"If you must go into the jungle, leave her there!"
In old movies, gorillas (i.e. guys in gorilla suits) do many things: they break out of cages, creep behind secret panels, and--in a grand burlesque of controversial Darwinism-- try to mate with human women, Gorillas never actually get to mate with human women, though. Someone always shoots them first. That was the law.
In 1956, Ron Orman struck a gong and declared: Law... no more!
Ron (MESA OF LOST WOMEN) Ormond's UNTAMED MISTRESS (1956) is the film. Velda (Jacqueline Fontaine) is the girl. Velda grew up with the apes in deepest Africa, was mated to the chief, then 'rescued' by a Maharaja (Brian Keith). A sizable chunk of (quickly forgotten) filler from an old Sabu movie tells how he came to Africa on a hunting expedition, fell for a local girl who didn't like him, heard a jungle boy named Sabu was tipping off the animals (but never saw him - part of the deal Ormond made for the footage), lost his fortune when he obtained a cursed shrunken head; then he roamed the plains as a penniless freelance guide; and then found Velda after killing her ape lover in a fight. Now he's dying and asking these young hunters to return a cursed shrunken head to its point of origin, and to bring Velda back to her 'people.' Velda no like him.
All caught up, the 'raj cautions the age and species-appropriate Jack (Allan Nixon) against Velda (they've already fallen in love, sort of) : "Do you not believe," he cautions, "that someday her soft caresses could turn into hairy steel claws at your throat?"
Like all B-movie safaris, there's a lot of wandering around, pointing at mismatched stock footage (courtesy Ormond's neighbor's vacation movies) and providing narration travelogue ("the zebra as usual was comical to look at..) But no other narration of such footage had previously dared to ask: "Could natural selection influence the mating instinct of a girl who was brought up half human, half gorilla?"
When things get dull Velda dances; a shrunken head magically flies into her hands like a gift from the trees. She pulls up her skirt to show her plump things and twirls around the shrunken head. Where is her music coming from? Later, natives attending a tribal dance in the stock footage wear shirts and baseball caps, clearly modern Africans out on the weekend; one wonders what they'd think if they knew they were portraying headhunting savages who send a beautiful maiden each year to placate the lusts of a neighboring gorilla tribe."Every year Garuda come for sacrifice," explains Velda, "for girl."
"The natives consider it an honor, declares Jack's guide, adding "none of the have ever been found dead." Hmmm.
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Whatever your thoughts on just what that means, it's worth sticking around for the sudden, lurching, super WTF finale. In fact, it's worth all of the bad movies you ever watched. All the times you felt bad for the gorilla dying at the end --paid in full!
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Both films are currently on Prime, and if you don't have it, they're still floating around...You'd be a fool to miss them. Come to think of it, you'd be a fool to see them, too.
"The natives consider it an honor, declares Jack's guide, adding "none of the have ever been found dead." Hmmm.
A hit in the mid-50s southern markets, Untamed must have tapped right in to the sludgy vein of redneck miscegenation and anti-evolution anxiety that was fermenting in advance of the Civil Rights era. Today it works for a different reason. Personally, I love it, because of all the time I spent as a child rooting for the bad guys in my afternoon cartoons (namely Speed Racer), day-after-day I tuned in, thinking this time they'll win, just from the law of averages. Finally my mom could stand it no more - and told me the facts - the bad guys would never win, ever.
I was devastated. I never watched Speed Racer again. Well, after that, after watching King Kong a hundred times and always the same sad ending, at least I was prepared. With Untamed Mistress, I feel the same surge of joy I hadn't felts since Django Unchained.
Two years later: Ed Wood and Adrian Weiss (Jack's brother) sidestepped unconscious racial subtext by introducing civilized modern woman and ape in a well turned-out mansion boudoir and made it less about did they or didn't they and more about reincarnation and the idea that, in a past life, a human could have been "queen of the gorillas."
