The Ape Man (1943) – Review
Introduction
Following Murders in the Rue Morgue, we continue with old-fashioned horror and once again with Bela Lugosi—this time from his Poverty Row phase. During this period, he was forced to appear in quickly cranked-out B-movies for fast-shoot studios like Monogram, PRC, and the like, simply to support his family. Naturally, these films were all beneath Lugosi’s true level, but ever since Dracula, he had been firmly typecast in horror roles.
That said, I actually like these Poverty Row films. They are obviously not masterpieces, nor are they surprising, but they often have a peculiar charm of their own and—thanks to their short runtimes (usually no more than 70 minutes, often barely 60)—they provide brisk, uncomplicated entertainment for B-movie enthusiasts.
After Voodoo Man (1944) and The Devil Bat (1940), I now ventured into the next title of this kind from Lugosi’s filmography. And when he’s involved, it usually feels like a safe bet: The Ape Man!
Plot
Ominous music plays, an ape’s face looms in the background, and the title appears (presented by Monogram Pictures): Bela Lugosi in The Ape Man. Even the lettering is made to look “furry,” as can be seen in screenshots.
A ship pulls into harbor, and a group of reporters waits eagerly on shore. They complain about the gloominess of the coastline, and while Jeff (our reporter hero) cracks a few jokes, a man elsewhere studies a newspaper. The headline reads: “Doctor Brewster disappears!” Accompanying it is a photo of Lugosi as Dr. Brewster and his worried colleague Dr. George Randall.
The man briefly shows the paper to a police officer (for about a second—very helpful), then walks away shaking his head. The ship arrives with a blast of its horn, and Dr. Randall is already waiting anxiously. The man from before approaches him, asks if he is Dr. Randall, and orders him to find Agatha Brewster, the sister of his missing colleague. The mysterious man vanishes just as quickly as he appeared and immediately joins the reporters, whispering to them that Agatha Brewster is on the ship—and that she also happens to summon spirits. Now that would be “a great story.”
Jeff, of course, doesn’t need to be told twice and immediately intercepts Agatha as she disembarks. Dr. Randall tries to fend off the reporters, but they won’t be shaken off, snap a photo, and persuade her to give an interview the following week.
Agatha asks Randall about her brother. The police haven’t found anything—because, as she now learns, he is in fact hiding in his own house. Six months earlier, the two of them had made an astonishing discovery, and Brewster decided to use himself as a test subject. Unfortunately, the experiment was a little too successful, and Brewster has been struggling with the consequences ever since. Randall fabricated the public story that Brewster had vanished to keep the truth hidden.
Agatha insists on seeing her brother, but Randall warns her that she must prepare for “a terrible shock.” In the next scene, they arrive at the house, and Randall leads her through a secret passage behind the fireplace into the cellar. Behind iron bars, Agatha sees something crouching—something hairy. Not just a gorilla, but her beloved brother, who has, well… visually adapted to his cellmate.
Review
Yes, this is Poverty Row horror in its purest form: a man in an ape costume, Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist, a reporter who more or less functions as comic relief, and a woman who occasionally talks back to him but otherwise has nothing to do except be rescued and apply makeup, naturally.
The story follows familiar paths that won’t surprise anyone even remotely familiar with the genre—for better and for worse. Of course, everything is cheap. In terms of “special effects,” the spectacle is limited to the obligatorily rustic laboratory with bubbling concoctions, a man in an ape suit (interestingly, not played this time by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, who wore the costume in what felt like every ape film of the 1940s and early 1950s—and there were many), Bela Lugosi with thick sideburns… and that’s basically it.
And yet, the whole thing is oddly charming and breezily entertaining, simply because you know exactly what you’re getting—and you get it without unnecessary padding. Lugosi gets his screen time, and overall the film is competently staged. It starts moving immediately and, aside from one or two unnecessary dialogue exchanges between the “hero couple,” it never really loses momentum.
Granted, the pace isn’t exactly breakneck—there’s only so much you can do with a 60-minute runtime—but it’s more than sufficient to give Lugosi the stage he needs. Once again, he is absolutely terrific (though I honestly can’t recall ever seeing a performance of his that wasn’t, and I doubt I ever will—yes, even his low points with Ed Wood, but that’s beside the point).
As mentioned, this kind of work was beneath him—churning out films for shoestring studios like PRC in a matter of days for little pay—but he never let it show. He always committed fully to his roles, and that’s true here as well. He famously turned down Frankenstein because he didn’t want to act under a mask (arguably the biggest mistake of his life), and here he stands in front of the camera as an ape-man wearing a mask. And to be fair, the makeup is actually quite well done.
Fortunately, it’s not a rigid full mask, which allows him to use his facial expressions—and that’s one of his greatest strengths. In some scenes, he transitions effortlessly from euphoric to depressed to diabolical. His dialogue delivery is once again a pleasure to listen to, resulting in a classic, highly effective mad scientist portrayal.
The makeup even reminded me a bit of his role as the “Sayer of the Law” in Island of Lost Souls (1932)—another excellent horror film of the 1930s, based on the equally excellent novel by H.G. Wells, but that’s a side note. Lugosi also gets to grapple with his gorilla, which—much like in Murders in the Rue Morgue—assists him in his murders. There are even a few scenes where he prowls the dark streets with his animal in search of victims, strongly recalling his earlier role.
