Return of the Ape Man
Entry updated 14 October 2024. Tagged: Film.
US film (1944). Banner Productions. Directed by Philip Rosen. Written by Robert Charles. Cast includes Ernie Adams, Michael Ames, John Carradine, Mary Currier, Judith Gibson, Bela Lugosi, Frank Moran and George Zucco. Zucco, playing the ape man, fell ill during shooting and was replaced by Moran for most of the film. 60 minutes. Black and white.
A newspaper reports the disappearance of local tramp Willie the Weasel (Adams), last seen being driven away by two "distinguished looking gentlemen". Willie wakes up in a laboratory feeling cold, believing the pair of Scientists there had found him drunk on a park bench the previous night: they give him $5 and he departs happily. Professors Dexter (Lugosi) and Gilmore (Carradine) are delighted: for Willie had been frozen in sub-zero temperatures for four months and then – the point of the experiment – successfully revived (see Cryonics; Suspended Animation). Their next step is to do the same with someone frozen for a greater duration, so they undertake an Arctic expedition seeking prehistoric men (see Origin of Man) embedded in a glacier. It takes ten months, but eventually they find one. It is implied the body needs to have been frozen whilst alive, rather than as a corpse.
Back in the laboratory the body ("neither man nor ape") is unfrozen and injected with a serum: it works. Though the revived ape man (Moran/Zucco) is violent, Dexter cows then cages him by wielding the blow-torch used to melt the ice, then goes on to reveal the next step: to "transplant a segment of the brain of the present-day man into the skull of that pre-historic creature, endowing him with just enough understanding to make him obey my orders" (see Intelligence). When his colleague wonders why not replace the entire brain, he responds: "No, that would remove his entire connection with his former life – I must leave in him enough of his own brain to stimulate his memory." Gilmore acknowledges the wisdom of this "to vest him with the faculty of speech and slight reasoning power without disturbing the instincts and impulses of his former life". But he has concerns – extracting this brain segment would likely kill the donor, so it would be murder. Dexter: "Murder is an ugly word; as a scientist I don't recognize it."
Gilmore has to threaten Dexter with a gun to prevent him operating on a lawyer (Ames) he has drugged, and refuses to work with him any more. After the ape man briefly escapes and murders a policeman Dexter manages to lure Gilmore back to the laboratory with the promise that he will kill the ape man. It is a ploy: when Gilmore walks between two glowing tubes he is paralysed, enabling Dexter to bind him. An operation to remove part of his brain and transplant it into the ape man's is a success. "I have advanced his mind twenty thousand years in a few hours," Dexter boasts: the ape-man can speak, is calmer and thinks he is named Gilmore. However, he now runs off, making his way to Gilmore's house: here he plays Gilmore's favourite tune on the piano, throttles his wife (Currier), then returns to the laboratory. The police are following and repeatedly shoot the ape man as it strangles Dexter: the bullets have no effect, whilst with his dying breath Dexter tells the officers it can be killed with fire. The ape man goes back to Gilmore's house and abducts his niece (Gibson), then returns to the laboratory again (for some reason via a theatre) where he tears out some wiring, accidentally starting a fire which kills him; the niece is rescued by her fiancé, the lawyer mentioned earlier.
Whilst Dexter can be considered the Mad Scientist of the pair, the saner Gilmore – who we infer died from the operation – was nonetheless content to abduct and experiment on tramps; so, despite his later protestations, his ethical standards are not of the highest. Regardless of the title, the Return of the Ape Man is not connected by story or character to The Ape Man (1943), though Lugosi stars in both. Despite the opening and closing credits being run over an image of a gorilla in a cage, the title character is clearly a caveman not an ape man. With suspended animation, the grafting of brain segments onto another (see Medicine) and paralysing beams, the sf elements are central to the plot. Though the story is full of Scientific Errors, at one point it does look as though issues of Identity might be broached, with the personalities of Gilmore and the ape man in the same mind (see Psychology): but this does not get beyond the ape man playing some classical music on a piano then strangling his wife – and when asked why, he answers: "I didn't mean to." The absurd elements make this an enjoyably bad film for most of its length, though the laziness of the ending is disappointing. [SP]
links
previous versions of this entry