Dan (Lance Fuller) is a big game hunter millionaire with an adult male gorilla (named Spanky!) behind the secret panel in his boudoir. New bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) wants to meet him! The honeymoon is literally stormy, with crashing thunder and flashes of lightning. Dan's study is laden with taxidermy animals and animal skin rugs. Laura has a striped angora sweater that she rubs a lot, as if chilly, but in a languid, beguiling way. She and Spanky hit it off. She seems psychically connected to him; during her fitful sleep that night, she dreams of the jungle, as if channelling Spanky and encouraging him to break the bars and come to her. Spanky does. Dan wakes up in time to shoot Spanky right as he tears off her nightgown. She doesn't sleep well after that, just keeps rubbing her angora fur, and whisper-talking about her 'weird sensation.'
Everything takes on a sinister sense of dislocated giddy wonder when Ed Wood is writing the dialogue. He makes the proceedings as resonant with B-movie and personal touches as he can; Spanky is kept in a basement lit by torches and accessible via secret panel. Nothing is played for carny side show sleaze because Ed's compassion for his freaks is without measure. We root for the ape to get the girl from the beginning. Dan never does anything evil, but we can't help but feel there's something 'off' about him, something akin to Herb Evers in Brain that Wouldn't Die.
Next morning, Dan and Laura need to talk about this like adults. Dan declares her reaction to Spanky's caress was not "normal." She keeps remembering the jungle, the animals. A hypnotherapist announces Laura was, in a distant past life, 'queen of the gorillas!' Will their already scheduled honeymoon on African safari let her work it out of her system? Not sure why Dan thinks bringing her to the land of the apes is a good idea. But for us, and for Laura, and Africa's single gorillas, it surely is ideal. The animal trainer male / animal female pair bond archetype goes way back, from Marnie to Captive Wild Woman. It usually only ends one or two ways. But there is yet a third.
Laura worries: "Dan will think he's married to an idiot or something."
Then the film gets--- according to some critics, including monkey suit maniac John Landis--a little dull. To stand-in for Africa, Weiss folds in lots of tiger (!) footage from Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948) and safari shots from Bride of the Gorilla (1951). Landis doesn't care for such cost-cutting measures, but me, Ive always had a soft spot for scenes of actors shooting at stock footage. Though some of the driving and chasing down giraffes and antelopes scenes--evocative of Hatari--are kind of alarming, one may rest assured the actors were nowhere around any of these creatures. Furthering the abstraction, when Laura dreams her way into the jungle past, the animal footage is shown in negative. This is even better since we can just see hypnogogic spirals, Austin's pretty sleeping face, super-imposed over it; Laura's zonked hypnotized voice names each animal is it appears in the footage as we see her past life ape POV ("trees and vines don't seem to bother me. I push right through them.")
Ed spares us the usual cliches. Laura is no victim or savage, just legitimately capable and turned on by Africa ("the jungle really gets in your blood, doesn't it?"). She digs the danger; she doesn't mope over the animals being killed, nor try to rescue prey items from carnivores the way Tarzan does. Speaking throughout the movie in a cool sexual purr, both mature and open-minded, sexy yet reaching deep in herself in answer to some strange 'sensation.' Austin doesn't overdo it or make the character ridiculous, campy, or misguided. And marvel at how Ed slips in a rhapsody over his "angora sweater" into her hypnotized ramblings ("soft like kitten's fur -- it felt so good on me.")
I'd rather see Bride and the Beast twice than the entirety of the Captive Wild Woman trilogy once, so there you go.
Both films are currently on Prime, and if you don't have it, they're still floating around...You'd be a fool to miss them. Come to think of it, you'd be a fool to see them, too.
Darwin, you old so-and-so, you must feel pretty proud of yourself.
"You'll feel rested," notes the hypnotist, "but you'll want a cigarette."
"You'll feel rested," notes the hypnotist, "but you'll want a cigarette."