You may be noticing around now that I am a bit of a sucker for gorilla movies. There's something fascinating to me, in ways both good and bad, about the obsession movies had with gorillas over the first half of the 20th Century, in a way which I feel is unequaled today. Gorillas were an easy symbol of the exotic and the unknown, and for a while it seemed like it was almost a goddamn requirement to have a gorilla in your movie if it fit anywhere within the horror and mystery genres. People just couldn't get enough fucking gorillas.
Now, there are some relatively clear issues in this: using the gorilla as a shortcut for "the exotic" usually brings up complicated racial issues. In this case "the exotic" usually refers to Africa (though as we'll see in the decidedly odd House of Mystery Southern Asia was not immune), and there's a long history of black people being associated with apes and other subhuman hominids. Consider the fact that King Kong, the most famous "gorilla picture" of all time, wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for the release of Ingagi two years prior in 1931. Ingagi, as I've said often on this site, is a "documentary" about the mating habits of gorillas and...Africans. Yeppp, I still have...issues with that. Of course, King Kong isn't immune to racial criticism either--Kong kidnapping and sexually threatening a beautiful white woman, anyone? (To say nothing of the trampled villagers.) You'd better believe that some hideous thoughts were had in the heads of moviegoers when they saw these gorilla movies.
But by the early 1940s, it had gotten to the point where, as we've seen in The Gorilla Man, movies that didn't even have gorillas in them were trying to get in on the gig--mercifully freeing them from the uncomfortable racial elements in the process while also creating hilarious surprises for the unaware viewer. That failed setup is what makes this second category of "gorilla pictures" fun for me, just as the increasingly bizarre dalliances into Shitty Science in the actual gorilla pictures brings me to laughter. Human Gorilla was originally released under the title Behind Locked Doors, but the title card above indicates it must have seen release under the better title pretty early on. The film is not about any sort of actual gorilla, instead being a film noir about corruption in a local mental hospital.
Reporter Kathy Lawrence seeks out PI Ross Stewart to help her claim a $10,000 bounty put out on crooked Judge Finlay Drake. The caveat is that Drake is presently hiding out at a medical facility run by his friend Dr. Clifford Porter: La Siesta Mental Hospital. Stewart will have to disguise him as manic-depressive ex-salesman Harry Horton to get in, with Kathy playing his wife. It isn't long before he finds out that La Siesta is more like a prison, and a bad one at that--one with torture and abusive staff. Of course, when it's time for patients to disappear permanently, they're taken to the "Human Gorilla," a man named Champ--a crazed ex-prizefighter played by none other than a weirdly-young Tor Johnson! It isn't long before it's Stewart's time to face the Champ. With our plucky investigator escape the madhouse, or will he be caught in Tor's wheels of progress...?
One thing that I'm noticing fast in these film noir PI things is that a lot of them feature similar central leads--I've not read or watched my Hammett or Chandler, so I don't know the proper archetypes here, but I've seen quite a few movies where the PI is a happy-go-lucky obscure first-timer who has a lot of comic relief before he gets real serious on the case. And, of course, he usually ends up dating his female client at the end. This is the sort of stuff that the noir parodies I watched in my childhood took on. It's quite ripe for ripping apart.
I know I still haven't gotten around to Find the Blackmailer, but Ross Stewart is no D.L. Trees. When he's in "comic" "relief" mode, he's really, really creepy. Not even the fact that he's a pretty solid detective can make up for the fact that he is basically a step away from being a rapist. When Kathy proposes (no pun intended) to pose as husband and wife, after telling Ross about what the plan is, he backs her up against the wall and says, "Yes, and I'm always kissing you...publicly, privately, just all over the place." Seeing that written out gives it a double meaning that I really don't like. Then he goes on to add, "You could say I'm manic-depressive--beating you one minute and kissing you madly the next." They've known each other for less than thirty minutes. Add on the fact that Ross is so green that Kathy watches his name get painted on his office door, and there's no reason why she shouldn't just seek out some other detective. One thing that does bug me about these private eye movies is that they always say that they can't hire a detective whose face is known, but surely an experienced detective would a) know how to disguise themselves, and b) keep their identity on the down-low on a consistent basis to avoid this exact situation. I realize that's not perfect logic on my behalf, but I feel bad for these ladies who have to keep shelling out good money for idiots just because Dick Tracy keeps plastering his face everywhere.
Anyway. This movie has a lot of creepiness besides Ross Stewart, as manifested in Larson, Dr. Porter's abusive assistant. Larson takes care of most of the physical punishment around La Siesta, even though Porter gives him a limp admonishment not to harass the patients. Larson beats a man for screaming from nightmares, subjects the patients to long hours of hard unpaid labor, and make loud noises outside Tor Johnson's cell to make him have PTSD episodes. Worse, there's a third man around the hospital, Fred Hopps, who meekly accepts his place under Larson and Porter because his son is a patient at the institute, and Larson abuses the kid when Hopps misbehaves.
There are a lot of intriguing parallels and deviations between this movie and The Gorilla Man. In The Gorilla Man, suspense arises because we the audience know what Craig Killian is in for before he does; in Human Gorilla, we get our suspense from the fact that Stewart knows he should brace for the worst but we the audience don't know what's in that hospital. Both movies feature a bespectacled, psychopathically violent second banana to the main villain; both movies feature another servant of the main villain who is only working for them because they're holding their children hostage, who ends up helping the hero in the end. Both movies also feature the threat of gristly punishment for the imprisoned protagonist--in Human Gorilla transgressions are dealt with by Tor Johnson, while in Gorilla Man the threat is ending up in the operating theatre of Dr. Ferris.
In sum, Human Gorilla is a surprisingly wild ride in its 61-minute runtime, even if its "hero" is a despicable scumbag. It's great to see an early "performance" by Tor Johnson, and what's more is that it has a pretty good double feature to go with it if you can get your hands on a copy of Gorilla Man. It's a piece of solid noir, with a lot of fun twists along the way. Try it!
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