Fri 17 Jun 2016
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: THE WHITE GORILLA (1945).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews[10] Comments
THE WHITE GORILLA. Fraser & Merrick, 1945. Ray Corrigan, Lorrain Miller, Charles King and Francis Ford. Written, produced & directed by Harry L. Fraser.
Dammit, I felt like watching a Killer Ape movie, and this time it was The White Gorilla, made in 1945 and 1927. No, that’s not two versions, it’s actually one movie made nearly twenty years apart.
To better understand The White Gorilla you need to know something about its auteur, Harry L. Fraser, who also worked under the names Arthur Borris, Wayne Carter, Harry P. Christ, Harry S. Christ, Harry C. Crist, Harry P. Crist, Harry Crist, Miller Easton, Weston Edwards, Harry Frazer, Clint Johnson, Harry O. Jones, Harry Jones, Timothy Munro, Monroe Talbot, Munro Talbot, Victor von Resarf and Edward Weston. Those who profess to enjoy the films of Ed Wood need to take a look at Fraser’s oeuvre and recognize him as the spiritual father of bad movies. Fraser worked in film from the silent days to the 50s with only the faintest glimmer of talent, and most times not even that, but he brought his films in on time and under budget, which kept him gainfully employed at studios where they wanted it done Tuesday.
According to Fraser’s memoirs (I Went That-a-Way, Scarecrow, 1990) it took three and a half days in 1945 to film White Gorilla, and looking at it today, one can only wonder how he spent three of them. Most of the footage shot in ’45 consists of Ray “Crash†Corrigan sitting around a cardboard mock-up of a Jungle Trading Post telling Charles King and Francis Ford what happened to “the Rogers safari.†Every so often we flash-back to scenes of Crash walking through the woods behind somebody’s back yard, which is supposed to be the African jungle, looking off-screen and seeing… well, whatever grainy old footage of wildlife happened to be handy at the time, including tigers and new world monkeys.
But it gets better. As Crash continues his story, the movie flash-backs to old footage from Perils of the Jungle, shot in 1927. And this footage is so blatantly mis-matched as to provoke disbelieving laughter from anyone who sees it: the actors are all made-up in classic silent-movie style, with rouged lips and eye shadow, they mime their parts with pre-talkie emphasis, and they seem to move at the wrong speed. So we get these 1945 shots of Ray “Crash†Corrigan standing in somebody’s shrubs, saying voice-over, “…as I watched, the lions surrounded Rogers’ camp…†and then we cut-away to the hilarious footage of what he’s supposedly watching. And of course, since all this was filmed eighteen years earlier, Corrigan can’t interact with anyone in the Rogers safari, so he – or the writer — has to keep coming up with excuses like, “…with no ammunition, I could only watch helplessly while the natives…†or “…with the river between us, I could only watch helplessly while the crocodile…â€
Well, he’s not the only one watching helplessly, but White Gorilla gets better still. Sometimes we cut away from Crash to more recent footage, filmed that same weekend, of someone in a white Gorilla outfit lumbering through the woods. Eventually the guy in the white Gorilla suit runs into someone in a black Gorilla suit and the two mimic fighting for a few minutes. Then the camera simply seems to lose interest and we cut back to Corrigan or to the silent movie for a few chapters till the refrain starts in again: someone in a white Gorilla outfit lumbering through the woods, running into someone in a black Gorilla suit, whereupon the two mimic fighting for a few minutes, till the camera loses interest and…. It’s like being caught in a time warp. I have it on good authority that Crash played at least one of the battling apes, so this film was quite a stretch for him dramatically.
White Gorilla, in short, is one of those films so jaw-droppingly awful as to be truly fun to watch, and I recommend it to anyone who can approach it in the proper spirit. While we were watching it, I happened to mention to my wife that the writer-director had written a memoir, and she responded, “Because those who forget the past have to repeat it?â€
June 18th, 2016 at 11:09 am
Sounds like one the Hollywood smart-pants should consider for a re-make. Well, no. Do you suppose this was make as a kids triple feature fill-in?
June 18th, 2016 at 11:33 am
I have been wondering about that myself. Just where were ultra-cheapo movies like this booked and for what audiences?
June 18th, 2016 at 11:39 am
What’s with the multiple Crists in the credits?
June 18th, 2016 at 1:35 pm
Another thing I have been wondering about.
