8. The Ape Man (1943)

Director: William Beaudine

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Louise Currie, Wallace Ford, Henry Hall

Caveman Quotient: Either 0% or 100%, depending upon your point of view

Analysis:

As I write this, I am looking out the window of my room in a flophouse by the East River. I can hear sirens in the distance, growing closer, and as the cars screech to a halt outside I type on, mad and uncaring, desperate to finish the last line of the review before the police burst in and tear me kicking and screaming from my Remington. But I deserve it all, you know. You see, I have broken my own rules. The Ape Man isn’t a caveman movie at all.

It’s a question of genetics, really. While there’s nothing all that controversial about a caveman movie in which a person regresses to a proto-human state – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde did it, Altered States did it, and I’m pretty sure I can argue that Howling II: Your Sister is A Werewolf did it on a technicality, even if it does posit that Homo sapiens is descended from canines. The Ape Man, however, is not a tale of regression, but of transformation. Simply put, Bela Lugosi turns himself into an ape by injecting himself with the spinal fluid of a silverback gorilla. That’s not a caveman movie – that’s just weird.

The Ape Man is a product of the notorious Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures, Corp., and despite its seemingly exceptional insanity, it’s hardly atypical of their output. Monogram are infamous for having combining a total lack of resources with a complete disregard for quality, compensating with a heavy dose of crazy and former star/future Ed Wood, Jr. collaborator Bela Lugosi embarrassing himself in a series of increasingly ludicrous roles. You sort of have to feel sorry for Bela Lugosi. He started-out on top, changing the face of cinematic horror with his ground-breaking (albeit, not very good) role in Dracula, went on to star in a number of genuinely good films, including the stone-cold classic White Zombie, and then set out on a long, slow decline that would see him closing-out his career as a broken-down morphine addict forced to lose a wrestling match against an inanimate rubber octopus. Even if he was partially to blame, going about doing silly things like turning down the role of Frankenstein's monster because it didn't have any lines, you can really sympathise with him a bit in this film when, after just having engaged in a battle of wits with his ape, he collapses into a chair and declares "I have messed everything up!". On the other hand, his loss was our gain, since while I certainly wouldn’t wish any ill on the man, I certainly do enjoy watching him make a fool of himself.

And boy! What a fool he does make. Indignity, thy name is The Ape Man. Equal parts unfunny comedy and non-horrific horror film, the only things this film has going for it are Lugosi’s performance and a healthy dose of silliness. Lugosi is Dr. James Brewster, a “world-famous gland expert” with an unexplained Hungarian accent, who has suddenly up and vanished, out of the blue. The newspapers are going wild about it, but no-one can find a trace of him, and many people are starting to suspect that poor old Dr. Brewster may be dead.

Enter Brewster’s sister, Agatha (Minerva Urecal). She’s just returned from a ghost-hunting trip in Europe, and is deeply shocked to learn of her brother’s disappearance. She goes to talk to Dr. George Caldwell (Henry Hall), Brewster’s long-time friend and colleague, hoping to get some sort of perspective on events. Caldwell, for his part, is quick to reassure Agatha that her brother is alive and safe. It turns-out that one of his experiments went awry, leaving him changed somehow, and rather than deal with the public outcry that would accompany revealing himself, Brewster has instead holed-up in the secret laboratory hidden beneath his house, where he is busily working on a cure. Only Agatha should brace herself. Her brother's appearance has undergone some rather drastic changes.

There’s really no way to explain in words the glorious nature of the scene in which Lugosi first appears. Agatha and Caldwell wind their way down along the staircase concealed behind Brewster’s living room fireplace. They cross the laboratory, and Caldwell trips a lever that exposes a hidden cage. In the cage, there squats a silverback gorilla, here portrayed via unconvincing man-in-suit. Beside the ape, all snuggled-up, is a figure in black. It stirs. It rises. Agatha looks on in shock -- and the thing turns towards her -- and it looks up at her -- and Caldwell brandishes his pistol as the thing falls against the cage. And what is this thing, you ask? What, this grotesquery? It looks like a man, yet it walks like an ape, and its pale and trembling fingers are cloaked in fur. And then it speaks. By God, it speaks! It is Bela Lugosi – and he hasn’t shaved in days!

Bela Lugosi, transformed into a man-ape and shacking-up with a gorilla. Really, could you concoct a more lurid scenario?

This, then, is the extent of Dr. Brewster’s transformation: he slouches somewhat, he swings his arms a little, and he has facial hair that bears an equal resemblance to the beard of a Mennonite and the helmet of Juggernaut. Looking at all this, there is really no reason why he couldn’t just apply some Nair and go topside. But then I suppose there’d be no film. I mean, I guess they could have made Lugosi wear the gorilla suit, but then they would have lost the face recognition of their “star”. On the other hand, they would have gained an intelligent mad scientist gorilla who spoke with a Hungarian accent, and that is worth more than all the Bela Lugosi in the world.

