Bride of the Gorilla

Curt Siodmak – 1951 – USA

Curt Siodmak directed a few films but was much more successful as a screenwriter, known for writing highly intelligent and philosophical B-movies like The Wolf Man (1941) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), including a couple directed by his own brother and fellow German émigré, the fine director Robert Siodmak.  Death, man’s dual nature, and his complicated relationship with his primordial past are recurring themes in Siodmak’s stories, and this film returns us to the basic concept of The Wolf Man, except expressed in a more clearly psychological – rather than literal – way.  Raymond Burr plays a brutish plantation manager in South America who is cursed by the black-magic-practicing mother of a girl he has jilted; cursed to see himself as mutating into an ape, though he remains a man in the eyes of everyone else.  Off he goes into the dense jungle every night to run free, hunt and terrorize the locals with his trail of torn animal carcasses.  The production values are thin, of course, but as in any Siodmak screenplay, it’s really about the existential ideas that linger after the apparent low-budget silliness is over.  Lon Chaney, Jr. (Lawrence Talbot himself) plays the local police captain.