"NO DAME'S GONNA CALL ME THAT!"
Bestial steam ship coal-stoker Hank Smith (William Bendix) is insulted by cruel, self-serving Mildred Douglas (Susan Hayward) and seeks either revenge or self-understanding— maybe both! Warning – spoilers head.
Hank Smith is a brutal, non-thinking animal of a man who only lives to feed the furnace of the dilapidated steam freighter he thinks of as his own, berating his fellow workmen to shovel ever harder & faster. On rare shore leaves, he carouses with his only two companions – the older, philosophical Paddy (Roman Hohnen) and beer-money providing Long (Tom Fadden) – who both care for Smith despite his abdominal behaviour towards them and the world.
Smith only has a dim understanding of women. Attracted to a bar waitress who he has just casually roughed up, he does not know how to deal with her come-hither response to his raw masculinity. The best he can do is unerringly flip a coin across the bar into her cleavage. Clearly, Smith’s only sexual outlet is his machine-like shoveling of coal into the insatiable furnace of the ship, his one true love.
Mildred Douglas is a spoiled rich beauty whose only use for people is manipulating them into giving her what she wants. We’re introduced to her as she is forced to book passage on Smith’s steam ship, captained by actor Alan Napier – Alfred to Adam West’s Bruce Wayne – when she is all but thrown out of Lisbon. Mildred had accompanied her childhood friend, Helen Parker (Dorothy Comingore), to Portugal to help in some unspecified way with war relief, but instead she partied as the city burned. When presented with her exit visa, Mildred laughs off the harsh words leveled at her, and turns an indifferent eye to the beaten down refugees whose place she is usurping on the ship. Once on board, she coos her way into the best accommodations – the cabin of Helen’s sweetheart, 2nd Engineer, Tony Lazer (John Loder). Tony becomes helpless clay in Mildred’s hands and throws over plain, but sincere Helen thinking that vivacious Mildred is actually sweet on him.
Mildred lies her way into getting a tour of the boiler room, leading to the iconic confrontation between filthy, shirtless Bendix in all his sweaty glory and the almost-virginal-in-white Hayworth. Locking eyes, the two are stunned into silence. Never has a woman been in the furnace room and never has Smith ever seen one so beautiful. The camera focuses and holds on the bewilderment expressed on Bendix’s face as his Smith tries to process what he sees – something that should not exist! Mildred is also stopped dead in her tracks. For once in her life she does not have a snappy quip to defuse the situation. She has never experienced anything like this primal fury inches away from her. Her eyes betray a dozen emotions in a flash - shock, terror, fear, and is that…? Yes! Pure carnal lust! Just as we saw in the abused, but aroused barmaid.
Mildred recovers in a second, hurls the title-generating insult, “Don’t touch me you ape, you hairy ape!” and bolts away. Both partners are left shaken by the event. Mildred broods on deck in perhaps the only self reflection she will ever do in her vapid life. But, she quickly recovers, dumps the now-unless to her Tony, who is left spinning in the knowledge of how cruelly he’s been exploited, and returns to her high society life of self-important meaninglessness.
Smith is more drastically affected. For the first time in his life he sees himself as others see him. With a growing glimmer of thoughtfulness, he struggles to understand what that means. We’re even shown him brooding in the classic Rodin ‘The Thinker’ pose in a call back to a scene from the Eugene O’Neill play that the film is based on. Mildred’s insult has eviscerated him to the point that he becomes too limp and impotent to shovel enough coal to keep the ship up to steam. With real consequences – the ship has fallen behind the protective convoy it was sailing back to the USA with, leaving it vulnerable to (unnamed) enemy attack.
Once in New York, Smith stalks Mildred in an attempt to get her to explain the meaning of her insult. This only lands him in jail where he’s humiliated by the police and left like a broken zoo animal in a cage. Sprung on bail by his friends, Smith ends up at a sideshow where he sees and acknowledges himself as being no different than the caged gorilla (played by frequent ape suit actor, ‘Crash’ Corrigan) in another call back to the play.