As I may have alluded to once or twice in the introduction, Brewster found himself in this state after injecting himself with the spinal fluid of a gorilla. Why I do not know. I suppose he and Caldwell were trying to test the viability of gorillas as spinal fluid donors, which would have taken about twenty seconds of dialogue to establish but which is instead glossed over in favour of scenes of Bela Lugosi engaging in chest-beating displays of alpha-male superiority with his pal the preternaturally intelligent test-ape. So I suppose the film-makers made the right call on that one. Anyway, Brewster is naturally upset about the unexpected side-effects of his course of ape-juice, and is eager to return himself to the ranks of humanity. He figures (perhaps reasonably) that since injecting himself with simian spinal fluid transformed him into an ape, injecting himself with human spinal fluid will transform him back into a man. Like I said, fairly reasonable.

Less reasonable is Brewster’s determination to go through with this plan. You see, for the spinal fluid to take effect, it has to be fresh – which means that any donors for the fluid have to still be living when the stuff is removed. And needless to say, the removal of a significant quantity of spinal fluid from a living human is hardly about to do wonders for their health. If Brewster wants his humanity back, then he’s going to have to kill for it.

Of course, from here you can pretty much write the film itself. Caldwell refuses to help Brewster with his scheme. Agatha sides with Brewster out of misplaced affection, and the brother and sister strong-arm Caldwell into helping them, having Caldwell inject Brewster with the spinal fluid of Caldwell’s butler. The first treatment doesn’t work, so Brewster ups the ante and starts staging murderous night raids to amass more fluids, sicking his pet gorilla on helpless citizens and then draining them with a syringe. In the end, it all goes pear-shaped when Caldwell throws self-preservation to the wind and takes a stand against his crazed partner, meeting his end but striking a blow for common decency in the process. In the final moments of the film Brewster is cornered in his laboratory, and murdered by his gorilla in the course of a fight over an attractive girl. Moments later, the police arrive, rescue the girl and shoot the gorilla, putting an end to the nasty business once and for all.

Really, there is the germ of a good idea in there somewhere. Granted, it’s probably a good idea that was stolen from an earlier film that I’ve never heard of, and I know it would crop-up again in a bunch of films that I can’t remember, but being derivative doesn’t necessarily preclude being good. The idea of a scientist accidentally mutating himself into a vampire is a simple but effective one, giving an element of ethical and psychological complexity (not to mention a nice Elizabeth Bathory-style twist) to the hoary old R.L. Stevenson-inspired “Man turns himself into a monster” premise. Probably the film that it reminds me of the most in this regard is The Little Shop of Horrors, where a loser feeds people to a carnivorous plant out of a belief that his popularity hinges on the plant’s survival. Except, you know, The Little Shop of Horrors actually did something with the idea. And, despite being just as cheap and rushed as The Ape Man, it didn’t suck.

Putting aside my obsession with selfishly-motivated vampirism as a plot point in horror stories, I suppose I should say something about the rest of the film. It doesn’t really bear thinking about, to be honest. Did you know that, in describing the film, I completely avoided mentioning the two reporter characters which take-up half the running time snooping, trying to dig-up dirt on Brewster? There’s reporter Jeff Carter, who’s a wise guy, and the female photographer, who’s named “Billie Mason”- and who as a consequence keeps getting mistaken for a man. They do the fairly typical low-rent Grant/Russell hard-boiled banter shtick, largely fail in their goal of providing a source of legitimate comedy, and wind-up almost entirely superfluous to the plot. Mostly they just keep showing-up at Brewster’s house, padding-out the running time by bothering Agatha with questions about her missing brother. It’s only in the last few minutes of the film that they do anything of significance, and really this just consists of Billie wandering into Brewster’s house while everyone’s out, getting nabbed by the Mad Doctor after he returns home from visiting with Caldwell, and serving as the requisite beauty for Carter to rescue at the end, thus proving to both himself and the audience that, strong-headed and capable or no, a woman is still a woman and she will always need a man – if only to serve as protection against murderous apes.

At the same time as I loathe the superfluousness of this sub-plot, I must admit that the two actors playing Billie and Jeff are reasonably likeable. I mean, Wallace Ford keeps flubbing his lines, and his character is a chauvinist jerk, but in the end he at least has a trustworthy face. Louise Currie, on the other hand, despite having almost nothing to work with, gives something close to an actual performance, and with a director who gave a damn she might even have been good. I mean, yes the dialogue is leaden and the pair’s sense of comic timing is severely impaired, but you take what you can get in these sorts of films. At least they don't read their lines off of the back off props like the guy who plays their editor. The duo’s presence also facilitates one of the film’s most interesting moments, a completely ludicrous climactic plot-twist involving a man who has been popping-up throughout the film and prompting characters on how they should respond to certain situations. It’s not at all a good twist, and the set-up is long and painful, but it really is something to see in action.

