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.

   

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