The Streaming Hell column is generally deployed for the worst genre pictures that our staff has unearthed — and been able to sit through, more than likely with clenched jaws and/or eyes propped open like something out of A Clockwork Orange. One totally expects to find this category of cinematic masochism to include plenty of examples from the subgenre of gorilla suit movies. But imagine what it was like for the guy in the suit? One such unsung hirsute actor was the Filipino immigrant Charles Gemora, a makeup artist whose designs include Marlene Dietrich’s dress ape in Blonde Venus and who frequently appeared on screen himself—in disguise. His many roles were for the most part uncredited, but he featured in such classics as Murders in the Rue Morgue and the Marx Brothers vehicle At the Circus, as well as snoozes like White Witch Doctor, which despite a supporting role from staff fave Timothy Carey, was screened for this column but dismissed as both too boring and not hellish enough. It seems like at least purgatory for an actor to give an improbably-great performance in the confines of a furry costume, and that was Gemora’s fate in the 1941 B-movie The Monster and the Girl, directed by Stuart Heisler. It’s an inexplicably good film that may have been hell to make.
Ellen Drew (perhaps best-known for the Preston Sturges comedy Christmas in July) stars as a troubled woman who as the movie begins is walking out of a soundstage fog, utterly defeated. With dramatic pauses that distantly recall Christopher Walken, she delivers a monologue worth repeating in its concise entirety: “I’m Susan. I’m a bad luck penny,” she says,” and bought a million dollars’ worth of trouble…for everybody! I reached for the stars so hard I didn’t look where I was walking. I wonder how things would be if…”
Much as she has been emotionally and physically devastated, Susan’s image dissolves to the close-up of a gavel banging in a courtroom, where her sad story unfolds like a hammer. Her brother Larry (Robert Paige) is on trial for murder in a complicated case that involves mistaken identity and sex trafficking (depicted quite boldly for the post-Hays code era). You see, Larry was trying to get his revenge on the hoods (including Joseph Calleia, Orson Welles’ Sancho Panza in Touch of Evil) that sold his sister into bondage. He’s innocent, but was set up! And that’s not even the wildest plot point.
Where, you might wonder, is the eponymous monster, who doesn’t make an appearance in the first half of this only 65-minute movie? Well you see, Larry is of course sentenced to death, but in a last-minute switch, a mad scientist decides to use his body for an experiment in which a human brain is transplanted — into a gorilla.
Enter Charles Gemora — uncredited, of course. The Monster’s final act follows Larry’s brain in a gorilla’s body, as one by one he stalks and kills the members of the gang that put him away. These murders are staged with variety and invention, some announced by a lumbering gorilla-shaped shadow approaching the victim, others built up to with a nourish gorilla-and-mouse chase in a dark alley.
You wouldn’t think a gorilla suit would give an actor much room for expressiveness, but the fuzzy face leaves enough room for facial movement to let Gemora convey, with his limited face and with gorilla-like body language, everything from passionate anger to tender regret. Did I mention Larry had a dog, Skipper? You see, Skipper recognizes his transformed master, and their interactions are probably the pinnacle of dogs interacting with people in gorilla suits in all of film history. Sure, you’re probably thinking, you can’t be serious? Is it possible that a Filipino in a gorilla suit can deliver a touching, even heart-wrenching performance? Charles Gemora did.
Read more about Gemora here, but take whatever you read about him with a grain of salt. As perhaps suits a man who plied his wares in fantastical creatures, his life seems particularly prone to embellishment. Whether the claims come from Gemora or from an enthusiastic myth-maker, the assertion that he invented push-up lipstick and tissue-in-a-box is at least unsubstantiated and in some cases clearly proven wrong. A 1931 Baltimore Sun article refers to him as Italian. His Washington Post obituary in 1961 asserts that Gemora donned a gorilla suit in King Kong—an iconic monster done with models. One wonders if that can be blamed on a relative pumping up the legend: “My kuya, he was the King Kong!” You can stream The Monster and the Girl on the Internet Archive, and it’s an entertaining hour. But it just scratches the surface of Gemora’s Hollywood exploits in the walking hell of a gorilla suit.
The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Monster and the Girl appeared first on Spectrum Culture.