In the end, there’s not much one can say about The Ape Man. Well, not much that’s all that constructive, anyway. With a good script, better actors, a budget and a competent director, it might have been quite good, in a screwball sort of way. But then, that goes for pretty much every crappy movie. As it stands, The Ape Man is really only worth it for the outlandishness of its premise, and the schadenfreude that arises from watching Bela Lugosi done-up with false mutton-chops, palling around with a gorilla and ooking and ahhing like a monkey. But on the other hand, that’s already more than anyone could ever reasonably ask.

Looking over the above paragraphs, it is self-evident that The Ape Man is not a caveman film. A gorilla never is, was or will be a primitive human, and so transforming oneself into one of our simian brethren can hardly be considered the same as regressing into a Neanderthal state. At the same time, however, it should be clear why I decided to cover such a fundamentally ridiculous film. And so I hope that anyone reading this will forgive me, for – much like Bela Lugosi agreeing to star in this crummy, crummy film – I have forfeited what's left of my honour for the greater good.

Or something like that.

Rating:





Special Consideration – The One-Horned Armadillo of Unconventional Appeal

7. One Million Years B.C. (1940

Director: Hal Roach

Starring: Conrad Nagel, Carol Landis, Victor Mature, Lon Chaney, Jr.

Caveman Quotient: Whole tribes! Two of them even! It’s a veritable Caveman Calgary Rodeo!

Analysis:

Ah, yes. Finally the day has arrived. Granted, it took me a while to get to it, what with restarting University and supposedly working on my thesis, but it's finally here... Enough with you phoney cavefolk – you Piltdown men of the Pleistocene Picture. Seven films in, and we hit the mother load. It doesn’t get much cavemanlier than this.

First things first: One Million BC is not the movie where Martine Beswick and Raquel Welsh get in a catfight while wearing fur bikinis. That much-vaunted entry is still a few years on. But One Million BC, in its own special way, is perhaps more enticing a cinematic spectacle. It’s certainly not as good as One Million Years BC, mind, and I’d argue that it also fails to succeed on the more visceral level of being as much fun, but at the same time it does manage to lay-down almost all the rules of the “proper” caveman film, while simultaneously juggling ridiculous science, hammy performances, weighty themes of the civilisation of man and special effects techniques which are by turns preposterous, inspired, and utterly despicable. In short, it constitutes a must-see proposition for anybody who loves completely ridiculous crap.

The best part of One Million BC may actually be the framing narrative, which manages a delicate melding of narrative superfluousness, didacticism, over-acting and tin-eared dialogue that seems almost calculated in its idiocy. During a thunderstorm, a bunch of lederhosen-wearing Tyrolean mountain-climbers take refuge in a cave and just happen to stumble upon a palaeontologist (Conrad Nagel). This guy is really a sight, I must say. With his wild eyes, beard and enormous pipe, he could just as easily pass for either Captain Nemo or Moses, and he speaks every word with such earnest and overblown enthusiasm that you’d think he’s just uncovered the latter’s alternative draft of the Ten Commandments. The palaeontologist is in the process of documenting a section of primitive rock art, which he believes can actually be interpreted to tell the saga of an ancient people. Fascinated, the mountaineers beg him to share his interpretation, and the palaeontologist just about jumps for joy at the chance. And so, Conrad Nagel launches into the tale of two peoples – the savage and near-bestial Rock tribe, who ruled by force alone, the strongest amongst them leader and the weak left to fend for themselves; and the lovable and enlightened Shell tribe, who had little things like agriculture and good manners, and who despite their name did not live anywhere even remotely near the sea. Of course, Nagel’s narration vanishes about ten minutes into the film and never tells us anything we couldn’t have figured-out for ourselves, but then I guess that’s a small price to pay for the following screencap:

Robert Mitchum Conrad Nagel with pipe.

Anyway, we begin with the Rock tribe, who are just about the most savage savages you could ever care to meet. Their language consists of about four words, their concept of compassion is non-existent (when an old dude falls of a cliff they just sort of roll with it), and the pinnacle of their technological evolution is the realisation that, if you hit an animal many times with a large stick, eventually that animal will stop biting you and you will be able to bite it instead. The chief of the Rock tribe is Akoba (an unrecognisable pre-stardom Lon Chaney, Jr.) and he’s a big mean bastard at that. He yells; he screams; he tapes-over the VHS cassettes of others; and when dinner time comes around he takes a lump of triceratops ten times larger than anyone else’s. When that doesn’t satisfy him, he then tries to steal the food of his only son Tumak (Victor Mature). Tumak is having none of that, mind, and things soon escalate into a full-blown battle for alpha male status. Tumak is a tough one but Akoba has some bite in him yet, and the old guy kicks his son’s butt right out the cave mouth and into the waiting arms of homelessness.

