PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*
Bela Lugosi made a handful of low-rent Monogram horror films in the 1940s, and some of them are fairly entertaining as cheap entertainment. But I never had much use for THE APE MAN. Perhaps I agreed with all the Lugosi fans who empathized with the skilled actor being economically obliged to cover his face with yak hair and gambol around like a monkey.
Scripter Barney Saracky, who also scripted four other Lugosi cheapies, can't bother coming up with a reason as to why eminent scientist Dr. Brewster (Lugosi) chose to test his ape-man serum on himself. Saracky's more interested in the badinage between his wisecracking reporter Jeff (Wallace Ford) and his photographer Billie (Louise Currie) as they become interested in the murders Brewster commits in order to allay the serum's effects, which cause him to grow extra hair on his face and hunch over when he walks. Brewster's accomplices, a less sanguinary doctor and Brewster's sister, are just there to help explicate the story. Since Brewster's trying to banish his anthropoid traits, it's not clear as to why he keeps a caged gorilla in his laboratory-- except so that at the climax, the gorilla can burst loose and kill the scientist who tormented him.
The most interesting thing about the script doesn't relate to Brewster's sad fate, but occurs early in the association of Jeff and Billie. Their "fate," if one can call it that, is to become romantically entwined, but they start out by snapping at one another, since Jeff doesn't think women should work in journalistic pursuits. Billie retorts that Jeff must be "4-F" since he's a young guy who's not serving in the army, and Jeff replies that he's due to enter some unspecified service in a few months. Since nothing else in the story references the ongoing war, it's slightly interesting that the writer thought he had to maintain sympathy for the male romantic lead by affirming that, yes, he was going to fight alongside Our Boys-- even though the actor, about 45 at the time, probably would have been rejected from service. Louise Currie, who turns in the best performance in this trifle, was by contrast fifteen years younger than the fellow she was romantically paired with-- for whatever that may mean.
Sad what happened to Lugosi in his declining years. You gotta hand it to him though - he gave his everything to Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Old Mother Riley Meets The Vampire. I wonder how his career would've panned out had he played Frankenstein's Monster when he was young enough to carry it off and before Karloff got it?
ReplyDeleteIMO, no choice of roles would have helped Lugosi unless he'd found some way to eliminate his accent. But he came to the US late in life, and so he just learned English phonetically. Now, his accent helped make him distinct in some ways, but he couldn't disappear in parts the way Karloff could.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but the Monster was a non-speaking part in the first movie and Lugosi's face was thinner and his jaw less jowly. Assuming he'd have been wearing the Jack Pierce make-up, he might've carried it off far better than he managed later. However, there's no doubt that when it comes to the Monster, Karloff was king.
DeleteIt would have been interesting to see what Lugosi might've done, particularly if he'd been working not with Whale, who clearly wanted a British actor, but with Robert Florey, who was born in France and raised in Switzerland. I don't think the two of them would have produced a classic, but apparently other fans like to speculate on the matter, since there's some sort of "alternate-world" book called ROBERT FLOREY'S FRANKENSTEIN on the market now.
ReplyDeleteI get the sense that when Karloff's Frankenstein hit big, Universal tried to build him up as a new Lon Chaney. Karloff wasn't a makeup guy like Chaney, but his rough features could be "molded," so to speak, to fit characters as different from one another as the Mummy, Morgan the Butler and Fu Manchu. With the possible exception of Ygor the Hunchback, Lugosi always looked like Lugosi no matter how much makeup they applied.
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DeleteI suspect that may've been down to Lugosi himself, who knocked back Frankenstein because he didn't want his facial features buried under loads of make-up. Apparently his version would've been more like the Golem so I'm glad he knocked it back. By the time he appeared in Frankie versus Wolfie, he was too old and too fat, and all references to him being blind were cut from the movie.
DeleteTHE APE MAN may be the nadir of LUgosi's roles (yes, even compared to the Ed Wood stuff). By comparison, he spent most of FRANKENSTEIN/WOLF MAN stumbling around in his blind phase, but he does have a couple of decent moments. At the point where he's brought back to strength (and sight) by the addled scientist, he gives the camera one of his signature looks of fiendish glee. I don't know if the average 1943 filmgoer even remembered the plotline from GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, where Ygor's brain is in the Monster's body, but at least Lugosi got to play "Ygor" one last time.
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