If your idea of endlessly re-watchable half-asleep outsider gold /accidental surrealist multi-meta collage is the same as mine--which seems almost impossible--viddy well the THE WHITE GORILLA (1945), streamable everywhere. and don't even bother trying to figure out what's going on with all the flashbacks and animal reaction stock footage cutaways. It's better that way. Just find the best transfer you can, wait until you're nodding off in your easy chair with slippers, loyal wolfhound, glass of port, and unlit pipe at your side, and stream away (you can find it on my YouTube mix Vintage Jungle Madness). Why? Low stakes, a pleasing narration, and the gorillas, and the liberating sense of 'seeing the seams', whereas the tools of covering lack of budget are revealed. Stock footage, foreign releases, public domain classics, home movies, silent documentaries--whatever is in the fridge, so to speak, can become integral to some story tellable only by the few actors and sets you have at your temporary disposal. When it 'works' it's priceless, that sense of found object outsider art you might get at the gallery show at a mental hospital.
Ed Wood validating his cross-dressing via blue collar conversation heard over industrial footage of steel girders pumping white hot out of the forge, or building a movie around a home movie of Bela Lugosi sniffing a flower outside his house for Plan Nine--it's like poetry structured from whatever word magnets happen to be on the fridge. And what about the way Game of Death II composites a Bruce Lee performance out of classic footage (stretching back even to when Lee was a child actor), outtakes from Enter the Dragon, and even Lee's actual funeral? Ingenious, even if it, or especially because, it never quite gels. And Curtis Harrington Queen of Blood with young pre-fame John Saxon and Dennis Hopper as astronauts encountering a a martian queen conjured up via footage from a Russian sci-fi film? Sublime! Peter Bogdanovich making Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women from a different Russian sci-fi film by folding in new scenes of Mamie Van Doren in a blonde wig and glittery silver hip huggers? I'm floating on a lava sea of Lady from Shanghai references. And like Ed Wood's BRIDE AND THE BEAST (1) and the Luigi Cozzi GODZILLA Redux, of late, two composite gems I keep on my emergency dial, so to speak. I've recently found a new favorite... alas it's barely an hour long. Would it was a million.
THE WHITE GORILLA
(1941) Dir. Harry L. Fraser
Starring Ray "Crash" Corrigan
"The jungle.... weird...."
Godardesque meta manna cascades like a waterfall, thundering library stock music crashes and recedes in glittering harp glissandos over the credits proudly kicking off the post-modern edge with a credit that says "An All-Star Cast." We know right away that the normal handrails of narrative are going to be coming and going. And then there is Ray Crash Corrigan"--usually inside a gorilla suit or doing stunts-- stars, narrates, and probably fights himself. He's kind of got an Ed wood drinking buddy vibe. He's no milquetoast. He's played gorillas in every movie ever made, and here is in a gorilla movie, as himself. We're off and walking! We cut through the usual roster of dangerous African animal stock footage as his narration sets the scene.
He plays Steve Collins, a chewed-up guide who stumbles out of the African jungle and into the trading post (the actual only non-stock set) where three white guys are drinking and kvetching about jungle noise. Naturally after a drink to steady himself he starts with his tale of the doomed safari he was guiding, and how his client, Bradford "wouldn't listen" to him. And would always camps near a stream ("always near a stream,"--an odd detail, he'll mention again, though we never see one, or even a camp). And so we flashback to the meat of the movie, highlights lifted from a silent serial from 1927' Perils of the Jungle. Silent Tarzan Frank Merrill as handsome Bradford, sporting an arm band tattoo and getting into all sorts of scrapes while searching for 'the Cave of the Cyclops' (just a statue, alas). We get lots of lions try to break through the cabin door, while sad-eyed apes look on, or charging elephants, angry natives, a little jungle boy (it's all good cuz he's fiercely Hawksian deadpan rather than Sheffield cutesy) and--most anachronistic of all--tigers. Bradford even rescues a comely (white) daughter from a marauding hippo!
 |
| Steve, wishing he could help |
These scenes are all narrated by Steve and peppered with regular cutaways of him peeking out from behind bushes or up in trees, periodically offering rationalizations like "with the lions between my hiding spot and the endangered party, I was powerless to help" to explain why he never shares their frame. Like a good guide that he is, he merely bears witness.
Yes, he's less of a fighter and more of a rationalizer, and Corrigan does his weirdest bit of acting when spying his nemesis the White Gorilla through the trading post window back in the present, while about to take a shot of whiskey. Instead of pounding it to steady his nerves like a real man he lets it slip through his fingers and starts this intense little pule / whine of "there it is," almost like he's in a long bathroom line, barely holding it in. Always near a stream.
Since Corrigan is usually the one growling and snarling (he plays every gorilla in 40s movies), it's surprising to hear his soothing, masculine and low-key voice that fits him perfectly. He's kind of a beefy, normal looking guy, but the lyrical language and conversational way he speaks (in a kind of repetitive hypnotic style where the key word of the previous sentence is the first word of the next) creates a pleasant kind of trance. Distant jungle noises outside the trading post, the nature footage, and the rich music, and foley for the silent film flashbacks, all run under his voice, like soothing 'green noise.'
It's only an hour long, alas, with absolutely zero resolution on the fate of Bradford and company, but they can barely remember them by then. Case closed. Their likely grim fate, better left unsaid. The white gorilla is shot and laying out on the lawn Steve is going home to America, rationalizing once again in his conversational tone:
"After all, we have no right to the jungle. It belongs to the natives, and the animals, not the white man. It was theirs before we came, it should be theirs now."
t. And his narration even continues, no longer bearing witness, but imagining the jungle giving the gorilla a kind of animal memorial. It almost makes me cry, every time, if I'm still awake by then. This was an age of unconscious colonial Considering the blithe unconscious colonial racism, animal cruelty of 99% of all other jungle movies from that era, it's almost woke. Not that you'll be by then, if you watch it late at night in bed like I do, always near a stream.
NOTES:
1.Corrigan knows, he and Wood were apparently drinking buddies. And you could always find old Crash at a table at the Brown Derby, quietly drinking and waiting for someone to stagger over and ask to rent out his gorilla for some low budget opus (it appears in Bride and the Beast as does Corrigan's other suits. If you're wondering why there are so many gorillas running around in those movies, you know who to thank!'
2. See The Love Witch for my shocking true story.
1.I can only imagine how long the filmmakers must have tried to get the kid up on the elephant before this compromise