Exiled, Tumak is left to fend for himself, and must wander out alone into the harsh, monster-haunted wilderness of the Hollywood Dreamtime. He somehow ends-up drifting down a river in a tangle of branches, and before long he washes-up asleep at the feet of Loana (Carole Landis), daughter of the chief of the aforementioned Shell tribe. The Shell tribe are a magnanimous lot, and despite the fact that Tumak is clearly bad news they agree to take the young man under their wing. Things go along a bit rough for a while, what with Tumak’s homicidal rage and complete lack of social graces, but slowly a process of cultural exchange occurs. The Shell tribe gradually acquaint Tumak with such concepts as individual property ownership, comedy, and the right to freedom from oppression, while Tumak in turn uses his great strength to shake apples from a tree and beat-up a truly ridiculous man-sized marauding theropod (in a movie chock full of goofy things, this may well be the goofiest – so silly is it, in fact, that the film makers never even show it in full profile, which is a pity as it makes it impossible for me to get screen caps of the thing). Aided by Loana, who has taken a quasi-romantic interest in him, Tumak begins to soften gradually, and becomes valued member of the tribe.

Unfortunately, not all of Tumak’s old habits can be broken. When Loana’s former beau Ohtao (who, interestingly, shows no ill will towards Tumak at all), shows the newcomer one of his fancy newfangled shell-tipped spears, Tumak is naturally enthralled. But try as he might, he can’t quite get his head around the idea that, instead of just stealing Ohtao’s spear, he should get off his arse and make one himself. What’s worse, when Ohtao tries to reclaim his spear Tumak just about makes to kill him, and he’s only stopped by the timely intervention of the rest of the tribe. The chief, deciding that enough is enough, kicks Tumak out. Luckily for Tumak, Loana has by this point more or less fallen for him, and she decides to follow him (for whatever sick, twisted reason) out into the wilderness, braving ferocious dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals in the hopes of making it back to Tumak’s old tribe. I’m not sure what Tumak hoped to achieve by this, honestly – I guess he just planned to try and beat Akoba up again (because it worked-out so well for him the first time, after all). In any case, the question has been rendered moot by events back at Rock City during the course of Tumak’s absence. You see, Akoba got himself messed-up pretty bad during a dangle with a bison one afternoon, and now that he’s a sickly old cripple a new guy has taken-over as king of the Rock tribe. Which might seem to pose just as big a problem, except that muscling-out a crippled old man is a hell of a lot easier than facing-off against a battle-hardened young Turk and his hot, frizzy-haired, spear-savvy new girlfriend. Pretty soon, Tumak is chief, and Loana is busily at work inventing the White Woman’s Burden and bringing civilisation to his brutish, furrier-frequenting new subjects. Things are just grand for all concerned, although that volcano in back of shot sure has an ominous cast...

I’m tempted to give One Million BC much more than its due. Released as it was in 1940, its proclamations about the savagery of the Rock tribe appear, almost unavoidably, to be a loud and angry cry against the evils of Global Fascism. That Hal Roach would decide to couch his parable on the evils of the “Might is Right” philosophy within a caveman movie where Victor Mature fights a giant armadillo is, needless to say, both a peculiar and an admirable choice of strategy, and his broad-strokes prehistoric morality play would have a strong impact on later films like Teenage Caveman and, God help us all, Yor, The Hunter from the Future. In addition to this, the movie looks great. The film obviously wasn’t a mega-budget affair, but the prehistoric world it portrays is, for all its inaccuracies, really cool to look at. The Rock tribe cave is dripping with Gothic menace, the desert landscapes are blasted and gigantean, and the jungles are impossibly lush and bestrewn with great tangles of vines and weird-looking pot plants. The acting, on the other hand, is never especially good, and in the opening prologue is actually outright ludicrous; but the actors playing cavemen all rise to meet the minimal challenge of this sort of old-timey matinee fair, and Carol Landis even manages to be good. Not good good, but caveman movie good, and certainly gives a better show than Raquel Welch would twenty-seven years later.

