Finally... INGAGI (1930)

The great Charlie Gemora in an early unheralded role.

It's not every day - nor every week, month or year - that a lost film arrives on home video, so I'm surprised at the relative lack of noise surrounding Kino Lorber's recent release of INGAGI (1930) - a film that I was personally quite excited to see. Presented as the eighth release in their fascinating series "Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture," INGAGI - made possible with the help of Something Weird Video and the Library of Congress - was actually not truly "lost" - three nitrate prints were known to be held at the Library of Congress - but until this release, the general public had no access to this legendary picture for at least 50 years.  

INGAGI was presented to audiences of its day as an authentic ethnographic film, being the documentary account of a safari led by one Sir Hubert Winstead into "darkest Africa" - the name of the mysterious continent literally zooms glowing out of the opening scrolled text like a ghostly "Boo!" In addition to chronicling the dark continent's "low bred" people and unusual wildlife (wildebeests, giraffes, zebras, and crocodiles spawned by the dozens), there is on-the-spot footage of the debonair Sir Hubert's hunting and painstaking capture of a leopard and a reputedly 65-foot python (disturbed in its attempt to devour a lemur), replete with often tasteless tongue-in-cheek narration, while a ceaselessly noodling electric organ grinds out the most turgid Bible Tent music imaginable. At one point, they document the discovery of a tortoise with a strange armor-like shell with wings, which they christen a "tortorillo" - shortly before its bite allegedly poisoned and killed one of the dogs taken along on the hunt. But the real point of the film, promised to us in that opening scroll, is its exclusive documentation of an African tribe that worships gorillas - to the point of sacrificing its barren women to them, in the belief that mating with gorillas will help them to bear children at least of some hybrid sort.

INGAGI premiered in various North American theaters on March 15 and did the proverbial "boffo box office," raking in at least $4,000,000 - an enormous return on a meager investment that time would prove even more meager; however, by the first week in June, newspapers across the country began to run exposé reports about its sensational content. As Bret Wood points out in one of the two excellent commentaries included on this disc, today's audiences tend to regard the audiences of the 1930s as being preposterously gullible as compared to today's more sophisticated viewers, but the published documentation of the day generally supports the idea that INGAGI was quickly recognized by critics and popular audiences as an insult - not to people of Africa or African descent (which it most certainly is) but rather to paying audiences. It seems that whoever played Sir Hubert Winstead never left California to head his own safari, whose highlights were a fabulation of footage freely cobbled together from other ethnographic films, such as Lady Grace Mackenzie's 1915 film HEART OF AFRICA. In an ironic discovery that only began to gain popular meaning in recent times, every act of intrepid heroism attributed to Sir Hubert in the movie had actually been accomplished some fifteen years earlier... by a woman. 

Here is one widely syndicated article that was published all over the country, originating in the Los Angles TIMES:

INGAGI's Congo Films producer Nat Spitzer had been happy to receive the early controversy, which lured to the box office even more people bent on making up their own minds about it, but when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association retracted their involvement with the picture, he took more public objection to the way his film was being dragged over the coals, claiming that all this riotous objection arose from feelings of professional jealousy. Particularly damning was an article I found in Orlando, Florida's ORLANDO SENTINEL (7 June 1930), in which a famous authority on such matters - noted adventurer, hunter, and filmmaker Frank H. Buck - was asked for his opinion of the film, prompting this response of astounding forensic clarity:

Despite this, it is incredible to note that INGAGI nevertheless continued to fool a great many fools - but is it really so hard to believe, considering the well-publicized fools of today? This piece - which I found in the FORT WORTH (TX) RECORD-TELEGRAM (18 July 1930) - stands more as indictments of ignorance and gullibility rather than a vindication of Mr. Spitzer: 

The spectacular 4K restoration of the materials, taken mostly from a surviving print one step away from the camera negative, tinted sepia for day scenes with night scenes presented either without a tint or tinted lavender, makes it more obvious than ever that INGAGI is a tossed salad of other documentary sources (scratchy with poor contrast and wanting clarity) with new, crystal-clear, staged footage of the fictitious hero and his fellows and their dubious discoveries. The film's cinematography is a real hodge-podge, coming from so many different sources, but there are a few quite stunning shots that were obviously filmed in-studio, including a powerful composition involving a lion with illuminated eyes poised regally in the foreground of a diffused stage light's full moon. As an uncannily beautiful image, it would have fit much more seamlessly into something super-stylized like Rex Ingram's THE MAGICIAN (1926); it wouldn't surprise me if the lion was either Slats or Jackie, the first two MGM lions. 

