BY HANK REINEKE
On 14 April 1940, W. Ray Johnston, the President of
Monogram Pictures Corporation, was resting at the Baker Hotel in Dallas, Texas. On the following day he was to meet with MPC’s
company shareholders in the hotel’s ballroom. The New York Herald Tribune would
report that Monogram, later lovingly christened the most famous of Hollywood’s “Poverty
Row†studios, was to announce their ambitious 1940-1941 program of fifty films:
twenty-six features and twenty-four westerns. One of the films announced for imminent production was The Ape, an adaptation of the Adam Hull
Shirk 1927 stage play.
Johnston announced that big screen’s preeminent
boogeyman, Boris Karloff, was to star in their horror new vehicle. Karloff would be cast as an obsessed scientist
driven to madness and murder in pursuit of an otherwise noble goal. For Karloff’s fans, there was something familiar
with this scenario. The actor was, once again,
cast as a generally well-meaning, good-hearted soul whose medical ethics would
be expeditiously abandoned in the course of research. If you’ve already screened The Man They Could Not Hang (Columbia,
1939), Black Friday (Universal,
1940), The Man with Nine Lives
(Columbia, 1940), or Before I Hang
(Columbia, 1940)… well, then you’ll know what to expect here. Except this time we also get an escaped and
possibly murderous circus ape for diversion.
1940 had been a busy year for Boris Karloff, the actor having
already appeared in several far more polished productions for the bigger
studios: Universal, Warner Bros., Columbia and RKO. The Ape
would the last of the films Karloff would make for the more austere Monogram in
the 1930s and 1940s: his previous entries were all in the studio’s “Mr. Wongâ€
series of atmospheric detective mysteries. The Ape, which the Hollywood Reporter would report was
scheduled to commence shooting on 15 July 1940 was to be something of a summer
vacation for Karloff. The film’s production
was planned to be wrapped in a mere week’s time.
That start date was apparently delayed. As the date of shooting neared, it was
obvious that production would have to be pushed back. On 10 July 1940 the Reporter scribed that “Kurt†Siodmak (who would soon pen
Universal’s iconic The Wolfman) had been
signed “yesterday.†If true, then that “yesterdayâ€
was a mere six days prior to the original announced first-day-of-shooting allotted
to Siodmak to actually write the
script. The newssheet also promised that
the latest thriller from Monogram would “carry a top budget,†that being a “top
budget†if measured by Monogram’s parsimonious standard. Shortly following the Siodmak announcement,
the Hollywood papers would report that actress Maris Wrixon had been “borrowed
from Warners†to appear as the film’s wheelchair-bound heroine, actor Gene
O’Donnell also signed to play her romantic paramour. Sadly, The
Ape mostly wastes Wrixon’s talent - and her arresting physical attributes -
as she’s mostly confined to a wheelchair throughout the film, a blanket draped
over her no doubt elegant legs.
Though Siodmak had already shown talent for writing the
scripts on such screen-thrillers for Universal’s Invisible Man series, Monogram
wasn’t terribly enthused with the draft turned in. It’s likely the producer’s balked at some of
the “too-expensive-to-reproduce-on-the-cheap†foreign location settings that
Siodmak’s draft would call for. So a second
writer was quickly brought onto the project to tighten things up. A New York Daily
News gossip columnist wrote on 22 July that he had recently enjoyed a
luncheon with the writer Richard Carroll who “has just finished a Boris Karloff script. Something about an ape.†In the film’s credits, Siodmak was credited
for his adaptation of Shirk’s play, and perhaps more generously as co-writer of
the screenplay. Siodmak would later rue
that little of his original story was brought to the screen.
Box Office would further report
on 29 July that William Nigh was hired onto the project as the film’s director. Tom Weaver, who would write the definitive
study on these low-budget horror films, Poverty Row Horrors!:
Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties (McFarland, 1993) suggests filming did not actually
start until early August… which was really pushing things: theater programmers planning
on booking The Ape were given a hard release
date of 13 September 1940. Weaver, who
along with Richard Harland Smith, provides a commentary to Kino Lorber’s Blu
ray of The Ape, is one of the
principal reasons to purchase the disc. This musty old film, more sci-fi than horror really, has been kicking
around the public domain almost since the beginning of home video, but has
never looked better than it does here.
If you’re a fan of Karloff or of these old Monogram
horror films of the 1940s, this Kino Lorber Blu-rayis certainly the edition to get. Aside from a few emulsion scratches here and
there, this film has never appeared looking as fine, having been sourced from a
2K master held by the Library of Congress. The print used in the transfer is from the British release, distributed in
1940 by England’s Monarch Film Corporation. It’s presented here complete with the British Board of Censors title
card on the film’s front end.
As much as I love Boris Karloff, this is, in all honesty,
one of his less memorable films. Upon its
release in 1940 the Los Angeles Times
was kind to Karloff’s performance if not thrilled with the film in
general. Of Karloff, the review conceded,
“No matter how farfetched the story, he always makes it believable.†The Hollywood
Reporter thought Shirk’s original stage play was far more thrilling as a
horror vehicle: “In wise realization that horror, as such, no longer holds its
former popularity on the screen, most of the obvious chills have been removed
from the screen version.†Variety thought the resulting film totally
dire, with the “Ultimate weight of the flick as a suspenser is nil and most of
the footage is extremely boring.â€
The sixty-two minute film didn’t make much of public splash
upon release, curiously playing first on co-bills alongside non-genre efforts
as Gene Autry westerns. Occasionally, The Ape was, on its second and third
turns, more fittingly paired with another Monogram effort The Revenge of the Zombies (1943, featuring John Carradine) on programmed
midnight “Spook Frolics.†Such midnight
screenings were probably the best setting in which to enjoy The Ape. While I personally love these sort of horror-cheapies of the 1940s, they
are, admittedly, not everyone’s cup of tea. Most fans of vintage-classic horror much prefer Bela Lugosi’s poverty-row
efforts for Monogram as – by intention or not – they all seem to have a deliriously
looney vibe about them that rackets up the entertainment value. The mad scientist in The Ape might be crazed, but compared to Lugosi’s madder-than-Hell
and far more sinister Dr. Paul Carruthers in The Devil Bat (1940), Karloff’s Dr. Adrian comes off as bland and dangerous
as… well, as television’s Dr. Marcus Welby M.D.
This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Ape is presented here in a 1.37:1
aspect ratio and in 1920x1080p with a monaural DTS sound and removable English sub-titles. The set also includes several bonus features
including two separate audio commentaries: the first by author Tom Weaver, the
second by film historian Richard Harland Smith. The set also features a Poster and Image Gallery, and the theatrical trailers
for Black Sabbath, The Crimson Cult (both
featuring Karloff) and The Undying
Monster.
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