The jewels in the film’s crown, however, are its action scenes. Admittedly, Tumak’s fight with the man-in-suit theropod is pretty goofy, but the rest of the dinosaur fights in the film are much more convincingly portrayed. With stop-motion obviously beyond the production’s means, Roach decided instead to employ the somewhat more crude technique of using trick photography to allow real animals to stand-in for his dinosaurs – the special effects technicians dinosauring-up the baby alligators and goannas by gluing fins to their backs and horns onto their heads. Sometimes this looks silly, such as when a giant armadillo attacks Tumak and Loana as they hide in a tree, but the monitors look damned convincing, if not as dinosaurs, then as giant monitor lizards wandering around in the jungle (which, honestly, is just as scary a thought). The optical work in this film is truly beyond reproach. In the climatic scene, where the Shell tribe must be rescued from a marauding giant iguana, the animal really does look as though it’s moving through the landscape, and the characters’ interactions with it are perfectly convincing to boot.

Unfortunately (and I bet you knew this was coming) the use of real animals has a downside. It didn’t have to, mind, but that’s never stopped anyone before. You see, this is a dinosaur movie as much as a caveman movie, and in dinosaur movies the dinosaurs always fight. And what’s the easiest way to show a battle between a goanna and a crocodile? How about having them fight for real? As impressive and powerful as it is to consider in the abstract, watching a giant goanna have its throat torn-out becomes positively horrifying once you realise that it’s happening for real. And what’s worse, it’s not even an isolated incident. In this film, snakes get eaten alive by bears... iguanas are buried under rock piles... One Million BC is one of those films that make you realise just how long sixty years actually is. That the makers of this films stage such scenes without pausing to consider that, rather than being horrified by the carnage and savagery of the animals on display, the audience might instead be horrified by the production itself, is bizarre. Then again, Cannibal Holocaust was only thirty years ago, after all... Although perhaps the most bizarre thing is just how often the battling dinosaur footage got recycled in later, cheaper films. We’ll be meeting that poor old goanna a fair few times again before this blog is out. In any case, it’s a real pity that the producers took the path they did, since while the rest of film is nothing special it at least has a sort of goofy charm. It certainly problematises any positive opinion I may have of the film as a whole.

Before I finish-up, I suppose I should also tackle a couple of the “firsts” posed by this here film. After all, One Million BC may not be the first serious caveman movie (it apparently rips-off those old D.W. Griffith ones pretty heavily, which I can well believe given its rampant moralising), but it does seem to be the only one much available, and as a consequence it’s responsible for a lot of the clichés, does and don’ts of the genre. For example, here the film presents a typical good tribe/bad tribe scenario, except that here for once not all the good cave people are bottle-blondes. As another example, here we get another prominent example of that damned volcano that’s always just about to erupt. The interesting thing here, however, is that the volcano doesn’t erupt at the climax of the picture, but instead blows its top at the beginning of the last act. There’s a whole dang iguana attack waiting back of that thing. It makes sense, I suppose, since in this film the volcanic eruption causes fissures that sort of swallow-up all the dinosaurs, and then humanity has to move-on in a spirit of comradeship into a brighter, dinosaur-free tomorrow. However, in the opposite direction, the film is relatively free of sexploitative elements. Granted, Victor Mature shows a lot of skin, but only by the standards of 1940s mainstream cinema could this film ever be billed as deliberately titillative.

I’m No Scientist, But...

Three words: Giant Freaking Iguanas. When you’re dealing with shit like this rationalisation goes out the window. Observe:

Wag – Good sir! Mr Roach, old man! You do know, old bean, that human beings never cohabited with dinosaurs don’t you, wot wot?

Hal Roach – Yes, but what about giant freaking iguanas?

See? Pointless to argue.

What is funny, however, is the lengths to which the makers have gone to try and disguise the fact that they were making a fantasy film. They aren’t quite so brazen as Hammer were with the remake, the wonderful poster of which involved bikini-clad cave girls, dinosaurs and a volcano all brought together beneath the characteristically bombastic tagline “THIS IS THE WAY IT WAS!”, but having a guy in lederhosen receive a lecture of questionable accuracy from a beardy in a cavern runs a close second. I’m actually confused as to why this section was included, honestly. Maybe in 1940 audiences just weren’t ready to leap forth into a dialogue-free caveman fantasy without a bit of easing.

