Thu 5 Nov 2009
THE APE. Monogram, 1940. Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gene O’Donnell, Dorothy Vaughan, Gertrude Hoffman, Henry Hall. Based on a play by Adam Shirk, adapted by Curt Siodmak. Screenwriters: Siodmak and Robert Carroll. Director: William Nigh.
This low-budget horror film was among those shown on TCM as part of a day-long festival of Boris Karloff movies just before Halloween.
In David Vineyard’s rundown of the list of titles (see the comments following), he gave rather short shrift to this one, and I’m sure rightfully so.
It’s short on thrills, imagination and budget, not necessarily in that order, but the presence of Mr. Karloff in it makes it worth a look-see, as it almost always does.
He plays one of his patented, well-recognized characters in this one, the more than slightly befuddled Dr. Bernard Adrian, whose dream is find a cure for polio in his backroom laboratory, first for crippled Frances Clifford (Maris Wrixon), who lives only a short distance away, and then for all mankind.
He’s a kindly old man, rather feeble-looking, but slightly scary with that glaring intensity that’s always in his eyes – the sort of old man whose house small kids dare each other to throw rocks at, which they do.
To obtain the serum for Miss Clifford’s recovery – well, that’s where the escaped ape from a circus traveling nearby comes in. Dr. Adrian finds he needs what seem to be spinal taps from dead men to continue his work, and somehow it appears that he has the ape doing his stealthy, late-at-night tasks for him.
Here are the key words in the review so far: befuddled, kindly, scary, intensity, stealthy. Without Boris Karloff in this movie, you could also call it ludicrous. But with him in it, it’s transformed into another dimension altogether.
It’s still not a very good movie, but I think there are parts of it, if I can convince you to watch it, that you may not forget — and no, I don’t mean the scary parts.
November 5th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Karloff comes as close to raising this up as is possible, but Burke and Hare couldn’t resurrect this one. Granted it isn’t as bad as similar outings with Lugosi or George Zucco, but even Boris can only do so much, though there are one or two nice touches in the Siodmak script. But compared to the others that were playing that day this one really is minor at best.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:38 am
Actually, the Lugosi/Zucco films are a bit livelier than this clunker. My favorite comment on Karloff’s cockamamie scheme was in PSYCHOTRONIC: “Brilliant! Who’d notice a gorilla going around killing people?”
November 9th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
What can I tell you? Go back and read my comments again. If you can get past how ludicrous the story is — admittedly, a Big If — there is a dimension to this story that certainly worked for me.
I stand by my last paragraph!