June 18th, 2016 at 3:00 pm
Fraser was above all a man of mystery–what Andrew Sarris would have called a “Subject for further research.”
And I read somewhere–god-knows-where-now– that WHITE GORILLA was actually given a big ballyhooed opening in Los Angeles, with saturation ads, giant cut-outs and a specially decorated lobby.
Those people must have been starved for entertainment!
June 18th, 2016 at 4:30 pm
A lot of films like this have footage of topless native girls and performed quite well on the exploitation market which survived into the early seventies in one form or another. WILD WOMEN OF WONGA WONGA is a good example as is this.
Believe it or not at one time people were starved for authentic exotic footage even though it usually turned out to be left over from the silent era or some Merian C. Cooper documentary or TRADER HORN. They also thought they were going to see something exotic or even forbidden. Look at those posters — “the greatest wild animal picture ever made” and the suggestive white gorilla holding the helpless girl showing a good deal of cleavage.
Audiences were unsophisticated, and unless you lived in a big city with an ‘art’ house or the local Chamber of Commerce had a stag night with those infamous 16mm loops the mob used to transport around the country from one small town to the next there wasn’t much opportunity to see anything racy.
This stuff actually played to packed houses in many a small town theater.
Dan,
“… in the proper spirit …” so what, a fifth of Scotch?
June 18th, 2016 at 5:30 pm
After reading this review I actually watched the film but, since I was sober, it probably was not in the proper spirit. I did enjoy the atrociousness of it all. The “all star cast” probably refers to the unnamed cast (Well, unnamed here, but they included Frank Merril, eugenia Gilbert, and Bobby Nelson) of the silent film portion of the movie.
The silent film (PERILS OF THE JUNGLE, which had also been written by Harry Fraser) was the best part part of WHITE GORILLA. It had a five- or six-year-old mystic jungle boy, a cheesy-looking “Cyclops” statue of a god, a jungle priestess swimming away from an angry, laconic hippopotamus, and no ending. The fate of the silent hero, heroine, jungle priestess, and the jungle boy are unknown, although Ray Corrigan tells us at the end of WHITE GORILLA the human bones were found at the bottom of a tiger pit. Animals mill around in stock footage and we are to assume they are attacking native huts. Best of all, the silent actors do not talk, except for dubbed-in screams.
In the rest of the movie, alas, the actors talk — something that emphasises the inanity of the entire film. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone wearing one of Corrigan’s famous gorilla suits and I had forgotten how bad they were. Both battles of the gorillas involves them dancing instead of fighting. (Neither gorilla would have lasted more than a few minutes in my old neighborhood.) Acting, plot, motivation, continuity, technical craftsmanship…who needs all that when you have a three-day shoot?
All lovers of bad movies should see this one.
June 18th, 2016 at 7:25 pm
I’ve seen something like this that has happened before. The film is Queen of the Jungle, ironically. A silent serial re-worked into a sound serial, years later. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026903/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_9
June 19th, 2016 at 3:27 pm
For a while every jungle film had footage from TRADER HORN and the pre KING KONG documentaries Merian C. Cooper filmed in Africa. Footage from old silent films was frequently thrown in as well, especially as the actors unions and Humane Society had not been as active in the silent era so you were more likely to have footage of actors interacting with real animals in actually dangerous situations.
Elmo Lincoln actually killed a lioness that went wild on the set of the first Tarzan film when it attacked the actresses playing Jane and her maid and the handler panicked and ran off. The footage is actually in the film where the lioness tries to get in the cabin where Jane and her terrified maid are hiding. The star of SON OF TARZAN was killed by an elephant in a scene in that serial, and that changed the way films were done since with sequential shooting they were left without a star for the final episodes of the serial.
And that hardly ended with the modern era. I can’t count the number of times the African footage from the fifties KING SOLOMON’S MINES shows up in African films. There is even a sequel of sorts, WATUSI, with George Montgomery as Allan Quatermain’s son Harry where the actors were chosen for physical resemblance to the stars of the former film, wear the same costumes, and fully half or more of the footage is from the former film.
June 20th, 2016 at 5:18 pm
You’re right John;
It’s one thing to use a lot of stock footage (as in the “Jungle Jim” movies) but much more -uh- ambitious(?) to build a whole new movie out of an old silent film.