Anyway, leaving aside the obviously fantastical nature of the film, I do still take issue with the representation of the caveman language. All the humans in this film are just that – thoroughly modern Homo sapiens sapiens. Given that one expects that language would have developed to a fair degree of sophistication with the early species such as the cro magnons, Neanderthals, and other, earlier species of human, the fact that the caveman languages in this film consist of about ten words each is inexplicable and irritating. There isn’t even any sort of explanation behind why “misha” is a monster, or “akita!” means help. Given that the cavemen don’t even appear to have a grammar, expressing everything as they do in concrete, single-word statements, I’m not sure why they aren’t just communicating with a series of grunts and gestures. Why yell “Akita!” when a loud, panicked shout would suffice? Yes, I realise I’m complaining about a language not being dumb enough, but I don’t care. The laziness of the film makers, in cooking-up a few catch-cries so that their somewhat limited actors wouldn’t have to struggle with complex dialogue, is infuriating. Why the hell not just have them speak in English, anyway! Were they trying to be faithful to original text? Did they not want to loose poetic intricacies of such cavemanese statements as “Tumak! Loana Tumak! Loana Tumak grishu!” delivered with a thick American accent. Well, I personally consider Robert Fagles’ translation perfectly suitable for non-native speakers, even if some prefer Pope or E.V. Rieu, and I’m sure that Carol Landis was up to the challenger of delivering dialogue such as

“O valorous Tumak! You of the stern-wooded staff;

I, Loana, of the thick-ferned vale, do kneel to you

In the sweet slavery of my love. Now, Tumak, let us

Voyage this valley, let us brave the mighty serpents

Of the veldt, and in the bourn of your distant homeland

Shall we suckle the coming bounty of our young”.

(Fagles, R. 1986 – The Saga of Tumak, Prince of Rockland,[l. 2372-2373]).

In any case, the “mumbo jumbo” convention is a very peculiar one, and something that I’m not entirely sure I’m in favour of. I am, however, looking forward to the monkey-man language that Anthony Burgess cooked-up for Quest for Fire (which I intend to watch this week, if I remember to buy it); and I’ll also admit that it’s a great deal of fun, when alarmed by something, to be able to raise your arms in the air and shout “AKEEEEEEE-TA!” to the complete bemusement of your family and friends.

Over all:

Two McClures out of Five.

6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

Director: Rouben Mamoulian

Cast: Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart.

Caveman Quotient: A solitary specimen of uncharacteristic tenacity.

Analysis:

I’d like to apologise for my lateness. I really would. You see, I’d been looking forward to discussing today’s film for an awfully long time, and yet when its turn came around it caught me dragging feet and going off to do heinous things like reading novels. I guess sustaining interest in anything can be a trial, especially when one is compelled to remain riveted by an endless parade of mediocre caveman comedies. Thankfully, however, today’s film is not only largely a-comedic, but it manages to avoid being mediocre, too. In fact, I’d even go so far as to declare Paramount’s 1931 version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to be one of the finest horror films ever made.

Now, there’s a problem there. “Thomas,” you might well ask, “what the hell does The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have to do with cavemen?” The answer is of course “absolutely nothing”, but the film adaptation is a very different matter. In bringing R L Stevenson’s novella to the screen, Rouben Mamoulian and his team made some very bold changes to what was, even in 1931, becoming rather shop-worn material. Discarding Stevenson’s idea of a man trying to slough-off the evil in his soul, the film instead latches onto the modern perception of the Victorian condition and presents a Henry Jekyll who is seeking to escape the physical yearnings and selfish impulses of his base, animal nature. As a consequence, rather than Dr Jekyll’s exploration of the dual nature of man leading to a separation of the “evil” and the “good”, there instead occurs a separation of the “civilised” and the “primitive”, with Jekyll’s imbibing of his transformative potion causing him to degenerate into a hideous Neanderthal.


The choices made by Mamoulian’s film may, on the surface, appear sensationalist and exploitatively lurid. Not only are the spectacularly simian make-up effects and transformation scenes about as far from Stevenson’s novella as you could care to travel, but the entire film is centred around a theme of sexual repression that has almost no basis in the original book. In the novella, Jekyll is described as a bit of a stuffed-shirt, who was wild in his younger days, and who is now obviously trying to grapple with his desire for freedom of action in conflict against the buttoned-down nature of Victorian high society. As Stevenson himself pointed-out, the theme is hypocrisy, in that Jekyll desperately wants to appear a good person while at the same time being able to do every nasty thing he ever wanted. In the film, however, Dr. Jekyll is never really a hypocrite. Instead, he is a victim of his society – an idealist and philanthropist bordering on a saint who devotes a great deal of time to treating the poor in a free clinic that he runs, yet at the same time finds himself driven to distraction by the intense physical desire he feels for his betrothed, Muriel Carew. The crux of the problem is this – Muriel’ father the General is a self-absorbed prig, and insists that the couple must take each others hands on the same date that he and Muriel’ mother wed. The only problem being that doing so requires an agonising wait of eight long months. Given the battle between propriety and human nature that must be raging back and forth within Jekyll’s soul, it only makes sense that the poor guy would start to entertain notions about the duality of man (that he would be attempting to separate the base and civilised portions using a potion of his own devising in the hope of perhaps nullifying it is, admittedly, somewhat more peculiar - but then I guess it does make for a pretty cool story).

