by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran us a movie we’d
recently downloaded from archive.org, Gorilla Ship, a Ralph M. Like production from 1932 released
through the Mayfair studio, one of the short-lived indies that didn’t make it
through the Depression, and a company that seemed to make nothing but cheap,
tacky, formulaically plotted and indifferently directed movies. I had hopes for
this one, though, because of the director, Frank Strayer, who made some quite
interesting films in the early 1930’s (including two horror classics, The
Vampire Bat and Condemned to Live) before settling down at Columbia in 1938 as the
director of the long-running Blondie TV series. I also was curious about what sort of film it would be just
based on the title — I presumed it would be a movie actually involving great
apes, either gorillas that were on the ship and escaped and threatened passengers and crew or a ship that
sailed to a location with a large gorilla population and whose crew had some
nasty run-ins with them.
It actually turned out to be a blatant ripoff of Jack
London’s The Sea Wolf — George
Waggner (who later produced The Wolf-Man at Universal) got credit he didn’t deserve for an “original” story and
script that spent reel one establishing a romantic triangle between three
overly rich people who’d known each other since childhood: Philip Wells
(Wheeler Oakman), his wife Helen (Vera Reynolds) and her friend Dave Burton
(Reed Howes). Through a series of scenes expressing upper-class excess — first
at the golf course, then in Philip’s car (which looks big enough you could
imagine him throwing a party in its interior) and finally in Philip’s home, we
learn that Philip is pathologically jealous and is convinced Dave and Helen are
having an affair. The three agree to take a voyage on Philip’s yacht, and then
reel two suddenly cuts to a totally different story as we meet the crew of a ship captained by the
fearsome “Gorilla” Larson (Ralph Ince, top-billed) — George Waggner actually
had the chutzpah to rip off Jack London’s
last name for his fearsome, sadistic
captain, and merely changed the species of animal that gave him his brutish
first name! We quickly find out Gorilla Larson is an S.O.B. because he throws
his crew members down to the floor so often one of them is actually keeping a
tally of how many times he does it, and when his cabin boy, Benny (Ben Hall),
brings him his breakfast, he throws the coffee in his face because it isn’t hot
enough. (If he’d thrown the coffee in Benny’s face because it was too hot, that would have been even nastier!)
We watch
Gorilla’s ship sign up its crew (there’s an intimation that at least one of the
sailors was shanghaied) in the dark in what can only be described as
Murk-O-Vision, and then get underway — we finally see a stock shot of a four-masted schooner that
Charles and I have probably seen in a thousand movies before this one, and at
least that gets us literally out of the darkness into the light — and just when we’re beginning to
wonder where Philip, Helen and Dave are going to fit into this story, Gorilla’s
ship (whose name is never given in this film, though since Jack London called
Wolf Larsen’s ship the Ghost we can assume it’s called the Spectre or something equally synonymous) picks up a man in
a lifeboat and it’s Philip. Philip insists that he was out in his yacht with
his wife Helen and their friend Dave, the boat exploded and he was the only
survivor. Gorilla doesn’t believe him, and as Philip admits later, Gorilla is
right: Philip deliberately scuttled his own boat to murder his wife and her
(presumed) lover, but later on Gorilla’s ship picks them up as well — and it turns out Gorilla and Dave are
old friends (how on earth did they meet and get to know each other?) and Gorilla decides to knock
off Philip so Dave and Helen can be together. Only Philip steals a jewel box
belonging to Helen and convinces Gorilla’s crew that the captain is protecting
Helen only to get his hands on her
jewels, and he starts a mutiny, aided by one of the sailors who has the hots
for Helen and is convinced that Gorilla won’t let him rape her, but Philip
will. Eventually Gorilla subdues the rebellious sailors and regains command of
his ship just in time to mobilize the crew to fight a fire that’s started on
board, and he sends Dave and Helen away in a lifeboat.
Gorilla Ship has a few good moments — notably some nicely
atmospheric shots by director Strayer and cinematographer Jules Cronjager
(whose nephew, Edward Cronjager, also became a cinematographer and actually had
a far more illustrious career than his uncle!) — but mostly it was just boring,
an anemic retread of a great story (though it made me more curious than ever to
see the first sound version of The Sea Wolf, a 1930 film from Fox with Milton Sills as Wolf
Larsen and Alfred Santell directing; Sills died right after it was filmed but,
judging from the one movie of his I’ve seen — the 1924 version of The Sea
Hawk — he was a genuinely
charismatic and sexy leading man in an era, the 1920’s, when most of the male
stars were either beefy types like Thomas Meighan or Valentino-esque
androgynes; indeed, he looked enough like Errol Flynn it seemed appropriate
that Flynn would play his role in the remake, which almost totally altered the
plot but used some footage from the Sills version as stock) and as useless as
every other film I’ve seen that bore the Mayfair brand.