When we finally get to gorilla-related material, about 15 minutes from the end of this offensive, condescending, and generally appalling document, we see naked black women - the supposed outcasts of the tribe, the "brides of the gorillas," if you will - roaming through the brush, one of them cradling a nude toddler identified as the offspring of their "unholy" alliance, "seemingly more ape than human" - though the child has no visible difference from any black child of that age, other than a bottom painted curiously white. A publicity image exists that shows the child, matted with irregular patches of hair, being nursed by its bored-looking mother. According to the Bret Wood commentary, the film's last two reels were widely subjected to state censor board interference. Therefore, paying audiences of the day are unlikely to have seen its several instances of desexualized nudity, which include at least one instance of frontal male nudity among the natives - but the print preserved and restored here is completely intact. 

But then - and here comes the real reason why INGAGI remains historically important - the gorilla appears and stalks the camera crew... who are at this point included in the picture; we see the lone cameraman (!) cranking away as the monster looms near; a monster that most readers of this blog would immediately recognize as the pioneering gorilla actor Charles Gemora. It's at this point when we recognize the tenor of the narrator's voice as sharing much with the voice of another famed explorer, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) of 1933's KING KONG. 

A badly framed shot, yet remarkably prophetic of KING KONG, which followed in 1933. 

In the other commentary on the disc, film historian Kelly Robinson tackles the subject of INGAGI's place in the history of gorilla-themed entertainment. I understand it's her first commentary and she does an excellent job; she's highly personable and knows her stuff. She reminds us that, before there were iconic images of the classic monsters carrying away women in white gowns, there were images of gorillas doing the same - a trope that she traces back to Emmanuel Frémiet's 1887 sculpture "Gorilla enlevant de Femme," which for which she makes a persuasive "smoking gun" case for this entire trend - not just in horror films, but in this earlier rash of faux-documentaries of the 1920s and '30s. But the truth that stands out most boldly is that INGAGI, however offensive it may be, really is an important forerunner of KING KONG - though (as I noted in my article "Edgar Wallace and the Paternity of KING KONG", VIDEO WATCHDOG #126 July/September 2006), its story was also greatly indebted to Wallace's 1926 novel THE AVENGER - known in the US as THE HAIRY ARM - in which an ape-like man abducts a beautiful blonde actress and carries her to the rooftops of a noted explorer's home, where a volley of gunshot brings him down. As the world's leading directors and producers of similar ethnographic films at that time, such as GRASS and CHANG, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack must have seen INGAGI before they made KONG - if only to discover what about it attracted to this shoddy little film an incredible $4,000,000 in box office earnings. There are images in the faux INGAGI footage that almost breathtakingly presage immortal images in KING KONG - the sacrificial rites involving the tribal dance of native women and a man garbed in ape-like costume, Denham cranking his camera in the face of danger) - so we cannot deny that it achieved something, despite its cheerfully low character.

This is a subject that ultimately adds up to considerably more than the sum of its parts. The subject of INGAGI spills over not only into the gorilla-themed films that followed, but into all manner of film exploitation, from the tropes of Universal horror (not least of all MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) as well as the much-later pseudo "found footage" shockumentaries from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. As the film's two commentators freely admit, there are any number of reasons to detest INGAGI, yet it stands at the heart of a fertile trail in film history and something well worth knowing about. 

It should be mentioned in closing that Kino Lorber's "Forbidden Fruit" series was inspired by Bret Wood's 2009 history of the "golden age" of exploitation cinema, published by Midnight Marquee Press. INGAGI was preceded in this series by the following Blu-ray releases, all of which are generously supplemented and highly recommended: Vol. 1: William Beaudine's MOM AND DAD; Vol. 2: REEFER MADNESS and SEX MADNESS; Vol. 3: UNASHAMED and ELYSIA; Vol. 4: MARIHUANA and NARCOTIC; Vol. 5: TOMORROW'S CHILDREN and CHILD BRIDE; Vol. 6: SHE SHOULDA SAID "NO!" and THE DEVIL'S SLEEP; and Vol. 7: TEST TUBE BABIES and GUILTY PARENTS.