Matters are made worse when Jekyll, walking home one night, rescues a pretty young prostitute from a dispute with a John. The minute young Ivy gets a look at him, with his top-hat and cape and gentlemanly manner, she immediately realises that she could be on to a very good thing. She puts the charm on something extraordinary (the seduction scene displays frank sexuality and an erotic charge that must have had quite a few people worried even in those pre-Code times), and it looks as though Jekyll might even succumb, only being “rescued” at the last minute by his friend the prudish Dr. Lanyon. The two men depart as Ivy’s bear leg sways back and forth in Jekyll’s mind like a pendulum, and Henry explains to his friend that repeats of this sort of business are exactly what he hopes to avoid by means of his “experiments”.

The final straw comes when Jekyll gets a little too caught-up in his experiements one night and temporarily transforms himself into a Neanderthal. As a consequence, he manages to almost miss a dinner-date with the Carews, and the General is so flustered that he decides to take Muriel away from Jekyll on a tour of France. She protests, but to no avail, and Jekyll is left alone and bored and thinking about a lot of things, sex chief among them. In the end he figures consequences be damned and decides to give his potion another try. He’s realised by this point that it won’t allow him to escape his baser impulses, but perhaps, with a little finesse, it might allow the good doctor to indulge them. And so once more he swallows his potion, clutches at his throat, and gasps in horror as his teeth lengthen, his skin grows dark and hairy, and he transforms into this:



Needless to say, this probably wasn’t what he had in mind when he started the project.

The Hyde in this version is a fascinating character. Rather than being a figure of pure evil, he is something far more sophisticated and psychologically intriguing – a bundle of atavistic impulse completely shorn of civilised convention. He does things not because he’s evil, but because he doesn’t know any better; it’s only gradually that Hyde grows more sophisticated in himself, developing the necessary emotional equipment to blossom into a heartless, vindictive savage. And so his first action upon transforming is not to go out and beat people up for no real reason, but to finally cut through all the societal red tape and get himself a little tail.

Obviously privy to Dr. Jekyll’s memories, Hyde tracks down Ivy, who is plying her trade in a sort of cabaret deal that suggests The Blue Angel crossed with an Old West saloon. A woman of the world, she sings the number “Anytime Ivy”, which could be considered her theme song of sorts, and when Hyde asks someone to bring her to him she comes without hesitation, secure in the woefully misguided belief that she can handle anything. Hyde - who is self-professedly no gentleman - paws her, makes a show of courting her with some champagne, and then proceeds to threaten her into accepting the unenviable position of his kept woman.

From here the film plays-out as you’d expect it too, with the noble Dr. Jekyll attempting to juggle the demands of his public life alongside Hyde’s relationship with poor old Ivy. Hyde’s relationship with Ivy is one of twisted sadism that is truly painful to behold. In these scenes, Frederic March’s performance is so convincing that it’s very, very difficult not to squirm. Ivy Pearson’s life is, in effect, a living hell. She can’t escape Hyde, for fear that if she goes to the police he’ll track her down and kill her, and there is every sign that her fears are fully justified. What this leaves her too, in the meantime, is a life in which she is kept caged-up like a performing animal which Hyde tortures for his amusement. The most painful of these scenes occurs when Hyde, alerted by a newspaper article that Muriel is returning to London, tells Ivy that he’ll be going away for a while – though he knows not how long. Unfortunately, Ivy makes the mistake of showing a barely discernible hint of relief at this news. Unfortunately, because Hyde, as a living personification of all that Jekyll has repressed, is as much a creature of self-loathing as of desire; and his actions are motivated as much by a yearning to lash-out at a world which he hates, and which hates him in return. And so Hyde proceeds to wheedle Ivy... Do you hate me? No? Then you must love me! If you love me, you must be happy! Why don’t you show it? Why don’t you dance, and sing! Sing for me, damn you! And so he forces her to sing, and so Ivy sings. “Anytime Ivy”, to be exact. And only then, as Ivy lies broken and weeping on the bed, does Hyde proceed to rape her.

It is from this point that Jekyll attempts to reassert himself, swearing-off of Hyde and attempting to make amends with Ivy by sending her some cash. Of course, it’s all woefully inadequate and largely ineffectual. What Hyde fails to realise is that, by this point, he is no longer merely indulging his impulses and has now become a slave to them. That it was Hyde doing all those horrible things to Ivy doesn’t change the fact that Jekyll is the one who knowingly and willingly let Hyde out. In the end, Hyde reasserts himself again and again, potion be damned, and the results are just as disastrous and one would expect.

