The Gorilla (Allan Dwan, 1939)

The Gorilla is a creaky bit of nonsense and a painfully old-fashioned throwback to a trend that had run its course by the early '30s (the gorilla-suit murder mystery in a fancy old house with secret panels — yes, this was a thing), but the excellent cast of character actors in front of the camera and talented journeyman director behind it make the film bearable. They can't transform it into something it's not (and three members of the cast unsuccessfully tried to get out of doing the movie), but at least they give it a little pizzazz and some of the ol' razzle dazzle. It would have been a real slog with a less personality-filled creative team.

Powerful producer and studio exec (and fellow Nebraska native) Darryl Zanuck bought the rights to the 1925 play The Gorilla, which was a bit of an odd choice for 1939, when the gorilla-suit fad on stage and screen had mostly dried up. Zanuck thought the film would make a good vehicle for comedy team the Ritz Brothers, who did not share his opinion. When production was delayed due to the death of the Ritz Brothers' father, the Ritzes decided to stay away indefinitely as an act of protest against the inferior material. The studio, Fox, responded with an expensive lawsuit, and the Ritzes reluctantly rejoined the production.

This was my first exposure to the Ritz Brothers (Harry, Al, and Jimmy) aside from a few brief cameos in later movies, so I don't want to judge them based on a project they didn't want to do. They were enormously influential on other comedians and had a long career in vaudeville, nightclubs, movies, and television, but their performances in The Gorilla didn't do much for me. I laughed at one joke, but every other bit, gag, or one-liner was stale and tired. The Ritzes are often compared to the Marx Brothers, but aside from the superficial similarities (Jewish siblings from the East Coast working in vaudeville, stage, screen, and TV in the same decades), their style, at least in this movie, is closer to a more subdued Three Stooges, and who wants their Stooges subdued? One Ritz brother (Harry?) is also fond of the rubber face bit that Jerry Lewis and young people on TikTok would pick up years later.

Fortunately, we also get a smorgasbord of great character actors in addition to the Ritzes. Bela Lugosi, Patsy Kelly, Lionel Atwill, Joseph Calleia, and Wally Vernon inject charisma, actual humor, and personality into the stale material. (We also get the milquetoast young engaged couple, filling the usual roles of blonde damsel in distress and uber-Caucasian snooze telling his future wife she's imagining everything, boringly played here by Anita Louise and Edward Norris. Why is a variation of this couple in nearly every '30s ensemble movie?) Lugosi and Kelly are much funnier than the Ritzes here, and they don't have to carry the burden of being the comic relief. Director Dwan, a skilled Hollywood craftsman, can't do much about the material, but he makes the mostly single-setting movie look like a movie instead of a play, even when he keeps the camera still. I recently watched a later Dwan film, Slightly Scarlet, an arty and luridly pulpy color noir, and I recommend you skip The Gorilla and watch that one instead if you'd like an introduction to Dwan.

The Gorilla opens with housekeeper Kitty (Kelly) finishing her copy of Romeo and Juliet in bed and settling in for a night's sleep. She's interrupted by the arm of a gorilla reaching into her window and pinning a note on her nightgown. She unsurprisingly freaks the eff out and rouses the butler Peters (Lugosi) and the owner of the home, wealthy businessman Walter (Atwill). They give her the business about dreaming the whole thing until they see the note, which gives Walter 24 hours to live and is signed "The Gorilla." Walter starts mildly freaking, because The Gorilla is a master criminal who has committed a series of murders in the area while wearing a gorilla suit. Criminals loved to wear gorilla suits in '20s plays and '20s and early '30s movies. I wish this trend had caught on with actual criminals, but, alas, we just got a bunch of mediocre plays and movies about guys in gorilla suits.

Unbeknownst to everyone except Walter and the audience, Walter may not be as wealthy as he appears. Besides the gorilla business, he owes a quarter of a million dollars to some other business jerk and is having trouble repaying the debt. He makes an emergency call to his milquetoast niece Norma (Louise) who arrives with her milquetoast fiancé Jack (Norris). They're a milquetoast snooze, as I may have already mentioned, but the important detail here is that Norma's rich mother died years earlier and left half her fortune to Walter and half to Norma, with the condition that Norma gets whatever's left once she marries, unless she's dead, in which case it all goes to Walter.

Meanwhile, instead of informing the police about the murder threat, Walter hires a trio of detectives to catch The Gorilla and keep him from being murdered. These three detectives are bumbling idiots named Garrity, Harrigan, and Mulligan (the Ritzes). I know the movie is a mystery-horror-comedy involving gorilla suits, but Walter's employment of these goofballs is one suspension of disbelief too far. Hiring one idiot? Maybe. Hiring three idiots at once? Shame on you. Then again, Walter built a house with about seventeen dozen secret panels even though he's a legit businessman, so he's clearly a weird guy.

Anyway, people keep disappearing and reappearing after accidental and/or purposeful secret panel biz, Peters does a bunch of weird stuff, a mysterious stranger (Calleia) shows up and starts poking around the house, and an actual gorilla named Poe enters the mix, meaning we have a guy in a gorilla suit and a straight-up gorilla causing mayhem, pandemonium, and chaos. (The real gorilla, unfortunately, is also a guy in a gorilla suit, though he's an actor pretending to be a gorilla, which separates him from The Gorilla, who is an actor in a gorilla suit pretending to be a criminal in a gorilla suit. Got it?)

The real gorilla's trainer, Seaman (Vernon), is discovered unconscious in a closet. When he comes to, he's frantic to find the gorilla, especially before it discovers Kitty and Norma, because, he says, the gorilla does not like women. Ummm, problematic much? Hashtag cancel that misogynistic gorilla. We get a great line here from Kitty when Seaman warns her that "Poe hates women": "So does Kipling. So what?"

The usual gorilla-suit rubber-face secret-panel slapstick hullaballoo ensues, until the confusing climax, when roughly seventeen plot twists occur in a minute or two and a needlessly complicated plan is unsatisfactorily explained, followed by closing credits. I had more fun watching this than I've ever had sitting through a Christopher Nolan movie (okay, I liked Memento), but I don't think anyone has a compelling reason to sit through this movie unless some weirdo makes you do it at gunpoint. It's not good, it's not awful, Lugosi and Kelly are fun, enough with the gorilla suits already.