Mark of the Gorilla

 

Nazis make the best villains. One can’t say anything good about them. Nothing. They have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Put a swastika armband on them and wish for everything bad to happen to them without a trace of guilt.

I love movies that feature a good gorilla suit.  Have a jungle thriller with some good gorilla suits and I’m very content. Even better is when a mad scientist uses a guy in an ape suit to do his dirty work for him. Still better is an old dark house thriller that has a guy running around in a gorilla suit.

There’s not a movie ever made that couldn’t be improved by having a scene featuring a guy in a gorilla suit. Do you know how much better those Dark Knight movies would have been if they featured a scene with Batman fighting a guy in a gorilla suit?

That’s right, tons better.

“Mark of the Gorilla” (1950) gives us the very great pleasure of putting Nazis inside gorilla suits.

It could be the greatest movie ever made.

OK, it really isn’t, but it’s a reasonably enjoyable one. “Mark of the Gorilla” was the third film in the 16-film Jungle Jim film series. Produced by low-budget expert Sam Katzman for Columbia Pictures, the Jungle Jim series afforded former Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller the opportunity to stay in the jungle while keeping his clothes on. He later continued the role in the Jungle Jim TV series in 1955. Because the character rights reverted to the producers of the TV series, the last three films in the series he starred as himself, but, not to worry, he’s still the same old Jungle Jim.

TCM has been running these Jungle Jim flicks on Saturday mornings, and they provide 70 minutes of harmless fun. The plots range from standard jungle adventure to more loopier adventures, such as a valley of giants and visitors from the moon. And Nazis.

 

 

 “Mark of the Gorilla” sees a former band of Nazis who, during the war, had discovered a secret African valley filled with gold. After the war, they return to the valley to mine the gold. Because they don’t want the local populace to know what they’re doing, several of them don gorilla suits to terrorize the countryside, keeping the villagers busy while others strip the valley of its gold.

Local game warden Jungle Jim hears about the gorilla attacks and thinks something is fishy, since gorillas aren’t known in those areas. His suspicions are confirmed when in a struggle with a gorilla, he throws a knife at the attacking gorilla, wounding him in the arm. The gorilla runs away with the knife sticking out of its arm.

On Jim’s way back to camp, a knife hurdles into the tree next to him. He turns and sees a gorilla running away. A knife-throwing gorilla? That clinches it for Jim.

While they are referred to as Nazis, and even led by a wanted war criminal, they don’t don Nazi apparel, to my disappointment. When I first read the plot description - Nazis wearing gorilla suits -  I had a very different movie in mind.

I pictured Nazis wearing their swastika garb as they climbed into the suits. In a perfect movie world, a horde of real gorillas (but, of course, still played by guys in gorilla suits) would fight the Nazi-suited gorillas, and during the battle, have their gorilla suits torn off to reveal the Nazi costumes underneath. Pulp adventure at its finest. But alas, it wasn’t to be. Sometimes the movie we have in our heads is better than what is actually there.

 

 Former 20^th Century Fox ingénue Trudy Marshall is on hand as one of the two female leads and I can only wonder what was going on in her mind as she was traversing Columbia’s jungle back lot. “A few years ago I was appearing in “Dragonwyck”, and now I’m doing this!”

Marshall’s character has one of the more harrowing five minutes I’ve seen in awhile. She and Jim are inching there away along a cliff’s edge when they are attacked (not too convincingly) by an exceptionally large bird. Since this is a Sam Katzman production, said attack mainly consists of close-ups of a bird intercut with close-ups of Jungle Jim waving a knife in the air. Still, it’s enough for Marshall to fall off the cliff into a lake below. She sinks to the bottom where her body is enclosed by a giant eel. As she is struggling at the bottom of the lake, Jim jumps in to wrestle with the eel. She swims to the top only to have the Nazis take potshots at her as she’s swimming to shore. The poor girl can’t catch a break.

There’s lots of stock footage of different kinds of animals in the jungle and it’s obviously filler. Yet, I wonder if such footage wasn’t appealing to the kid audiences who made up the core of Jungle Jim fans. If a kid in a rural area didn’t live near a big city with a zoo, it’s possible the only time he got to see live footage of these magnificent animals was at the movies. Remember in those days, there was no “Wild Kingdom” or “National Geographic” footage on television. So the kids going to see “Mark of the Gorilla” got to see footage of African animals. And Nazis in gorilla suits. And Jungle Jim. Sounds like a perfect Saturday afternoon at the movies to me.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death; The Bride and the Beast

It’s Hammer Time!

