watch it ONLY if you love Inca stories, and get ready Fast Forward all the musical numbers by the Inca singer.

Several years ago I met a Production Assistant who worked on RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and was told an interesting story: that SECRET OF THE INCAS was indeed the inspiration for RAIDERS... but it went much further than that. The PA stated that George Lucas had seen SECRET years before and adapted the story into his own vision for Indiana Jones. Lucas screened SECRET -in secret- for Spielberg who immediately attached himself to the project. Here's where it gets interesting: Spielberg quickly negotiated the rights to SECRET and the contract demanded it be shelved and never released in the United States so there couldn't be any direct comparisons to RAIDERS. That's why even today you can't buy an official NTSC copy of SECRET; my region-free disc came from the U.K.! And the similarities between Heston's costume and Harrison Ford's some 30 years later were no accident, either: the PA told me that the RAIDERS creative staff were required to watch SECRET and use it as source material as much as possible to save production time/expense. And, it's clear they took a lot of notes! Others have mentioned the obvious similarities, but there's another really quick one that most people overlook: it's a little musical phrase on the SECRET soundtrack that is identical to one that John Williams used later on when he scored RAIDERS. Listen closely and it'll jump right out at you. Another coincidence? I'm not so sure! Further, Charlton Heston was famous for talking about his filmmaking experiences, yet he never directly -or publicly- mentioned SECRET... not even in his detailed autobiography, "In The Arena". He would only say that he once made a film high in the Andes where it was very difficult to breathe! Privately he allegedly had plenty to say: that he was contractually prohibited from mentioning his work on SECRET and that he seriously resented the fact that Spielberg had so thoroughly usurped his character and with little alteration turned it into the cult-status-cash-cow that Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones attained.

Charlton Heston made two films in 1954, and both have a South American setting. Whereas the first, "The Naked Jungle", was filmed in the USA, with Florida standing in for the Brazilian jungle, the second, "Secret of the Incas", was actually shot on location in Peru. It is often regarded as an inspiration for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the Indiana Jones franchise. Heston's character Harry Steele is, admittedly, not a professional archaeologist; he is an adventurer who poses as a tourist guide but whose real reason for being in Peru is to find an ancient gold and jewelled Inca treasure. Legend has it that the Inca Empire fell when this object was stolen from the Temple of the Sun and that the Empire will be reborn once it is found and returned to its rightful place. Steele's costume, including a leather jacket and fedora hat, is similar to that worn by Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones films, and at one point he even wears a light beard, something unusual in the fifties when Hollywood's leading men were nearly always clean-shaven. (Many people were upset when Gregory Peck appeared with a historically-accurate moustache in "The Gunfighter", a fictionalised biography of the Wild West outlaw Johnny Ringo). Although Steele he is the hero of the film, he is by no means wholly admirable. This was something of a departure for Heston, who normally specialised in playing the good guys. Christopher Leiningen, his character in "The Naked Jungle", may be rather stiff and lacking in human warmth, even towards his wife, but morally he is wholly upright. Steele is not. His initial intention towards the Inca artifact is to steal it; he is only the "hero" by comparison with his ruthless rival Ed Morgan. Only at the end does Steele have a change of heart. A subplot deals with his romance with a glamorous Romanian refugee named Elena Antonescu. We never discover Elena's full back-story, but she must have been a person of some consequence because the Romanian secret police have sent an agent all the way to Peru to persuade her to return to her homeland. "Secret of the Incas" is in many ways a standard action/adventure flick, but Heston always makes a very watchable action hero, and the striking photography of the Andean scenery lifts it above the level of the average fifties B-movie. it is often credited with popularising Machu Picchu as a tourist destination. 6/10

For those who have suggested that Indiana Jones was based on Heston's character in this movie, you are wrong, but not that far off. Jones was loosely based on Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer who rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911. Bingham, a very interesting character, later became a U.S. Senator.I don't know what movie everyone else was watching, but this one is on my short list of worst films I have ever seen. I have been to Machu Picchu and Cuzco ---and I thought this was an insult to Incan/Peruvian culture. The plot is predictable, the acting mediocre, and as someone else pointed out, Steele turning into a good guy at the end is a cop out.