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Monday, March 21, 2022

THE HAIRY APE (1944) –William Bendix is King Kong!

"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).


 


Thursday, March 10, 2022

FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE (1934): Claudia Colbert as Sheena!

 

An almost Pre-Code jungle adventure by Cecil B. Demille – who can resist it?

This film wastes no time with set up to get straight to the action. Four desperate people are thrown together as they shanghai a lifeboat to escape from their bubonic plague-infected ship. Self-promoting newspaper reporter, Stewart (William Gargan) and Arnold (Herbert Marshall), a chemical researcher beaten down by his inconsequential life, grab unwilling accomplice, librarian Judy (Claudette Colbert) and the unflappable wife of a British official, Mrs. Mardick (Mary Boland), for their bit of self-justified piracy. Just when they think that they have found safety onshore Malaya, they discover that the local village is being burnt to ground the plague has reached land!

 Gargan, Colbert & Marshall

Picking up white ex-pat (Leo Carillo) who has gone native, they are forced to bush whack through the jungle to reach the next port in hopes of returning home. They quickly become lost and have to contend with dangerous animals and hostile natives. The two men are chauvinistic bores who continually berate mousy Judy for being timid and having no sex appeal. But, by simply taking off her glasses, letting down her hair and bathing nude in a waterfall, Judy is transformed into a Sheena-like, sexpot goddess, knowledgeable in all jungle lore. From here on in it’s a grudge match between the two men for Judy’s affections. Just as the jungle has transformed Judy, indifferent Stewart rises to the challenges, while Arnold slowly unravels without the artificial adulation of his readers back home to prop up his ego.

 

Four Frightened People is not a great film by any criteria. Written by Bartlett Cormack (The Front Page, 1931 and Thirteen Women, the 1932 film that made a star of Irene Dunn) and Lenore J. Coffee (Evelyn Prentice, 1934) from a novel by E. Arnot Robertson, its 78 minute running time seems overly long for a plot that was already tired by the 1930’s. It mostly plays as a comedy, but there are times it gets quite dark. The film gets points for actually shooting in Hawaii, so the jungle feels authentic. 

Cecil B. Demille was always good at feeding the Christian indignation of the censors to get away with a little titillation. Here Mary Bolland's character is a crusader for ‘fewer babies' (i.e., no sex). In a fun scene after she’s been sidelined from the main plot, she emancipates the women of a jungle tribe from their baby (sex)-obsessed men. This very direct support for the suffragette movement is something that you would not see in films a year later. Mrs. Mardick’s morality crusade disguised in terms of population control let DeMille feature Colbert's nude shower (actually body double Annette Kellerman in a flesh-coloured body suit) in a scene that must have had the men on the edge of their theater seats, but it actually pales in comparison to Colbert’s milk bath in DeMille’s Cleopatra of the same year.

Distinguished actor Herbert Marshall has the best and most believable character arc in the film, moving smoothly from uninvolved, casual cad to believable romantic obsession for Judy's unleashed libido. Despite having lost a leg in WW1, Marshall navigates the real jungle set with ease.

Comedic relief, Mary Bolland, acquits herself well as a character that Natalie Schafer would perfect as Mrs. Howell years later on TV’s Gilligan’s Island. Of note is that whenever our lost troop camps for the night. they miraculously produce a 3-star lodge to sleep in that The Professor would have been proud of.

The Ineffectual jungle guide is played by Leo Carillo who would later become best known for playing The Cisco Kid’s sidekick, Pancho, for 6 seasons (1950-1956) on television. I fondly remember him from a few Universal Horror films such as the mystery-comedy Horror Island (1941) and starring in a better role next to Nelson Eddy and Claude Raines in The Phantom of The Opera (1943).

Four Frightened People was a one-off low point for Colbert in 1934, a year which saw three of her films being nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture; Cleopatra, Imitation of Life, and It Happened One Night, the latter winning her the award for Best Actress. Laura at Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings reviewed the recent BluRay release of this film and notes that it “was not considered a success in its day, which led to director DeMille being "locked in" to directing epics.”

Is Four Frightened People Worth My Time? If you've ever wanted to watch Claudette Colbert cavort in a leopard skin bathing suit, catch fish with a spear, hunt with a handmade bow, and order men around at the muzzle of a pistol, than this is the film for you.

Availability: The recent Kino Lober BluRay looks great and has a nice a commentary track by Nick Pinkerton.




Friday, November 27, 2020

Greta Garbo is the Two-Faced Woman (1941)

Greta Garbo’s last screen performance has her playing a prim ski instructor masquerading as her gold-digging twin sister to undermine her wandering husband’s (Melvyn Douglas) affair with Constance Bennett.

I can see why this George Cukor-directed film flopped at the box office; Garbo in a strictly comedic role was just too much of a stretch for audiences used to their stern, aloof heroine.  However, she is great; today she would be praised for stretching her boundaries.

Two-Faced Woman is a lot like Barbara Stanwyck’s The Mad Miss Manton (1938) in that it has lots of great parts that don’t add up to a whole. The script is inadequate and the direction dull. The fun in watching Garbo play polar opposite twin sisters is undermined by the fact that her philandering husband (Douglas) knows who she is all the time. This, for me, cuts the legs out from under the film, much like in The Little Shop Around the Corner (1940), where of the two pen-pal lovers, Jimmy Stewart knows who Margaret Sullivan is, but not vice versa. It becomes a bit painful watching both Sullivan and Garbo make fools out of themselves for men like Stewart who does not have the gumption to reveal his identity, or Douglas who is nothing more than a smooth talking egotist who treats women like chattel. 

