Minor Horror #02-1: The Monster and the Girl

This is the first in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post from last year, when I first did this.

The Monster and the Girl (Stuart Heisler, 1941)

The Monster and the Girl is a 67-minute B-movie from the early forties about a killer ape going on a rampage. It is both aesthetically refined and dramatically compelling, which is very strange for a B-movie from the early forties about a killer ape going on a rampage. It’s not what’s supposed to happen. It’s not how movies like this are supposed to work. True, it isn’t the most refined or the most compelling film of the era. It is not quite, say, Citizen Kane. But it is the work of people who, at every step of the process, seem to have thought seriously about how to make a killer ape movie actually work, not as cheap program-filler, but as something audiences will be drawn into, and might not forget as soon as they leave the theater. Realistically, given how marginal its reputation is today, most of its audience still probably experienced the picture as simply what was on while they smooched with their sweetie, etc., which makes the level of commitment demonstrated, if anything, all the more remarkable. No one expects much from a movie like this – but, if they had cared to notice, they would have found they’d gotten quite a bit anyway.

I think a big part of why The Monster and the Girl has continued to fly as under the radar as it has is the sort of hobbyist auteurists who are by far the most likely to be interested in checking out forgotten contract pictures from before the A-bomb won’t, on a cursory inspection, find much to be interested in here. Stuart “Stoops” Heisler was a competent, professional director who handled a couple dozen movies you probably haven’t heard of and many more episodes of TV, mostly westerns like Rawhide. His is not the sort of oeuvre which is likely to draw the attention of those looking for “the personal touch,” to put it gently. Similarly, Stuart Anthony, the film’s writer, was a workhorse who racked up script credits for forty-odd movies in thirteen years – most of them, again, ones you probably haven’t heard of. The Monster and the Girl, somewhat notably, comes almost at the very end of this career; he died in April 1942, at the age of 51. As I’ve said, it’s an unusually good script, certainly a cut above the sort of rote material that was the norm for this sort of production, but the only way you’re going to discover this is by actually watching the movie. Like Heisler, he was a competent professional who no doubt led a rich and meaningful life – but, again, his name in the credits doesn’t suggest much. If one digs a little deeper, though, signs begin to appear that this could be something out of the ordinary. First, it was produced by Jack Moss, who also produced (and who, according to this Wellesnet piece, possibly bears responsibility for “ruining”) The Magnificent Ambersons, meaning this movie is not quite as far from Citizen Kane as one might have first assumed. Moss was also a stage magician, and tried to be a lot of other things with varying degrees of success, so his involvement here isn’t exactly a seal of quality – but it is interesting, a real indication that there might be something here, so to speak. What really does it, though, is noticing that it was shot by Victor Milner, with Haldane Douglas and Hans Dreier on art direction. Milner shot It’s a Wonderful Life, The Lady Eve, DeMille’s Cleopatra, and a whole slew of other capital-M Major Motion Pictures, including several major Lubitsch works (Trouble in Paradise, Broken Lullaby, Design for Living) which also featured art direction by Dreier, who, after being convinced by Lubitsch to emigrate from Germany in the early twenties, served as Paramount’s supervising art director for more than thirty years, playing a crucial role in pretty much every masterpiece the studio produced in that period, and winning multiple Academy Awards.

Dreier’s involvement with The Monster and the Girl was, I suspect, probably fairly minor, given he’s second-billed behind regular Heisler collaborator Douglas – as supervisor, Dreier was presumably involved in pretty much everything the studio was putting out at this time, after all. The same, however, cannot be said of Milner. This was his show, and he, I think, is the key. He’s what makes the difference. If you, like me, are the sort of freak who’s watched enough “guy in an ape suit” movies from this era to have some idea of what they’re like, you will know they tend towards plain, unfussy wide and medium shots where all the necessary characters get together on a flatly lit backlot set and do quips and exposition at each other until the movie is long enough to count as a feature. Occasionally the ape shows up and there’s some screaming, or a ritual is performed, or an experiment is conducted, but mostly it’s just mediocre actors sleepwalking through a lot of tedium. It is as bland and affectless a form as you can imagine, a mode of filmmaking characterized by a degree of pragmatism and shooting-schedule efficiency which enabled the Sam Newfields and Jean Yarboroughs of the world were able, in some years, to churn out a new movie every couple of months. This is how these ape movies are supposed to look. It’s how everyone expects them to look. But this is not how The Monster and the Girl looks, because it’s not how Vincent Milner works. He works with elegant tracking shots, precise blockings, meaningful shadows. He is, as his record shows clearly, more than simply competent – and the difference this makes is immediately and strikingly obvious.

Watching The Monster and the Girl, you might initially think you’ve put on the wrong movie, that there’s been some sort of mix-up somewhere. The entire first half of this movie, give or take, has no ape antics whatsoever – instead, we get a courtroom drama in miniature, and an abnormally bitter, nasty one at that, a miscarriage of justice story in which some mobsters force a naive small-town girl into prostitution, and then frame her brother for murder when he comes to rescue her. This aspect of the narrative is, itself, pretty unusual, pushing right up against the boundaries of what the Hays Code would permit – the nature of the girl’s “profession,” for example, is communicated entirely via her black clothes and pregnant silence when asked how she makes her living. The kids won’t get it, but everyone else does. It’s also unusual in that it depicts the justice system failing completely, unambiguously, and irrevocably, condemning an innocent man to death and then going ahead and executing him. We are used to a last minute reversal, a miraculous exoneration, but it’s clear there will be none here. Before the fated hour arrives, though, there is another scene. The man sits motionless in a jail cell, face fractured by the bars. He gets a strange visitor: a Doctor with a European accent, who wants to use his brain for medical research, more precisely for an experiment in transplantation. Up until this moment, we have been in what is, essentially, an abnormally grim and cynical noir, with a wrongly-accused hero facing seemingly certain doom and a rouge’s gallery of loathsome, smirking villains eagerly awaiting it. But then this Doctor steps out of the shadows, and it becomes clear that, yes, this is really another movie entirely, the one we thought we were getting from the beginning – except not really, because in the beginning we did not imagine there would be a way to give a killer ape a motivation and a hit list, and, more than that, a motivation that we find emotionally compelling, and a hit list of men we really, seriously want to see dead.

Aside from the strong script, superior cinematography, confident direction, and committed performances across the board, it’s worth noting, also, that in The Monster and the Girl can be found one of the very best ape suits of the pre-2001 era. It’s not that it’s “convincing,” but rather that it is not quite convincing, and Charles Gemora, the man in the suit and its designer, known to some as “The King of the Gorilla Men” for his accomplishments in this specialized domain, understands how to leverage this uncanny not-realness to sell a deeper emotional reality, not a physical verisimilitude but a poetic one. The suit’s face is capable of only so great a range of expressions, yes, but consider this: in the theatre of Ancient Greece, at the dawn of what we know as Drama, actors commonly wore masks that covered their entire head. And those masks did not move at all.