Going Ape With Scream Factory, Part 3

Acquanetta is examined by new mad doctor J. Carrol Naish in JUNGLE WOMAN.

The second film in the Paula the Ape Woman series is JUNGLE WOMAN (1944), directed by Reginald LeBorg. LeBorg is best remembered for a handful of later horror films, including THE BLACK SLEEP and DIARY OF A MADMAN. JUNGLE WOMAN has the reputation of being one of Universal's most disposable chillers because it's almost entirely told in flashbacks as Dr. Carl Fletcher (J. Carrol Naish) is tried for Paula's murder in a judge's (Samuel S. Hinds) private chambers, with the now-married principals of CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN (Milburn Stone, Evelyn Ankers) occasionally chipping in their recollections, prompting more stock footage from CWW and THE BIG CAGE than seems quite decent. As noted in my last installment, there are no transformation scenes; in fact, the only view given of Paula in her half-ape form is withheld for a single shot at the end of the picture. Laid out in synopsis form, it doesn't sound very promising - and yet I personally find JUNGLE WOMAN to be the most interesting of the three films in terms of its approach to generating horror scenes. LeBorg wasn't a first rank horror director, but you can see him turning the disadvantages of this production to their best advantage with a series of interesting and sometimes very effective set pieces - the opening attack (staged with doubles in silhouette), the attempted development of Acquanetta's Paula - now with actual lines to speak - into a kind of B-movie version of Simone Simon's Irena in Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE (1941), and especially a sequence in which a swimming Paula sets out to avenge her hair-trigger jealousy against this film's romantic couple (Lois Collier, Richard Davis) as they enjoy a moonlit boat row. The single shot of the submarine Paula's arrow-like wake closing in on the rear of the rowboat is one of Universal's most effective frissons of the 1940s, looking ahead to a special form of aqueous horror that would not come fully about until CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) or JAWS (1975).

Vicky Lane in Paula makeup by Universal's resident genius, Jack Pierce.

THE JUNGLE CAPTIVE followed its troubled predecessor by a full year, and its release was muted by placing it in many theaters as the co-feature on double bills with Universal's latest Inner Sanctum picture THE FROZEN GHOST, both films directed by Harold Young (THE MUMMY'S TOMB). At least it had display ads in newspapers - a prowl through newspaper archives indicates that Universal hadn't wished to draw undue attention to JUNGLE WOMAN. The script takes a horror pulp premise, a standard romantic back story (Amelita Ward, Phil Brown) and wedges Paula's rocky legacy into it. She is now played by 18 year old Vicky Lane, born to an American mother in Dublin, who - in a disclosure that must have mortified Universal's publicity department - described herself to reporters as "Black Irish." She was also, already at her young age, the wife of actor Tom Neal, the star of Edgar Ulmer's DETOUR. She does not in the least resemble Acquanetta, looking like an all-American sweater girl than and exotic import, but the makeup and hair department did their best to emulate her predecessrors' distinctive coiffure. Lane had actually appeared uncredited in a few earlier films (including Douglas Sirk's HITLER'S MADMAN), but this was her first credited film role - and her last.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 29, 1945.

Lane's inheritance of Acquanetta's duties is lacking in a convincing feral nature in either of her personas, and Universal seems to have deliberately deprived Paula of central attention by casting their "monster without makeup" star Rondo Hatton as Moloch, the henchman of the film's mad scientist, who is always firmly addressed as Mr. Stendhal (DRACULA'S DAUGHTER's Otto Kruger). Usually cast in silent roles, Hatton gets a surprising amount of dialogue and an even more surprising amount of lip from Stendhal, who lambastes the poor man's moonstruck reactions to heroine Ann Forrester (Ward) with unbelievable lines like "you're not exactly a Casanova, you know," and adding with a glance at the nearby Ape Woman, "that's more in your line." Harold Young, whose specialty seems to have been movies like BACHELOR DADDY and JUKEBOX JENNY, doesn't come near the atmosphere his cameraman George Robinson gave to THE MUMMY'S GHOST; his cameraman here was Maury Gertsman, a longtime Universal DP who was dealt this as his first horror picture. The studio was pleased enough with his Rondo Hatton scenes to place him in charge of the visuals on the rest of the films Hatton would make for the studio: HOUSE OF HORRORS and THE BRUTE MAN (both scripted by this film's author, Dwight V. Babcock), as well as the relatively woebegone one-shot, SHE WOLF OF LONDON.

In many ways, it's the audio commentaries that raise UNIVERSAL HORROR COLLECTION VOLUME 5 to the level of a reference necessity, especially for anyone who doesn't already own Tom Weaver's UNIVERSAL HORRORS or Greg Mank's WOMEN IN HORROR FILMS two-volume set. As always, Weaver's THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL and CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN (he's assisted by Steve Kronenberg on the former) are smart, feisty, often amusing talks that succeed as entertainment as much as production studies. He imports vocal performances by Larry Blamire and Lucy Chase Williams to fill in for Edward Dmytryk and Acquanetta, and pokes his nose into all sorts of production trivia and data - including a TMI explanation for John Carradine's aversion to white pants. Mank's JUNGLE WOMAN commentary is impeccably snappy, detailed, and expressive, its every shift and silence perfectly timed to the onscreen action; it's about as perfectly and tightly (yet smoothly) executed a commentary as I've heard. Scott Gallinghouse's JUNGLE CAPTIVE commentary is a bit dry by comparison, with some unannounced gaps, but there is no faulting his documentation, an exhaustive report on the making of the picture with special attention reserved for Rondo Hatton.

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

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