From the famed British studio comes “The Man Who Could Cheat Death” (1959) a glossy horror flick about a man who has discovered the secret of eternal life. This being a horror flick, such a discovery comes with a price, in this case, killing young, beautiful women and then secreting their glands to keep him going. He looks to be in his mid-30s, but in reality he’s 104 years old.

It’s Paris in the 1880s, and Anton Diffring plays the eternal man, a sculptor who first sculpts busts of his female models before killing them. It’s a good performance from Diffring, who excelled at playing these cold, aristocratic types. His latest victim is played by the stunningly beautiful Hazel Court, whose red hair and alabaster skin made her one of the most beautiful actresses of that era. She’s a wonderful actress too; no ingénue type, but you can feel her growing love for her sculptor, not knowing what he really has in mind for her. Christopher Lee brings up the rear as a doctor who sees his sweetheart fall under the spell of the artist.

The film has a lot going for it. Good cast, great production design (Hammer always made their films look more expensive than they actually were), and evocative lighting. I particularly liked the scene where Diffring opens his safe to drink his mixture to keep from going old. A luminescent green spills over the cup and fills the screen. The mixture looks like Mountain Dew, which made me go to the refrigerator and get a Dew. See, movies can influence behavior.

On the debit side, the film is awfully talky and slow-going. Director Terence Fisher could be a marvelous director, but this is one of his weakest efforts. Horror moments are few and far between, and there’s probably one talk too many about the dangers of prolonging life. The score by the usually reliable Richard Rodney Bennett is pretty undistinguished. The film needed some good old James Bernard bombast to spice things up at the end.

“The Man Who Could Cheat Death” is based on a play by Barre Lyndon called “The Man in Half Moon Street.” (Lyndon wrote the screenplay for “The Lodger” (1944) and “Hangover Square” (1945), two of my all-time favorite Victorian melodramas.)

“The Man in Half Moon Street” was made into a movie by Paramount Pictures in 1944 with Nils Asther and Helen Walker. I haven’t seen that version in probably 30+ years and don’t remember a thing about it, but I would be interested in seeing it again and comparing it to the remake.

“The Man Who Could Cheat Death” is by no means a bad film. It’s beautiful to look at (the DVD transfer is stunning), and is very well acted. It’s just kinda dull and talky. I’m glad I saw it, but for me, its definitely one of the lesser Hammers from the period.

Rating for “The Man Who Could Cheat Death”: Two and a half stars.

Far worst, but in its own way, more watchable is “The Bride and the Beast” (1958). It’s a terrible movie, but it’s so goofy that I found myself being mildly entertained for most of its 78-minute running time.

If the following sounds like an Ed Wood movie, well, that’s because he wrote the script (but not the original story, called “The Queen of the Gorillas” from Adrian Weiss, who also directed and produced).

Laura Fuller (Charlotte Austin) and her husband Dan (Lance Fuller, there’s a male porn star name for you) spend their wedding night at Dan’s house. Dan goes into the jungle to collect specimens for zoos. In the basement is a caged gorilla named Spanky (I am so not going there).

Spanky gets the hots for Laura, breaks out of his cage and steals up to their bedroom. He rips off her nightgown before being shot by Dan. Strangely, Laura does not feel threatened by the monkey’s advances.

The next day, Laura is hypnotized by a doctor. Regressing to a past life, it is learned she was a gorilla in a previous existence; not just any gorilla, but The Queen of the Gorillas. The doctor explains to Dan this probably explains her penchant for wearing angora sweaters (yep, we’re definitely in Ed Wood territory here).

For their honeymoon Dan takes Laura into the African jungle for his next expedition. You guessed it, Laura’s presence attracts the presence of gorillas in the area, setting the stage for the nail-biting climax – will Laura stay with Dan, or will her past life take over, forcing her to stay in the jungle and reclaim her Queen of the Gorillas moniker?

Before this can be decided, we’re treated to lots and lots of stock footage of wildlife in the jungle, including ferocious scenes of tigers in action. What are tigers doing in Africa? I don’t know either, but its likely producer Weiss had the stock footage, so why let it go to waste? In the film’s defense, the tigers are explained away in a scene where Dan is told that a ship leaving Asia with a shipment of animals lost its bearings on the shoals of Africa, and all the animals got loose and were seen roaming around.

“The Bride and the Beast” is badly acted and poorly directed. Its central story idea is goofy beyond belief. It’s probably a one star movie, but because the movie has several good gorilla suits (always a big plus with me), I have to give it an extra half star. Hey, it was better than “Wanted” (2008).

Rating for “The Bride and the Beast”: One and a half stars.