There are a lot of very good things about this film, but the two most obvious are Rouben Mamoulian’s direction and Fredric March’s captivating performance. The transfer to talking pictures from silent films was not a smooth one, and many directors were plainly baffled by how to balance things like fluid camera work and interesting visual story-telling against the demands of dialogue and sound recording. Many played it safe and let the actors do the work, and as a result many early talkies wind-up looking like nothing but nicely-lit stage plays. Mamoulian, however, had twin backgrounds in both stage direction and silent films, and as a consequence he had a much better idea of how to merge the elaborate direction and cinematography of the silent era with effect utilisation of sound. (He also appears to have been a bit of an arty tinkerer, and that never hurts either). For this film, he went all-out, employing everything from split-screens and double exposures to overlapping dialogue and elaborately-constructed hallucination sequences, all aimed at heightening the apparent subjectivity of the film. He announces his intentions in bombastic fashion in the very first moments of the film, opening with a first person tracking shot that follows Jekyll from his organ, where he is playing the “Toccata & Fugue in D Minor”, past the mirror where he checks his tie, and on a carriage ride all the way to the local institute where a lecture hall of medical students await him. The whole thing plays-out with no cuts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more audacious opening for a film of this vintage. It’s also brilliant in that it sets a precedent which allows Mamoulian to cut back to shots from various characters’ perspective throughout the film without the audience being jarred by the transition. Equally attention-getting are the special effects - during Hyde's transformation scenes, a series of coloured filters were removed from the studio lights, the absence of each allowing a new layer of Fredric March's makeup to show on camera. The result is that Jekyll appears to transform into Hyde before your very eyes.

March, for his part, is every bit the match of his director. While a bit stiff in the guise of Jekyll, this is obviously a deliberate strategy on the film’s part. Once transformed into Hyde March is not only physically unrecognisable, but his voice, actions and mannerisms are all so perfectly peculiar and inhuman that it really does seem as though he were being played by a different actor. Everything, from facial twitches and his strange, jerky way of moving to the fact that he carries himself so as to actually appear to have diminished in size, is perfect. And the joy he takes in his role. From his first appearance, staring into a mirror and crying out "Free at last!", Hyde looks like just about the happiest man to have ever walked the Earth. Watching the film, it doesn’t seem possible that it could have worked with anyone else in the role – which probably explains why it didn’t work when MGM decided to produce its pointless and slavish remake ten years later. Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner? It sounds like a good cast, true, but aside from a typically good performance by Bergman nothing ever really seems to gel.

Before wrapping-up this confused and painful overview, I should probably also mention the female leads. Rose Hobart doesn’t get all that much to do, but she manages a fine job of selling Muriel Carew as a considerate young woman torn between duty to her father and her own desires for independence and romantic love. It also helps that she has fine chemistry with March, and that they are always believable as lovers (there’s also a nice touch, in that both Jekyll and Muriel are shown to vent their passions for one another through thoroughly melodramatic displays of piano-playing). It’s a rare pleasure to see a “good girl” role that actually generates sympathy and interest.

However, the real honour here goes to Miriam Hopkins who, as “bad girl” Ivy, does excellent service to a wonderfully meaty part. An interesting thing about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is that the film doesn’t really have any villains, only victims of unfortunate circumstance. True, Jekyll does unleash Hyde, ut at first he has no real knowledge of what will occur, and his gradual complicity is ofset by his genuine attempt to make amends. Similarly, Ivy, despite being a prostitute, is never real punished for her sensuality. It’s true that she does meet an unfortunate end, but it’s clear throughout that we are merely supposed to pity the poor girl for having attracted the attention of Hyde - and it is the combination of pitifulness and maturity that Hopkins brings to the role which really makes it work. The scene in which she first attempts to seduce Jekyll is played without a hint of condemnation, and Lanyon, who interrupts the two, is presented throughout the film as a pompous, condescending, overly moralistic prig. The only element of complicity that Ivy could be said to have in her demise is that she overestimates herself considerably in accepting Hyde’s invitation to come drink with her. And, given that she probably didn’t expect to meet a sociopathic ape-man, she can be forgiven this.

In the end, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not a subtle film; but it is a complex and beautifully-made one. There is a genuinely tragic element, and while it may rob to novella of some of its potent vagueness it does manage to provide a highly effective narrative and thematic framework in return. And what’s more, it serves-up scenes of skin-crawling horror and a compelling human drama while at the same time managing to provide a lucid commentary on a topic which, regrettably, remains relevant even in an age when naked chicks appear regularly on network television. It's also rather comforting to find a film about a scientist tampering in God's domain in which the film is explicitly on the side of the tamperers, even as it admits that we may not be able to cope with what we find there.

Overall:



Four and a half cavemen out of five.