The Ape Man (1943)

Bela Bangs a Bonobo for Science!

The Ape Man (1943)
Directed by: William Beaudine
Written by: Karl Brown, Barney A. Sarecky

Tagline: “No one is safe from the cruel desires of this inhuman fiend!”

Agatha Brewster, world famous ghostbuster, arrives in New York after clinching the Whistler’s Mother Look-Alike Contest, and is met by the winner of the annual Neville Chamberlain Separated-At-Birth Competition. Neville reports that her brother, James Brewster (Bela Lugosi) has conducted weird experiments upon himself, and warns Agatha (whose Mid-Atlantic accent suggests she wandered away from Budapest at an early age and was raised in the woods by a pack of wild Margaret Dumonts) to prepare herself for a shock: Bela has transformed himself into a monster!

Meanwhile, a mysterious figure lurks in the shadows. Tall, skeletal, with a pencil-thin mustache and a porkpie hat, he combines the sinister aspect of the Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu with the fashion sense of Eb from Green Acres.

Arriving at Brewster Manor, Neville slides back a secret panel in the laboratory and reveals Bela, asleep in a cage, his limbs tenderly entwined around a gorilla. Noticing the sister’s horrified expression, the great ape coughs discreetly and nudges Bela, his hurt, plaintive eyes seeming to say, “I thought you told your family about us.”

As he turns toward the camera, we see that Bela has hideously transformed himself into an Amish farmer! With a bushy beard, but no mustache, and a hair-piece shaped like a bike helmet, Bela’s appearance suggests the results of cold fusion between Abraham Lincoln and Curious George.

People forget that Bela was a classically trained theatre actor, but look at his movement and body work. Note how his fingers are folded over themselves, rather than over the palm (great apes can’t form a fist), and how he’s made his thumbs look almost non-opposable. The yak hair isn’t doing ALL the work here, people!

The only thing that can return him to normal is an Epi-Lady, but they haven’t been invented yet. So Bela falls back on an old Mad Science favorite, and starts coveting spinal fluid. Unfortunately, none of his selfish friends will let him drain their backbones, and Bela, in a fit of animalistic rage, flings beakers and test tubes at the wall, then flings his own feces at a family of Canadian tourists when they try to snap his picture.

Whistler’s Sister gasps, “James, are you mad?” Considering he’s spent the last three months injecting himself with “ape fluid,” Bela sensibly regards this question as rhetorical.

Later, giggling like a pair of 12-year olds, Bela and his gorilla sneak over to Neville’s house to soap his windows, TP his shrubs, and steal his butler’s spinal fluid. The injection proves a success: Bela still looks like C. Everett Koop wearing Ted Danson’s toupee from Cheers, but he can now straighten his back. Alas, the effect is only temporary, and Bela takes to the needle like Kurt Cobain; within days he’s hooked. Strung out. Got a monkey on his back.

He and the gorilla go on a killing spree, tapping the townsfolk for their spinal fluid like it’s maple syrup season in Vermont.

Meanwhile, the mysterious specter from the first scene has returned, and is peering through the laboratory window. His wraith-like form and delicate, spidery hands strike fear in our hearts. His luminous, hypnotic eyes recall the evil mesmerist in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, while his turned-up hat-brim and chuckle-headed drawl conjure a chilling image of Goober from The Andy Griffith Show.

Bela prepares to visit Neville Chamberlain again, perhaps hoping to siphon his pool boy for a quart, but Whistler’s Sister won’t let him leave the house until he’s been groomed for nits. In a rage, Bela strangles his sister, crushing her windpipe and letting her lifeless body slip to the cold dungeon floor before fleeing into the night.

But like a defiant kid who refuses to fall down when he’s killed fair and square in a game of Cowboys and Indians, Whistler’s Sister leaps to her feet the instant Bela leaves and starts performing step aerobics. Then she runs a 10K over to Neville’s house, but is nabbed by the cops before she can finish the biking and swimming legs of the Ironman Triathlon.

Meanwhile, Bela has called upon his old colleague with a request that he shoot him up. But Neville refuses, unwilling to implicate himself in murder, and because the needle-tracks around Bela’s hairy coccyx are really starting to gross him out. So Bela strangles Neville too, but lacking the manic athleticism of an elderly spinster, Neville takes the hint and actually dies.

Bela goes home and discovers a newspaper reporter and a plucky girl photographer sneaking around his house. Naturally, he starts sneaking around after them, and pretty soon everyone is sneaking around after everyone else, creeping so slowly in and out of doors that it looks like a Feydeau farce performed by a cast of ground sloths.

Suddenly, Bela realizes the girl is blonde, and he’s dressed like an ape. He picks her up and carries her off, struggling mightily not to drop her or smack her head against a piece of furniture as he lopes awkwardly around the tiny set. At this point, the audience’s sympathy shifts decisively to the hideously deformed and half-demented Dr. Brewster. True, he’s a serial killer, and he’s involved in an unsavory domestic partnership with a primate. But at least—unlike the director—he’s never forced an elderly morphine addict to risk a hernia.

Bela and the blonde perform the Forbidden Dance. The gorilla, in a jealous rage, breaks free and basically does to Bela what Eric Roberts did to Mariel Hemingway at the end of Star 80.

“…and I want my records back! And all those mix tapes I made you!”

Think the movie’s over? You wish. In a touch worthy of Pirandello, the skinny lurker pops up and finally introduces himself. “I’m the author of the story,” he says. Then he leaves us with an insoluble existential riddle by asking: “Screwy, wasn’t it?”

Well...yes. With an aging Hungarian ham made up to resemble a Mennonite and loping around a sound stage like Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, this does appear to reach the generally accepted threshold of “screwy.” But what I’ll remember most from the film is how they wrote a character into the script, hired an actor, and filmed him skulking around the sets, just for that one lousy joke. Because I gotta wonder why. The movie itself—while funny to me—clearly doesn’t mean to be, so I’m thinking this radical shift in tone is just evidence of a bad conscience. The filmmakers knew their thriller was thrills-free, but instead of taking their lumps, they did what today’s online edge lords do when their edge lording fails to land: log off with a petulant “j/k”.

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