A Bela e o Monstro

Ellen Drew plays a woman tricked into prostitution by Robert Paige and a group of gangsters after leaving a small town for the lights and allure of the big city. Drew's brother comes to her rescue and is instead set up in a murder by the gang led by Paul Lukas. Phillip Terry(her brother) is given the death penalty for his innocence and is executed. Right now you must be thinking...is there a monster? Oh yes! Just before the execution takes place, scientist George Zucco asks Terry is he can have his brain after he is killed. Zucco receives Terry's consent and transplants the brain of Terry into a giant gorilla that will seek payback from the gang of thugs and the attorney that sent Terry to his death. This is certainly not your typical monster film from the 40's. It opens with Drew narrating and then we are immediately thrust into the courtroom. We see everything through the testimony of the witnesses. Very innovative, and well-done. The story gets ridiculous midway, but the director Stuart Heisler never for one moment takes the material as anything less than serious. This attitude really allows the film to work. The story also sheds light on what was at the time a very scandalous subject....prostitution. We are never told what actually happens in so many words with regards to Drew's shame, yet we know through subtle means. The gang is truly repulsive. Each of the actors in it are extremely good playing men with no souls. Gerald Mohr, Paige, Lukas, and Marc Lawrence(isn't he always playing a thug?) do very well also in their obvious demises to come. The rest of the acting in this film is pretty good too. Onslow Stevens has a small part as the prosecuting lawyer. And George Zucco is always a treat to watch. I never have seen him give a bad performance. And the ape?" Not bad...looks fairly realistic..I have seen far worse. A good all around film from Paramount. They sure don't make em like this anymore and ain't it a shame!

I learned about this movie from a sidebar to an article on "horror noir" in Films in Review, where it was highly recommended.

It does mix horror and film noir in its own peculiar fashion. It starts off more noir than horror. A woman addresses the camera, surrounded by smoke or fog, to tell us a tale. We're taken to a courtroom, where a stoic man is being tried for murder. The woman from the introduction enters the court as a spectator, and a couple of the other spectators call attention to her.

The man on trial doesn't say much in his defense, speaking in a monotone. The woman jumps up to insist on speaking. She seems like a tough dame, and it turns out she's the man's sister. What she says doesn't help much, and she isn't a credible witness; it's implied she's a prostitute.

Through a flashback to better days, we see the siblings when they were much more animated and happy. She wanted to leave their small town, but when she goes to the city she finds it hard to get work. She meets a man she falls in love with, and gets married, but when she wakes up after a party on her wedding night, he's disappeared. A strange man is in her bedroom informing her how much she owes for the room and party, and offers her work in a cabaret entertaining men...

The brother goes to the city to find the missing husband, and gets framed for murder by a criminal conspiracy by the men his sister now works for. Back in the courtroom, he's convicted, vows revenge, and is executed, but not before he agrees to donate his brain to science.

Post-mortem, his brain is implanted into an ape. It's not clear what the scientist hopes to accomplish by that. Something about evolution, perhaps seeing what the ape's potential is if its brain is upgraded. For some reason, the scientist seems to expect an intelligent ape, rather than a man's mind in an ape's body. It isn't clear to what extent the executed man's brain retains its personality or memories, but the ape does carry out his vow of revenge, and his own dog seems to recognize him.

There were several other primate horror movies Universal made, among them the three titles in the Paula the Ape Woman series: Captive Wild Woman (1943), Jungle Woman (1944/I), Jungle Captive, The (1945), and then the Bela Lugosi film Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). It's a funny thing about primates and horror, they go back pretty far. The Doctor's Experiment, The Professor's Secret, and The Monkey Man (all 1908) are three of the earliest ones, the latter one even involving a brain transplant!

OK, so it's about a human brain transplanted into an ape's body -- it's still a unique, original and stylish film. Director Stuart Heisler treats it all very seriously and the cast does a great job. It's beautifully shot and lit -- and there's even a sub-plot about white slavery and prostitution that's shocking for the time. A first-rate job by all concerned.

After the horror revival of the late thirties, Paramount decided to get in on the act with this rare excursion into "monster movies." But this is a weird hybrid, as if a film about a white slavery ring was in production and the powers that be decided to tear off the last half of the script and graft a ham-fisted (or banana-fisted) monster subplot onto it. It certainly makes for fascinating viewing, as long as you know what's coming. A tenuous similarity could be considered with 'From Dusk Til Dawn' wherein a story about two hostage-taking killers on the run suddenly switches gears half-way and becomes an outlandish vampire gore-a-thon. This 1941 release does have a resemblance to Karloff's 1939 'The Man They Could Not Hang' (Karloff a hanged scientist brought back to life with electricity proceeds to kill off the jurors that convicted him.) Nonetheless, this film's bifurcated storyline is almost delightful if only from the sheer crackpot audacity of trying to pull it off.

No need to recount the plot, it's simple enough. It's thirty minutes of trial and flashback to the white slavery set-up, then thirty minutes of Frankenstein-ian ape-crazed nonsense with a quick wrap up. The only hurdle to overcome is the amateur performance of Phillip Terry as the condemned man Webster. He drudges his way through as if told he was in a zombie movie, then behaves like a Stepford Wife in the flashback, then later does an over-the-top hysteria jag in his last scene. Inept. But he doesn't play the ape, thank goodness! That job is performed by Charles Gemora (who played the martian in 1953's 'War of The Worlds') and he does it subtly and effectively. Considering the highly-charged second half, it's too bad the writer and director didn't take advantage and really play up the tension and the murder scenes. Here's a case where a film could have run a little longer for a change. And thankfully the ape doesn't talk and Webster's sister (Ellen Drew) doesn't do that "I recognized him by his eyes" nonsense that it looks like it was heading for. There's also a terrific cast of familiar second-tier actor faces employed including Marc Lawrence, a young Rod Cameron, Joseph Calleia, Abner Biberman, Cliff Edwards and even Bud Jamison (Jamison familiar to Three Stooges fans). Granted the film's short running time doesn't give them much screen time (but oddly enough, the faceless unknowns Robert Paige, Terry and Drew get most of the camera-time). And one last enjoyable note is seeing George Zucco as the transplant doctor hovering throughout the film. In the first part of the film he is just hanging around, given little attention, as if waiting like the rest of us to get to the 'monster' part of the story. Then after he does his movie-changing brain transplant, he once again hangs around mostly in the background (at each murder scene), with no one really asking him why he's always there. It's all part of the oddness of this little curio.

This Paramount film has the kind of outlandish plot often found in minor studio cheapies of the same period: Phillip Terry's sister (Ellen Drew) foolishly falls for a gangster and ends up sold into "white slavery." Her brother tries to rescue her but ends up getting framed for murder by the mobsters. Convicted and sent to die in the electric chair, his body ends up stolen by mad scientist George Zucco, who puts his brain in the body of a gorilla. The gorilla now with Phillip Terrys brain, escapes and proceeds to kill off the mobsters one by one. Along the way his dog instinctively knows the gorilla is his (hers?) old master and tags along on his murderous rampage of vengeance. If one view this film ignoring the outlandish plot, this actually a very well made film with good Paramount production values, good stylish direction by Stuart Heisler, good atmospheric photography, and good performances by most of the films cast. Charlie Gemora's gorilla costume is more realistic looking than the cheesy moth eaten suits worn by George Barrows or Ray Corrigan in minor studio pictures. Also Gemora manages express real feelings and emotions underneath that gorilla suit. Also Gemora's gorilla actually walks and gestures like a real gorilla. THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL is an incredible film and is recommend if you are looking for something really outlandish but not trashy.