It's Saturday and I really should be reading and responding to the rest of the email I wasn't able to get to during the week. After waking up from a pretty good, pretty long sleep, I actually began doing that for about a half hour or so. But with 30 messages down and another 130 to go, I decided to call it quits—at least for a while.
Instead, I watched the 1940 low-budget Monarch feature, "The Ape," starring Boris Karloff. Poor guy, he plays once another misunderstood doctor whose intentions are good (he wants to cure his lovely young neighbor's paralysis) but whose methods are questionable at best (he dresses up as an ape and kills people to extract serum from their dead bodies). It's not quite as silly as I'm making it sound, but it's mighty close. Writer Curt (Kurt in this case) Siodmak, who would pen the film responsible for typecasting Lon Chaney Jr. for the rest of his career as "The Wolfman," actually wrote two back-to-back films for Boris Karloff (“The Apeman” was the second, the first was "Black Friday"). Siodmak is probably best known for the many horror films he scripted during the 1940s. Among these is an all-time favorite of mine, one of producer Val Lewton's best B-pictures for RKO, "I Walked with a Zombie" (1943). But getting briefly back to “The Ape,” a couple of the more interesting elements of that film include a scene in which the local sheriff simultaneously glowers at and reveals his badge to a circus vendor to extract from him a free bag of peanuts (moral ambiguity). Another occurs when the meanest man in town, usurious banker is murdered by the "ape" (just desserts). I give this film a C.
I also watched Fritz Lang's "The Testament of Dr Mabuse," released 1933 and banned in Germany until 1961.It's a somewhat supernatural, somewhat psychological, but certainly sociological look at an anarchistic crime boss in the uncertain world of early 30s Germany. Knowing what's going on at the time--the rapid ascendency of the Nazi party under Hitler's murderous leadership--gives the film an even creepier sensibility that it has already. According to titles added at the beginning of the film, the original print has survived but is damaged. At 121 minutes, the very respectable print used for the Criterion version is apparently down three minutes or so from the original release. Others have summed up and provided much more learned analysis than I will here, so let me just note a couple of things that stand out for me. In the early portion of the film, there's a member of the gang that looks remarkably like an oversized Hitler. He's got the same black, greased up hair and trademark Chaplinesque mustache, and he's a blustering bully just like the man he clearly represents. There's also a great murder scene at a traffic intersection. The killer's driver blows his horn as pedestrians cross in front of several lines of stopped cars, including his as well as that of his target. This causes other drivers to honk their horns and in the ensuing cacaphony, the deadly bullet is fired and no one is the wiser. The camera cuts to a high angle shot as the cars begin to pull out of the intersection--all but one. Dr. Mabuse is (I think) the original man behind the curtain, and his creepy, transparent presence fades in and out of various scenes, impelling characters to action and infecting them with his anarchistic, criminal consciousness. This is the second in Lang's multi-decade Mabuse trilogy (and the better of the two I've seen), and it's absolutely worth a look, both for its cinematic craftsmanship (its creative use of camera, editing, and sound) and its social commentary on the absolute worst of times. I give it a B+.
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