The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler, 1941)

Probably the only courtroom drama/film noir/mad scientist sci-fi/ape-running-amok horror movie/revenge thriller, The Monster and the Girl is a wild surprise, a schizophrenically genre-switching, narratively berserk, but tonally consistent little gem with strong performances, great character actor faces, and real feeling. It's definitely shooting to the top of my ape-running-amok list, and not just because it was withdrawn from theaters in Milwaukee by the city's film commission (for its depiction of "white slavery" and its implied criticism of the justice system).

The Monster and the Girl begins, after a fog-drenched, expressionist intro directed straight at the audience, in a courtroom, where Scot Webster (Phillip Terry) is being tried for the  murder of a man in a downtown hotel. (The movie never mentions what city we're in, but the sets look an awful lot like a Hollywoodized version of Manhattan.) Scot maintains his innocence but has no proof or witnesses, he's hesitant to say much of anything about why he was in the hotel or what he was up to, and he was discovered kneeling over the dead man and holding the gun. Scot's sister Susan (Ellen Drew) shows up and demands to be heard as a witness, much to everyone's surprise. The judge allows it despite the defense attorney's objections. Meanwhile, the camera picks out several shady characters sitting in the courtroom who take great interest in the case and keep sending not-so-subtle signals to each other.

The film's first half alternates the courtroom drama with flashback sequences tied to Scot's and Susan's testimonies, which tell a darkly tragic crime story in classic film noir style with classic film noir faces. Those faces belong to actors who are not top-of-marquee names, but if you're a classic Hollywood fan, you've seen them do excellent work in lots of memorable roles. Besides the aforementioned Drew (Preston Sturges' Christmas in July, Sam Fuller's The Baron of Arizona, Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, and Andre de Toth's Man in the Saddle) and Terry (Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and Robert Wise's Born to Kill), we get Joseph Calleia (W.S. Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, Allan Dwan's The Gorilla, Heisler's The Glass Key, Charles Vidor's Gilda, Douglas Sirk's Lured, Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood, and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), Marc Lawrence (Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire, William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, John Huston's Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, John Hayes' Dream No Evil, John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, Jim McBride's The Big Easy, Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, and Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action), Gerald Mohr (Vidor's Gilda, William Wyler's Detective Story, Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper, and Jerry Lewis' The Family Jewels), George Zucco (Van Dyke's After the Thin Man, William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Elliott Nugent's The Cat and the Canary, Christy Cabanne's The Mummy's Hand, Sirk's Lured, and Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate), and Rod Cameron (Sturges' Christmas in July, Edward Ludwig's The Gun Hawk, and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie). Sorry, I went credits-crazy there.

Back to the flashbacks. Scot and Susan are very close (it's implied that their parents are long gone and that they took care of each other), but while Scot is happy in the small town working at the post office and playing organ in the church, Susan has bigger dreams that only the Big City can fulfill. Bored and stifled in the small town, she gets her big brother's blessing to strike out on her own. In the movie's only bit of (restrained) moralizing, Susan finds out the city is no place for a young, single woman. She struggles to find work, and, after meeting a seemingly kind man named Larry Reed (Robert Paige) at the unemployment office, falling in love, and quickly getting married, she wakes up to a living nightmare. The relationship and marriage ceremony were both scams, designed to trap her (and presumably plenty of other naive young women on their own) in the permanent servitude of a gangster/sex-trafficker pimp (that part is heavily implied but never spelled out in any dialogue because it's post-Code Hollywood) named W. S. Bruhl (Paul Lukas) and his henchmen Deacon (Calleia), Sleeper (Lawrence), Munn (Mohr), and fake husband Larry. These guys all have such menacing, character-filled faces.

When Scot finds out what happened to his sister, he hits the big city looking for revenge. The gangsters frame him for murder, corrupt district attorney McMasters (Onslow Stevens) prosecutes him, and the possibly tampered-with jury convicts, despite Susan's testimony. Scot is sentenced to death. Susan is devastated and hopeless. The only person who believes her and Scot is newspaper reporter Sam Daniels (Cameron).

This is where the movie turns on a dime and gets crazy as hell. An eccentric scientist, Dr. Parry (Zucco), visits Scot on Death Row and asks him if he can use his brain after he's executed. A defeated Scot laughs crazily and gives him permission. After the execution, Parry takes the freshly deceased Scot to his lab and transplants the brain into the body of an ape. You know, for science. Ape-Scot busts out of the lab, hits the streets, and begins a program of retribution against the gangster and his crew, beginning with the corrupt DA and ending with the jerk who pretended to fall in love with his sister. Along the way, he also re-befriends his and his sister's beloved dog Skipper, who recognizes the Scot-soul inside the ape and assists Scot in evading the police like some kind of revenge-loving Lassie. I love to see an ape with a human brain and a cute dog teaming up to kill gangster-pimps and avenge the honor of a woman wronged. This is cinema, baby. (Oddly, the last 1940s movie I reviewed on this site, Man Made Monster, also involved a cute dog recognizing his old buddy in monster form and rekindling the bond.)

If you've followed this site for any length of time, you've probably read one of my reviews about an ape-running-amok movie. This was a major craze in the '20s and early '30s, but the genre never quite died out completely. Usually, the movie involves a caged ape getting loose and tearing shit up or a guy in a gorilla suit killing people or scaring people off as part of some kind of money grift or inheritance scam. Most of these movies are not that great, and some of the gorilla suits are pretty damn unconvincing (though I hold a special place in my heart for cheap fx).

The Monster and the Girl, on the other hand, spends half the movie delivering a gripping courtroom drama and a classic film noir before throwing in the crazy mad scientist brain swap-eroo and ape rampage. You really care about these characters, you're hooked on the proceedings, and you can't wait to see these gangster/trafficker creeps get smushed. The ape-with-human-brain is a real character you're invested in, not just some goofball jumping around in a costume. And boy howdy, this production spent money on its ape suit, I tell you what. This thing looks convincing and has a real presence and a range of motion in the eyes and facial features.

Director Stuart Heisler was a film editor for many years before making the jump to directing, and you can see his understanding of structure, build, and juxtaposition in The Monster and the Girl. This could have easily been a schlocky b-movie lazily slapped together (which, let's be honest, I probably would have enjoyed), but so much care has been applied to putting this thing together, and everyone in front of and behind the camera is doing high quality work. It's such an odd movie, attempting such an odd thing, and it works ridiculously well. I loved it.