   

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Lupin Is Mightier Than the Sword

New on Netflix is a French import mini-series, LUPIN (subtitled "In the Shadow of Arsène") - which, as you might imagine, is a modern day reinvention of Maurice LeBlanc's great gentleman thief, originally published between 1907 and 1941. As an admirer of these novels and stories, my initial expectations of this series were not very high; however, I'm pleased to report that the results are impressively elegant and charming.

Omar Sy stars as Assan, a robustly-built Frenchman of Senagalise descent - a black man, thus "invisible" in the Ralph Ellison sense - whose father committed suicide in prison after being wrongly convicted of theft. Ironically, his last gift to his son, found among his personal effects, was a leather-bound copy of Lupin's first adventures, which he adopted as a blueprint to his future character as a truly transparent master criminal. The first of the five episodes concerns the necklace of Marie Antoinette, to be auctioned after being exhibited at the Louvre, a subject that resonates not only in LeBlanc's early stories but in the earlier works of Alexandre Dumas.

This is a clever update; there are some witty allusions to the books (it might help to inspire a new generation of readers), it's full of stylish action and ravishing French settings, and it can be watched either in French with English subtitles or dubbed into English. I've been watching the English dub option and am impressed by the contemporary state of the art, which reflects attentive voice casting and has finally mastered the matching of room tones to the dialogue. A second season has reportedly been ordered, and I look forward to the remaining episodes.

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

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Recent Passings

RIP Jacques Champreux, among the greatest names in French fantastique. The grandson of the maitre Louis Feuillade, he wrote the scripts for Franju’s masterpiece JUDEX (his father had directed the rare 1934 version), the exquisite television thriller THE COMPANIONS OF BAAL, and a miniseries adaptation of Verne’s THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND with Omar Sharif as Nemo (which I have not seen - but it’s on YouTube!). He also wrote and starred in Franju’s miniseries THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE, which was also condensed into the feature NUITS ROUGES aka SHADOWMAN. Though he never played him officially, he was my favorite Fantômas. His work has had a huge impact on my aesthetic and creative life; I would never have written my long-aborning novel THE ONLY CRIMINAL without his example. He died December 24th at the age of 90; a colossus.

RIP Barbara Shelley, whose early roles in CAT GIRL (1957), BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE (1958), VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960), and SHADOW OF THE CAT (1961) made her the principal focal point of female heroism at the dawning of British gothic cinema. Probably the first actor to make me aware of the romantic value and appeal of intelligence, she wasn't an avatar of Hammer Glamour so much as one of their great stars, on par with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. In her key roles (THE GORGON, DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESSS, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT), she excelled at portraying the untapped strength and power at the core of demure women. can’t summarize her better than Jonathan Rigby did on his page this morning: “a superb actress and... the undisputed queen of British horror.” She died of COVID-19 at the age of 88.

RIP Russian actor Vladimir Kornev, who starred in the 1962 Soviet science fiction movie THE AMPHIBIAN MAN, who died of complications from COVID-19 on January 2, aged 80. THE AMPHIBIAN MAN is a genuinely uncanny film; as a child, when I first saw it on television in black-and-white, it was like stumbling across a waking dream; and when I finally got to see it again, finally in color on a Ruscico DVD, it exceeded my distant memory of it. You can find my review of it in VIDEO WATCHDOG #70, page 5.