His laboratory looks quite nice, but otherwise the sets are, unsurprisingly, very confined—limited to the lab, a few rooms in the house, and the offices of his colleague and Jeff. The cinematography is serviceable but neither particularly dynamic nor fast-paced. But what else would one expect when William “one-shot” Beaudine is behind the camera—one of the many B-movie workhorses of the era, whose résumé includes such enticing titles as Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (both from 1966). He also worked with Lugosi on Ghost on the Loose (1943) and Voodoo Man (1944).
Now, Lugosi in this role is really enough—the story is mostly just a framework. Still, it works well enough. The idea of a reporter slowly uncovering a scientist’s dark activities doesn’t win any originality awards (and yes, Ed Wood clearly borrowed quite a bit of this for Bride of the Monster), but it serves its purpose.
As expected, there’s also the obligatory—and completely uninspired—love interest with a “self-confident” colleague, played by Louise Currie (who also appeared in Voodoo Man). Reporter Jeff is played by Wallace Ford, and both characters are utterly bland and uninteresting, largely due to the dialogue they’re given.
Jeff is yet another annoying comic relief character whose sole purpose is to spout nonsense and crack bad jokes. One example, during a phone call with his editor:
“Okay, Chiefy.”
“Don’t call me Chiefy.”
“Okay, Chiefy!” click
Why did anyone feel the need to include dialogue like this? It annoys me every single time. These jokes are never funny (see also my review of The Murders in the Rue Morgue), and they clash terribly with the otherwise deadly serious tone of the film. At least here, it’s kept to a minimum, and Jeff doesn’t contribute much to the plot later on anyway. He doesn’t even get to rescue his girlfriend—that’s left to the police.
And that girlfriend, Billie, could have been cut from the script entirely. She’s supposedly his assistant, but aside from applying makeup, she does absolutely nothing. Her sole function is, once again, to be kidnapped at the end—who would have guessed? (Oh, and she gets to hold the camera once, lest I forget.)
More interesting are the supporting characters. First, there’s Dr. Brewster’s sister Agatha, convincingly played by Minerva Urecal (who also appeared with Lugosi in Voodoo Man and Ghost on the Loose). She effectively conveys the internal conflict of her character: on one hand, she wants to save her brother—she even threatens Dr. Randall with a gun to force him to inject the antidote—but on the other hand, she’s horrified that her brother must commit murder to obtain it (spinal fluid from a living person, who naturally dies in the process). I found her quite sympathetic, even though she’s given some rather pointless dialogue about ghost stories.
Dr. Randall, Brewster’s colleague, is also well portrayed by Henry Hall. Initially an accomplice, he eventually wants nothing more to do with Brewster once the experiments cross the line into murder. Hall frequently appeared in Poverty Row productions as well, including Voodoo Man and The Ape Man (there alongside Boris Karloff). Together, these two characters compensate for what Jeff and Billie lack: interest and sympathy.
The ape is played this time by Emil Van Horn, who had already portrayed a gorilla in The House of Mystery (1934). Apparently, Ray Corrigan couldn’t handle every gorilla role of the decade.
Then there’s one completely nonsensical character: a weirdo who appears at the harbor at the beginning, nudges the reporters toward Brewster’s sister, and thus functions as the catalyst for the entire story. After that, he serves no purpose whatsoever—except occasionally peering through the cellar window into the lab, watching Lugosi’s shady activities.
Why? This is “revealed” at the very end. As our “hero couple” Jeff and Billie leave the scene, the man sits in his car and is asked who he is. “Me? Oh, I’m the author of the story.” He then grins idiotically at the camera and rolls up the window, which reads “The End.” “Screwy idea, wasn’t it?”
Wow. That’s genuinely one of the laziest endings I’ve ever seen. And above all—why? It would have been perfectly sufficient to just let the couple walk away. Why include this character at all? The opening could have been staged differently as well; the reporters could have found Brewster’s sister without some random guy tipping them off.
This doesn’t make the film some clever meta-commentary on 1940s B-movie tropes—it’s just unnecessary and stupid. IMDb lists this character’s name as “Zippo,” but I’m fairly certain his name is never mentioned in the film.
Still, that’s not worth dwelling on. Another thing I would have liked to know is why Randall and Brewster were experimenting with ape blood (or whatever causes the transformation) in the first place. What was the goal? What did they hope to achieve? This would have been a perfect opportunity for some pseudoscientific explanations—or even to revisit the theory of evolution that Lugosi tried to prove back in Murders in the Rue Morgue.
The film can be watched on YouTube in surprisingly good quality. There’s also a U.S. DVD release, as well as a sequel, The Return of the Ape Man (1944), which has nothing to do with this film story-wise. There, Lugosi—surprise—plays a mad scientist experimenting on a caveman. John Carradine is also involved. Note to self: I need to watch that one.
Conclusion
In closing: The Ape Man was, for me, a fairly entertaining and quite amusing Poverty Row ape film. It doesn’t surprise in any way, but it also doesn’t really do anything wrong—neither positively nor negatively. I always enjoy watching Lugosi anyway, and for fans of the Hungarian actor it’s probably unnecessary to even recommend the film. Without him, it would certainly be far less entertaining.
Still, it’s a nice little time-filler if you enjoy B-movies from this era. Six beers on the scale!
