CRITIC ESSAY
BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA 1952
29%
Directed by William Beaudine
Written by Tim Ryan
Starring Bela Lugosi, Duke Mitchell, Sammy Petrillo, Charlita, Muriel Landers
When I’m asked about my guilty pleasures, I often name this ultra-low-budget movie but hasten to add that I don’t feel guilty about enjoying it. It is, by any rational measure, a terrible film. To someone not steeped in B-movies of this era, it might seem like an incoherent message from Mars. But for some strange, perverse reason, its mere existence makes me happy.
The seventy-four-minute movie features a bargain-basement Martin and Lewis trapped on a jungle island with a mad doctor played by Bela Lugosi. If those ingredients don’t intrigue you, I suggest you move on right now.
Bela Lugosi was a Big Deal to me. Like many Baby Boomers, I came of age when the classic Universal horror pictures were first released to television. Seeing Frankenstein, Dracula, and their various spouses and offspring were key moments in my life as a film buff. Forrest J. Ackerman’s magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland sealed the deal, as it did for other Boomers like Stephen King and Steven Spielberg. It took impressionable readers behind the scenes of classic horror films and heightened our appreciation of such genre giants as Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, and, of course, Bela Lugosi.
I’d watch any movie he was in. That included a lot of junk as well as some unexpected gems like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which he played it straight and proved he still had what it took to be a potent and persuasive Count Dracula. Just four years later, Bela’s career was on the skids when he accepted an offer from fledgling producer Jack Broder to appear in a much lower-rent comedy called Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
Most lists of so-bad-they’re-good movies from this era cite Ed Wood’s immortal turkey Plan 9 from Outer Space, which also features Lugosi. I love that one, too, but I have a special place in my heart for the earlier production. Maybe it’s the combination of Bela and a carbon copy of my favorite comedian at that time, Jerry Lewis.
The title itself is irresistible—apparently the brainchild of Broder’s young son. The cast includes Charlita, a beautiful woman with a figure made for sarongs; Ramona the chimp (reportedly played by the same simian actor who was Cheetah in the Tarzan films); rotund Muriel Landers, a singer and comedienne who later worked with The Three Stooges; and the comedy team of Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo.
Remember, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the hottest act in show business, appearing on TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour and starring in a series of hit movies for producer Hal B. Wallis. Mitchell and Petrillo were unabashed clones of Dean and Jerry: a romantic crooner and a monkey-like, anything-goes comedian. This was fine for desperate nightclub owners who wanted a novelty attraction but lawsuit-bait for a moviemaker. Associate producer Herman Cohen told researcher Tom Weaver that Jerry Lewis had a heated meeting with Broder, and Wallis followed up to rattle the cage. (Broder would have been happy to accept a check from Wallis to burn the negative, but that transaction never came to pass.)
The storyline has Mitchell and Petrillo, using their own names, as performers who wind up on the jungle island of Kola Kola after stepping out of a plane by accident. On the secluded isle, they encounter two amorous women, one of them the daughter of the tribal chief. When she gets a look at them after they’ve cleaned up, she does a “take” and Petrillo says, “Lady, you got us mixed up with two other guys.” Indeed. They also meet a mad scientist in residence named Dr. Zabor, who is conducting experiments involving the evolution of apes into men. The chest-pounding animal is played by Steve Calvert, who purchased his customized gorilla suit from the legendary Ray “Crash” Corrigan.
Duke falls in love with the chief’s daughter, while Sammy is pursued by her heavyweight sister. (“Fat women” were a staple of lowbrow comedy back then.) Lugosi doesn’t show up until twenty-one minutes into the picture, and when the stars meet him, they can only think of the vampire who bites people’s necks. “Watch out for bats!” exclaims Petrillo.
The only problem with this purported comedy duo is that they aren’t funny. At all. While the toothy Petrillo inevitably summons up thoughts of Jerry Lewis, he is merely loud and obnoxious. He has all the superficial moves but none of the innate feel for comedy that made Jerry a sensation. Duke Mitchell is an adequate singer, but he’d never be mistaken for Dean Martin. The other secret of Martin and Lewis’s success was that Dean had superb comedy chops.
For a quickie feature made for $100,000 and shot at the General Service Studio in Hollywood, where I Love Lucy was filming next door, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla looks pretty good. Veteran cameraman Charles Van Enger, who started in the silent era, knew what he was doing, and so did director William Beaudine, whose career showed great promise in the 1920s but never took off. Instead, he became one of the most prolific B-movie makers in Hollywood. He has literally hundreds of features, shorts, and TV episodes to his credit. He’d worked with Lugosi several times before, including on a pair of Bowery Boys comedies for Monogram Pictures. (On the set of one such endeavor, Beaudine looked around late one night, saw the exhaustion on the faces of his cast and crew, and muttered aloud, “You’d think someone was waiting for this!”)
Even Duke Mitchell’s featured songs aren’t as cheesy as one might expect. Broder bought the rights to a pop standard, “Deed I Do,” along with an Americanization of a Latin hit, “Too Soon,” and hired young Dick Hazard to arrange and conduct them. Hazard had a long career as a pop and jazz composer and arranger.
The screenplay is credited to ex-vaudevillian Tim Ryan, who appeared in and wrote many B pictures, with additional dialogue supplied by frequent collaborator Edmond Seward and Leo “Ukie” Sherin, a comic crony of Bing Crosby who also served as dialogue director on the set.
Call it a curio, an oddity, a one-off, even a dud. All of those descriptions accurately describe this movie, which was retitled The Boys from Brooklyn a short time after its initial release. But it retains a strange pull for me, just because someone had the nerve to make it.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla… and many viewers won’t be able to help wondering why.