A long-running trope in fiction, song and movies has been the person who goes to the big city and finds themselves corrupted by it.  Somewhat less popular is a storyline where a girl does that, only for her brother attempt to rescue her, then he gets framed for murder and executed, and the brain from his corpse is then put into a gorilla’s body, which is the form through which he exacts murderous revenge. 

This is the astonishingly weird plot of 1941’s The Monster and the Girl.  It packs a lot, and at a dizzying speed, into only 65 minutes.  To paraphrase Bill Murray in Tootsie, this is one nutty b-movie.

It is even a bit weird before it gets to the mad scientist stuff.  Ellen Drew is the girl who goes to the city, against the protestations of brother Phillip Terry.  It is there she falls immediately in love with gangster Robert Paige when he buys her popcorn.  In this insanely condensed plot, it feels like they go straight from this to a small wedding at a justice of the peace.  She awakens the next morning to discover the marriage was a sham, she has been stuck with a huge hotel bill and, as a now “fallen woman”, her only option is entertaining guests at a club.  I bet she wishes she had held out for a man who offered more than just popcorn.

In a movie of this vintage, her job obviously means that of a prostitute.  The word is never said aloud, not even in the courtroom scene where she testifies in defense of her brother, but her testimony is discounted as being without merit because of this.  Let me tell any of you readers who were born in this century, that was the largely the public attitude toward sex workers since the dawn of civilization until rather recently, though an even more recent change in sentiment seems to be sending us back down the path of shaming them.  Something I find ludicrous even in a picture of this time is the fake marriage setup, which is obviously only part of the plot so as to make Drew’s character pitiable to the audience.

This bizarre composition of the film is roughly one-third courtroom drama, which itself is part of the roughly half of the runtime that is noir, before succumbing to full-on batshit crazy once Terry goes on a murderous rampage as a gorilla.  His transformation is so long in coming that I honestly forgot this was on a set of four Universal horror films of that period, all of which have apes in the plot.  I was disoriented when the film changes gears, and I can’t imagine what it had been like for viewers at the time, if they were even still paying attention when this, obviously the second film in a double feature, was on the screen.

But this is why I like such movies.  I am increasingly of the opinion major studio b-movies will take one of three tacts: try to be the best they can be with their limited means, not bother trying, or just pulling out the stops and seeing what they can get away with.  This one takes that last option and is all the better for it.  There is no way any of this would have been allowed by Universal in one of their main, or “A”, features.

Typical of such fare, there is some self-awareness to the dialogue and characterizations.  I wish there had been more of the odd trio of George Meader’s coroner, Tom Dugan’s police captain and Willard Robertson’s police lieutenant.  Dugan gets increasingly annoyed by the coroner who, with each additional corpse, will conclude nothing more than the victim is dead and will not speculate further.  But Robertson gets the actual funny line, when he whines, “I’m tired of murders.  Can’t people just behave themselves for a change?”

Each of those victims had every bone in their body broken.  Even if we never see any of the actual murders, just the mention of this shows the kind of leeway studio b-movies had in contrast to their moneyed, and more sophisticated, output.  That there are gangsters in the plot is also a staple of the form.  There is an occurrence here of a key lesson mob pictures have taught me and that is, if a thug says somebody needs to be taken care of, they never mean it in a way that will improve that person’s health.

Another odd recurring element I have noticed of these features are experimental film techniques.  I assume these are dry runs of innovations before possibly applying them to “proper” movies.  Something eye-popping happens here which I have not seen before or since, and I’m not sure it is even employed for good purpose here.  This is a jarring transition between scenes, done through a wipe of concentric circles.  It goes by in the blink of an eye and is even more startling because it is accompanied by an accordion flourish on the soundtrack.  I went back and watched this frame-by-frame and I’m still not entirely certain how it was executed.  I only know it had to be done by hand and is flawless in execution, even when evaluated in minute detail.

I want to give a shout-out to a member of the cast of The Monster and the Girl, and that is Terry’s faithful dog Skipper, who recognizes his master even when he has assumed the body of an ape.  The dog is well-used, such as in a bit where a police officer talks to him condescendingly and the dog gives a look that is unmistakably “don’t patronize me”.  Skipper also keeps trying to bring Terry what I assume was the man’s hat in his pervious form.  The dog will need to bring something bigger, as Terry is at that point possibly the only person who ever lived who could wear a ten-gallon hat unironically.

Dir: Stuart Heisler

Starring Ellen Drew, Robert Paige, Paul Lukas

Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray box set Universal Horror Collection: Volume 5