When the ultimate history of Film is written, if films are listed in order of excellence, this one will not make it into the first 30,000 or so, but it is something of a joy for REAL film lovers to watch and savor. This was the first movie I ever saw on television, all the way back in 1948 or early 1949. I had just seen it on a Sunday afternoon kiddie bill, and liked it more than for any other reason because of the music (I can't say why now, but at 9 this kind of music appealed to an incipient classical music and opera lover), even if it did sound like it was being played by a ten-piece orchestra with delusions of grandeur. Anyway, within a month or two my family was invited over to one of my mother's school chums' apartment to see her new TV (remember, this is 1948, and Cattie was the first person we knew who had one) and we were thrilled, I especially so because they were showing THE APE MAN on it, so I got to see it a second time. Even at 9, I knew it was awful, but I still enjoyed it, and now having just watched it again for the first time in maybe 20 years, I recognize even more what's wrong with it, but love it even more. There isn't much to say about a film that is truly so bad that it is good, so I'll just mention a few comments I saw in these reviews. One commenter basically calls Wallace Ford and Louise Currie lousy actors. Ms. Currie, who died only recently at the age of 101, apparently lived long enough not to care (although I found nothing at all wrong with her), but my God, don't some of these reviewers know anything about acting and the history of same? Wallace Ford was an occasional leading man in the 1930s, but more often a character actor who gave uniformly superb performances from his lead in FREAKS (1932) all the way up to his last film, A PATCH OF BLUE (1965), along the way appearing memorably in John Ford films like THE LOST PATROL and THE INFORMER (he is the IRA leader who is betrayed to the English by Victor McLaglan's title character), as the best thing in two of Universal's MUMMY films, and in at least one Hitchcock film (SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and who created the role of "George" (played by Burgess Meredith in the film version) in OF MICE AND MEN on the Broadway stage. Another reviewer thinks that the crazy character who mysteriously appears throughout the movie is Jack Mluhall, and even claims that he gave himself roles in every film he wrote or directed. Well, Jack Mulhall (that's the correct spelling) never wrote or directed a film in his life, but acted in some 450 of them(!). He does not play the role that reviewer ascribes to him here (quite honestly, I don't know who does, as his name isn't in the IMDB cast list), but simply one of the reporters shown early on in the film. One reviewer intelligently asks why a character with a name like Jim Brewster is being played by an actor with a heavy Hungarian accent, especially since his sister appears to have been educated at Bryn Mawr, and I've had that same question in my head since I was 9. But he and I should remember that Lugosi played several roles where his name was either VERY American or VERY English (remember DEVIL BAT?), and nobody ever bothered to change the character's name in those, either. Maybe the films were so cheap that nobody even noticed, or maybe it might have cost $25 or so for somebody to search through each script and change those characters' names, and when it came to PRC and Monogram, do not doubt that $25 was considered real money. Anyway, awful as it is, I still love this film, but can't bring myself to give it more than a '6' rating. Other things to consider: it gave both Minerva Urecal and Henry Hall probably the most substantial roles they had in their Hollywood careers, especially Urecal, who was mostly playing loud-ish landladies or Italian restaurant owners (as in THE GREAT CARUSO), and here actually plays a kind woman of some breeding and intelligence. And then there is that near-starvation orchestra playing the background music that I still like, even if I had progressed to Bruckner and Mahler by the time I was 12 or 13. You really cannot take the boy out of the man, I guess. (They do a lot of filming in my neighborhood, and I often see vans lined up for two blocks, 70 or 80 film technicians bouncing about, a food wagon, a director's chair on the sidewalk, and a couple of actors walking down a street or up a stoop - which is all they are filming with that caravan of film makers, and it occurs to me that it probably costs modern film producers more to film that walk down the street or climbing of a stoop than it cost to make all 64 minutes of THE APE MAN - and then I remember that Lugosi died broke! OY!!!)
Review of The Ape Man
The Ape Man
(1943)
I'm Afraid it Really is Awful, but It's Also a Lot of Fun in a Perverse Way. Read On!
28 September 2019