Going Ape With Scream Factory, Part 2

John Carradine unveils Acquanetta in Edward Dmytryk's CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN.

In the 1930s, Universal produced a series of ambitious sequels to their horror hits, ranging from DRACULA'S DAUGHTER to 1939's epic SON OF FRANKENSTEIN; but in the 1940s, their approach to sequels became more influenced by serials than any attempt to improve on what had been done before. As several horror scholars have noted, their approach to their Mummy series was fecund enough but also swollen with stock footage and a complete disregard for the characters, geography, and chronology established by previous entries. These films have already been released on Blu-ray, as has their highly varied Invisible Man series (which even includes an INVISIBLE WOMAN); however, it has not been until recently - with the release of Scream Factory's UNIVERSAL HORROR COLLECTION VOLUME 5 - that Universal's entire trilogy of "Paula, the Ape Woman" movies has been made available on disc. The entire series was issued on VHS and through Universal's MOD DVD-R "Vault Series," but only CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN had a general DVD release as part of the 2009 set UNIVERSAL HORROR: CLASSIC MOVIE ARCHIVE, where it was paired with THE BLACK CAT, MAN MADE MONSTER, HORROR ISLAND, and NIGHT MONSTER.  

The Scream Factory release presents beautifully restored copies of CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, JUNGLE WOMAN, and THE JUNGLE CAPTIVE, along with Paramount's THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL (reviewed yesterday). The four films (each barely over - or under - an hour) are spread over four discs with audio commentaries, still galleries and trailers. There's also a full-color booklet but its content is almost entirely photographic, without an accompanying essay. The set is priced at a notch below $70, which rounds off to just under $18 per movie. Some reviewers have complained that the set is over-priced, given the length of the movies (and the extent of the stock footage contained within a couple of them), but it should be noted that the audio commentaries by Universal historians Tom Weaver (UNIVERSAL HORRORS), Greg Mank ( KARLOFF AND LUGOSI and Scott Gallinghouse (SCRIPTS FROM THE CRYPT: THE BRUTE MAN) are valuable additions to the set. Admittedly, these are hardly essential titles for the average horror fan, but they are of fair significance to genre buffs with a specific interest in Universal horror or 1940s mad science horror of any stripe.

CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN is of somewhat greater general interest than the others as it was one of the later B-pictures made during the early phase of his career by director Edward Dmytryk. Before he became established as the director of such films as MURDER, MY SWEET and THE CAINE MUTINY, Dmytryk honed his skills on pictures like THE DEVIL COMMANDS, CONFESSIONS OF BOSTON BLACKIE, THE FALCON STRIKES BACK, and this mad science caper, which is as lean and taut a 1940s thriller as you're likely to find. It not only incorporates a fair amount of stock footage from an earlier Universal adventure picture, 1933's THE BIG CAGE, which was built around documentation of famous animal tamer Clyde Beatty at work, but took a chunk of its actual storyline itself, which was about a circus on the verge of bankruptcy gambling on a comeback by having Beatty tame lions and tigers in a cage at the same time. In CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, this is the scheme of animal tamer Fred Mason (GUNSMOKE's Milburn Stone), who's counting on its success so that he can marry pretty Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers). While on his latest expedition to Africa, Mason found and brought back a gorilla he named Cheela (Ray "Crash" Corrigan), whose responses to him are almost human. In a bit of handy exposition that changes the story just enough to not be identical to the Beatty film it's swiping from, Beth is given a depressed sister with a glandular problem, which brings her into the orbit of debonair scientist Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine), who is fascinated by the circus and takes her up on an invitation for a behind-the-scenes visit. It is during this visit that Walters observes Cheela's human streak, and since he's completely unbalanced, he decides to have the primate abducted and taken to his secret laboratory. His glandular research enables him to extract Cheela's most human essence in the form of an attractive girl, whom he names Paula Dupree. When Walters visits the circus with her in tow, everyone is astounded at her innate ability to control the animals, even a battling lion and tiger. To make a long story short and a short movie shorter, horror ensues.

CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN (1943) isn't great but it is admirably efficient of its kind. It does a splendid fluid job of matching up with the BIG CAGE footage, and Stone (who is a great help in selling those illusions) and Ankers have more chemistry than most Universal romantic couples. Naturally, Corrigan is not nearly so convincing a gorilla as Charlie Gemora in THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL, but the real show here is Carradine at his most icily menacing. There is a great moment when he engineers the death of the man he's hired to abduct Cheela, once the job's been done. We don't see any of the violence; Dmytryk trains our attention to Carradine's face, which doesn't blink once as the man is being torn apart in front of him. And then there is Acquanetta's portrayal of Paula, as close to Germany's Alraune as American cinema had ever come to creating a daughter of mad science. Like Alraune, she's both monster and glamour girl, and Aquanetta's mute (and to an extent, blank) performance lends Paula an impenetrable mystery. Of course, she is essentially unknown even to herself until those occasions when her sexual jealousy of Beth causes her simian glands to reassert themselves, darkening her in color, sprouting hair, and reverting Paula to her true nature.

There was something about Paula's transformations into the Ape Woman that was troubling to the critic with the US communist newspaper THE DAILY WORKER. He complained that CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN was promoting Hitler's racist conception of black people being subhuman and ape-like. There had apparently always been some distrust of how Acquanetta - whose full name she claimed to be Burnu Acquanetta - represented herself. A full year before CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, the Salt Lake Tribune (28 July 1942) carried this caption to one of her early Universal promotional shots: 

Here's a sidebar of Acquanetta's full account of her personal history, as published in the Tallahassee Democrat (Tallahassee, FL) , 30 July 1942:

The DAILY WORKER rants enflamed curiosity, curiosity led to rumor, rumor led to former acquaintances coming forth and speaking out, and Universal bowed to pressure during the filming of the sequel JUNGLE WOMAN - not only by omitting any and all transformation scenes from the picture but by postponing any view of the Ape Woman at all until the last 50 seconds of the movie! By the time the filming was completed, Universal had undertaken their own private investigation of Acquanetta's personal history and learned the truth: "Burnu Acquanetta" was in fact the former Mildred Davenport of Pennsylvania, an 18 year old African-American woman. By this time the word was out, JUNGLE WOMAN (1944) was already in the can. Even as Universal was quietly tearing up her contract, they still had a picture to promote, so they ballyhooed her as "the exotic, dark-skinned, dark-haired American beauty who hoodwinked the entertainment world into thinking she was South American," while praising her latest performance as "even more intriguing and effective" than her work in CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN. The truth was out, and it would come out even more loudly in 1950, as Acquanetta sought an enriching divorce from millionaire Luciano Baschuk, who claimed that - despite the son they shared - they had never been properly married. Acquanetta would be replaced by Vicky Lane in the final Paula the Ape Woman film. When Universal first issued their horror films to television as the famous "Shock Theater" package, CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN and THE JUNGLE CAPTIVE were included, but the controversial JUNGLE WOMAN was mysteriously withheld. My own newspaper archives research shows that the film wasn't shown on television in North America until June 1972 - an absence from circulation of 28 years.

Though well-intentioned, the DAILY WORKER's righteous outrage against the film was misplaced; a time-lapsed transformation of any human actor into Ape Creature would have had to transition to a darker phase to get from Stage 1 to Stage 3. All that was ultimately achieved for making an issue out of this non-story was the public embarrassment of a black woman and the willful destruction of her career - the career of the first African-American actress to achieve name-above-the-title stardom in movies that were not advertised with the words "All Colored Cast." Some might see her downfall (some downfall, she always married and remarried well!) as Acquanetta's rightful comeuppance for denying her race, but was what she did really all that different from what separated Archie Leach from Cary Grant, or Ruby Stevens from Barbara Stanwyck, or the lies that Hollywood studios regularly concocted about their stars to fuel the gossip columns?

I'll delve into JUNGLE WOMAN and THE JUNGLE CAPTIVE tomorrow. 

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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