Smith eventually sneaks into Mildred’s luxury apartment. Neither the audience nor Smith knows what will happen next. Overpowered by Smith, Mildred displays the same range of emotions that she experienced at their first meeting. Riveting Smith with a look of confusion and lust, the bewildered Smith seems to actually believe in the possibility of some real connection with a woman. But, the moment Smith lets his guard down, Mildred bolts for the door. Smith catches her and throws her back on the couch. The scene crackles with expectation. What will Smith’s next move be? After a long pause, he pulls out a coin and flips it across the room, directly down Mildred’s décolletage. He exits a happy man, knowing that underneath whatever facades we might have, we are all just hairy apes. Whether Mildred has experienced any life-changing enlightenment is left hanging.
Based on the posters and press that I’ve seen for The Hairy Ape, it was not marketed to 1940’s bohemian intellectuals who would have bought tickets to the 1922 play, but rather squarely to an audience who were expecting a ‘gorilla abducts white woman’ film in the long tradition of such movies – The Gorilla (1921), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1931), The Bride of the Beast (1958) and dozens of others (for more on the history of this trope I recommend reading the paper Fremiet's Gorillas: Why Do They Carry off Women? by Zgórniak et al., 2006). The Hairy Ape even follows the plot of King Kong (1933); ‘hairy ape’ meets beautiful girl in exotic setting, followers her to Manhattan, gets imprisoned, breaks free & climbs skyscraper with girl in his arms. Fortunately our hairy ape realizes that the ‘dame ain’t worth it’ and sails away back home, happy with his new primitive understanding of the world and his place in society.
The Hairy Ape (1944) is based on an infrequently produced play by Nobel and four-time Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright, Eugene O’Neill. The original existential 1922 play is, as I interpret it, about the plight of uneducated, mostly immigrant workers trying to understand their place in American society where they only exist to run the soulless machinery that keeps the elite industrialists rich and their children spoiled (predating Fritz Lang's similarly themed Metropolis by five years). Our protagonist gains a sort of dim self-enlightenment as he tries to organize the workers to fight the capitalists, only to realize the futility of his actions. Accepting his fate, he meets his end in the arms of his mirror image – a gorilla that crushes the life out of him.
O’Neill specialized in painting unflinching portraits of
broken and often petty individuals as they reflected what he saw in society.
Much of his work – like Long Day’s Journey Into Night – was drawn from his jaundiced
views of himself and this family, which he often held in low esteem. Was O'Neill perhaps projecting part of himself into the play's lead?
The screenplay by prolific novelist and radio show writer, Robert Hardy Andrews, and Decla Dunning is a rare example of a stage production that probably would have been a difficult movie to watch being turned into a gripping film portrayal of lives unexamined. Andrews and Dunning kept the basic outline of the play, but dialed down its big picture class struggle plotline to a more focused version played out on an audience-relatable human level. Although O'Neill lived for more nine years after the the release of the film, I can’t find any comments that he may have made about the it, good or bad.
Director Alfred Santell began his career in the Max Sennett and Hal Roach studios, making a mark with his own self-branded comedy shorts featuring a trained chimp—good experience perhaps for directing a movie called The Hairy Ape. The storytelling is more than competent, but the material deserved a director with a deeper appreciation of the source material.
The film is amply aided by cinematographer Lucien Androit who knew how to light and frame Bendix at his bestial best. Paris born Androit had directed dozens of silent films starting in 1909 before moving easily into the talkies where he added a touch of class to mostly B films. Perhaps his most notable work was for Edgar Ulmer, making Hedy Lamarr and George Sanders look gorgeous in The Strange Woman (1946). He also gave a slick edge to one of my favourites, Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936), where Warner Oland squares off against Boris Karloff. He even helped to make Peter Lorre look heroic in several Mr. Moto films for Twentieth Century Fox. Of note to this review is the Androit-shot film, Topaze (1933), where another dim (but gentle) soul (John Barrymore in a nicely nuanced performance) also has his eyes opened to the real world. But, unlike Bendix’s emotionally limited Hank Smith, Barrymore’s Topaze embraces the corrupt capitalist lifestyle, nabs Myrna Loy, gets filthy rich and lives happily ever after (gotta love them Pre-Code films!).
Is The Hairy Ape Worth My Time? Definitely. With an underlying story by Eugene O’Neil and powerful performances from always great actors William Bendix and Susan Hayward, this 92 minute movie only lags when one of them is not on the screen, which happily is not often.
Availability: Unfortunately, this public domain film does not seem to have a decent DVD release. However, a very watchable copy is on YouTube (embedded below).