RIP Gerry Marsden MBE, former frontman of the immortal Gerry and the Pacemakers, who in 1965 briefly eclipsed The Beatles in Top Ten popularity. Though not in the same league as Lennon/McCartney as a songwriter, Gerry nevertheless penned a string of hits, including “Ferry Cross the Mersey”, “It’s Gonna Be Alright” and the ballad “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” (written for his future wife of 55 years, Pauline, who was upset at the thought of being by separated from Gerry for the first time as the Pacemakers prepared for their first US tour). Additionally, he and the Pacemakers (which included his brother Fred on drums) recorded a Lennon/McCartney original “Hello Little Girl” (a perk of having been taken under the wing of their manager, Brian Epstein) and found an enduring national niche when their recording of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was adopted as Liverpool’s (soccer) anthem. Like the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers starred in a film of their own, FERRY CROSS THE MERSEY (1965), and had the pleasure of performing at different times on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, including once when they briefly managed to join their illustrious stablemates on the BILLBOARD Top Ten. Gerry’s stage presence was brash and cheerful, fun-loving but also sensitive, and he wore his guitar ridiculously high on his chest. I was all of nine years old when the Pacemakers reached their peak; I never missed them on TV, I sat in the dark at their movie more than once (it’s never been released on home video), and I still enjoy them - I’ll never forget a time in the car when the words of ”I Like It”, one of their most infectious yet frivolous songs, moved me to tears as I realized how much of a love story it was really communicating. These guys - never hip, never experimental, never groundbreaking... but they were special in their own down-the-pub-gone-electric kind of way. There was a sense of fun and simplicity about them, also a rich sentimentality, and a deep love of country and birthplace, that always set them a bit above and apart. Gerry was 78 and had some previous heart surgeries; the cause of his death was a brief cardiac infection.

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

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LOVE UNDER 17: A Lost Title From My Misspent Youth Recovered

Movie titles don’t get much more scandalous than LOVE UNDER 17, which is actually Veit Relin's LIEBE UNTER 17, a fairly innocuous German “Report” film from 1971. I saw it at the Twin Drive-In with my friend Rob back in October 1976, when I was just over the threshold of 20 - and I did what most healthy young men do in the presence of such entertainment: I turned it into research, jotting down credits from the screen and writing an actual review for a fanzine I was plotting about the flood of Euro softcore entertainment that was not being seriously evaluated in print anywhere at that time. (This plan never got beyond the stage of a couple of written reviews and a few collected pressbooks.) Shortly after the film opened, it was seized by local police in response to someone’s complaint and replaced with something else. 

CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, 10 October 1976.

Cut to screen caption: 50 YEARS LATER... 

Over the years, LOVE UNDER 17 has become very obscure and I have read that it is now considered a “lost” film even in Germany. But last week, two things happened out of the blue: First, an incomplete English dubbed 35mm print actually showed up on eBay, the bidding starting at only $19! Secondly, I discovered by Googling that a DVD-R of the film was now available from different online sellers from a label called Desert Island Discs (whose holdings encompass such titles as DECAPITATION ISLAND, CALIGULA REINCARNATED AS HITLER and THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE AND HARRIET). 50 years had passed... did the film suddenly go out of copyright or something? Anyway, I wasted no time - I ordered LOVE UNDER 17 from Movie Zyme Warehouse and it arrived super-fast. And last night, I had the delirious experience of revisiting this odd and funny little movie I expected never to see again. 

CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, 8 October 1976.

After an opening downbeat vignette dramatizing the dangers of teenage hitchhiking, the film - intercut with seemingly authentic on-the-street interviews filmed in Munich - tells a series of short stories about first love that are variously sweet, randy, and comic, allegedly based on anecdotes from actual teenagers, all presented of course as “a public service.” It was all so refreshingly un-neurotic. I was happy to see Erik Falk (later a frequent Jess Franco star) turn up in the final story, in which a bar pick-up results in a lasting relationship. Unlike the somewhat choppy print I saw at my local drive-in, this DVD-R was maybe a 6 or 7/10 in quality and absolutely uncut - and in answer to your question, the women it features all look to be at least in their late teens. Also, while the opening text screens and credits were in English, a voice-over translated them into German and the entire film was in German! (The sales page I ordered from had specifically identified the picture as being in English.) I'm not complaining too much; the stories were easy to follow, and besides, an English copy would have surely been less complete. One of the most interesting details about the English credits is that the director's name is given as "R.B. Winston" and the English adaptation is credited to Robert H. Oliver, a cohort of producer Dick Randall who had previously worked as an actor in Mario Bava's FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, written THE MAD BUTCHER with Victor Buono, and directed FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS! It's a small world. 

So... if you should happen to win that 35mm print from eBay (I would try, but I have no means of viewing it) PLEASE have it transfered to video and please SEND ME A COPY! I suspect the English dubbing was part of its original appeal.

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

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