Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again host a fundraiser for Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: HBD Bela Lugosi
If you ever wanted to know what happens when 20th Century-Fox tries desperately to buy a hit by throwing together a stage-play adaptation, a dead-broke production schedule, a guy in a monkey suit, and a trio of frantic vaudeville brothers who would rather be anywhere else on Earth, look no further than The Gorilla. Directed by Allan Dwan and clocking in as a lean, low-budget $175,000 B-movie, this 1939 slice of cinematic chaos takes Ralph Spence’s 1925 Broadway play and squeezes every drop of frantic, screaming, scenery-chewing juice out of it.
Wealthy businessman Walter Stevens (Lionel Atwill) receives a lovely little death threat from a mysterious criminal mastermind known as The Gorilla. Naturally, instead of calling the police, Stevens hires the bumbling Ritz Brothers—Garrity, Harrigan and Mulligan—as his private protection detail. As a violent thunderstorm rolls in and knocks out the mansion’s power, things get properly spooky. An actual escaped gorilla (played by Art Miles as “Poe,” presumably a cheeky nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue) is suddenly terrorizing the household. Toss in a creepy butler named Peters (played with magnificent tongue-in-cheek relish by Bela Lugosi, fresh off Son of Frankenstein) and a nervous, shrieking maid named Kitty (Patsy Kelly), and you’ve got a haunted-house stew of mystery, horror and frantic slapstick.
Is the threat a man in a mask? Is it a beast? Or is it just an excuse for the Ritz Brothers to make faces at the camera?
For a quick-and-dirty B-picture, The Gorilla came with an absolute mountain of backstage baggage. Fox pushed the Ritz Brothers as their ultimate answer to The Marx Brothers. Spoiler alert: history didn’t quite agree with the studio’s box office strategy. Contemporary critics even snarked that the Ritz Brothers’ antics “make the Three Stooges seem highbrow.”
I feel bad for those guys. Filming was supposed to kick off on January 30, 1939. Unfortunately, the Ritz Brothers’ father passed away, delaying production by nearly a month. Fox—ever the sympathetic corporate overlords—sued the brothers for $150,000 for breach of contract because they didn’t show up on day one. The brothers were already deeply reluctant to slum it in a B-movie, and this legal battle officially ended their tumultuous run at Fox, sending them packing over to Universal. And in a vintage Hollywood quirk that feels deeply surreal today, the inherently Jewish Ritz Brothers are given aggressively Irish names—Garrity, Harrigan, and Mulligan.
Because the original copyright holders forgot or failed to properly renew the film’s copyright down the road, The Gorilla slipped comfortably into the public domain. That means if you’ve ever stumbled across a dirt-cheap DVD bargain bin or a sketchy late-night streaming site playing a version of this movie that looks like it was recorded off a third-generation VHS tape with half the frames missing… well, now you know why.
Other Bela monkey movies: Murders in the Rue Morgue, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, The Ape Man, Return of the Ape Man.
You can watch this on Tubi.