Douglas played this highly unsympathetic role too many times opposite great actresses, e.g., Joan Blondell in There’s Always a Woman (1937) and Myrna Loy in Third Finger, Left Hand (1940), His character in these films is like watching a fine sports car trying to accelerate with the emergency brake on. It’s hard to imagine women ever falling for a cad like Douglas who is perpetually tittering on the edge of being physically abusive. Such was considered comedic back in the day.

Two-Faced Woman is buoyed up by Constance Bennett in her supporting role as Douglas’s paramour. Her one scene sparring with Garbo is worth the price of admission. Apparently most of Bennett’s scenes were cut as she upstaged Garbo whenever they were together. And one can see why. Although Garbo is excellent, she is clearly uncomfortable in her uncharacteristically comedic role, whereas Bennett is like a well-oiled machine playing the cool manipulator with a light comedic touch that she had perfected over the previous decade.

Kudos as well to the brilliant Ruth Gordon who sparkles as Douglas’s long suffering secretary. Did you know that in addition to winning an Academy Award (Rosemary’s Baby) and an Emmy (Taxi) for her acting, so had four Academy Award nominations for screenwriting?

A print exists of the original uncut & unaltered Two-Faced Woman, but, although it has been shown publicly, it has never been released to TV or DVD. Come on Criterion! It’s Garbo with Constance Bennett and Melvyn Douglas! If you can release The Atomic Submarine, surely this is more deserving of a spiffy 4K restoration and release!

Is It Worth My Time: A qualified yes. If you can sit through the first leaden 30 minutes, things pick up once Garbo switches from Karin to her Katherine persona. And while Constance Bennett’s knife-like hip bones are not on display, her razor sharp wit is undiminished.

Availability:   From Warner Archives and the usual on-line sources.

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Ball of Fire in the Jungle - Law of the Jungle (1942)

Did anyone notice that a year after its release, Howard Hawk’s BALL OF FIRE (1941) was remade as a low budget jungle adventure?

In LAW OF THE JUNGLE (1942) singer Nora Jones (Arline Judge) is stuck in a small African town without a passport, singing for her keep at the local watering hole run by the shifty Simmons (Arthur O’Connell). When Nazi agents kill a British agent there, Nora hotfoots it into the jungle rather than stick around to get pinned for the murder. Fortunately she stumbles into palaeontologist Larry Mason (John King) and his assistant, Jefferson Jones (Mantan Moreland). Mason, being the stereotypical scientist, just wants to get rid of her so he can get back to his digging undisturbed. But Nora’s in a pickle and will have none of that and so tries to warm Larry up with her feminine charm.

                                                     Arline Judge, John King & Arthur O'Connell

Unknown to Nora, she’s carrying important papers from the British agent that will blow the cover of her boss, Simmons, and his Nazi colleagues. Before you can say ‘Auchtung!’ our heroes are running for their lives, pursued by the Nazi’s and eventually captured by hostile tribesmen. Salvation comes in the form of the Oxford educated Chief Mojobo played by Laurence Criner, who you saw playing briefly opposite Fay Wray in Black Moon (1943) and in King of the Zombies (1942). Criner turns out to be a Lodge Brother of Jefferson’s with no love of nasty ‘foreign agents’, so, unsurprisingly, everything works out on the end. Nora even thaws out Larry and snags her man!

                                                                         Digging for fossils

Plotwise, the only notable thing about the production is how closely the Nora and Larry interactions mirror those of firebrand Barbara Stanwyck to Gary Cooper’s bookish professor in the screwball classic Ball of Fire. Arline Judge was a hard working B actress in the 30’s and 40’s, while John King is noted for playing the singing cowboy, Dusty, in the long running Monogram Range Buster series. King is a handsome stand in for Cooper, and dark-haired Judge looks and sounds a lot like Stanwyck. I’ll bet good money that director Jean Yarbrough noticed the similarities and directed Judge to delivery her lines as if she was Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. I’d go further and suggest that Judge and King were even hired for their resemblances to Stanwyck and Cooper. Or maybe Yarbrough just thought up an interesting way to put a fun spin on an otherwise pedestrian film.

                                                              The great Mantan Moreland

The real star of the film is, of course, Mantan Moreland. The brilliant comedian featured in dozens of Monogram films in the 30’s and 40’s, usually taking at least second billing and stealing every scene that he appeared in. Moreland perfected the pop-eyed, scared of his own shadow routine that was often the only part available to black actors in films of that era. But, Mantan made that part his own and, for all of his supposed cowardice, he more often than not ended up saving the day. You laugh with him, never at him. And given the predicaments that he usually finds himself in – chasing or being chased by murders and other sundry criminals – I can’t but help agree with him that those situations are best stayed out of!

                                                                        Arthur O'Connell

The other notable appearance is by Arthur O’Connell. His role as the treacherous Simmons was a rare occurrence for him in a Poverty Row B picture. He had a number of small-to-large roles in classic films such as Citizen Kane (1941), The Naked City (1942) and Force of Evil (1948) before earning Oscar nominations by recreating his Broadway role in Picnic (1956) and for playing Jimmy Stewart’s drunken mentor in Anatomy of a Murder (1956). Readers of a certain age will best remember him playing the pharmacist in a long running series of Crest toothpaste commercials in the 1970’s.

Finally, film aficionados will know prolific director Jean Yarbrough for his work with Abbott and Costello, and directing cult classics such as The Devil Bat (1941) with Bela Lugosi, and the last (and least) of the classic Universal monster films, such as She-Wolf of London (1946; the last of the Wolfman-related films) and the iconic Rondo Hatton in The Brute Man (1946).

Is Law of The Jungle Worth My Time? The presence of Mantan Moreland and the thin Ball of Fire connection will make this of interest to film buffs; otherwise I’m sure that there are hundreds of better films to spend your time with. Also to be avoided if you cringe at the stereotypical depiction of African natives.

Availability: Only on YouTube as far as I can tell.