Thrills and chills mixed with comedy has been a cinematic staple since movies began—even before, as optical toys and magic lantern shows used ghostly specters and apparitions to startle and amuse their audiences. The first person to use macabre imagery for comic effect in a wholesale way with films was French pioneer Georges Méliès. Characters would disappear and reappear in puffs of smoke, disembodied heads grew to enormous size and exploded, and Arctic giants ate and regurgitated explorers. Méliès’s films teemed with demons, dark caves, animated skeletons, ghosts, and mutilations and, while essentially comic, were grotesque, gruesome, and always surreal.
Soon gothic stories such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein were adapted for the movies with spoofs often following, adding laughs to the thrills. Jekyll and Hyde was a particular favorite to parody, with the funniest take-off a solo Stan Laurel playing rude tricks on innocent British bystanders in 1925’s Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride.
In the mid-1920s, Hollywood embraced the horror comedy when films about mysterious doings in spooky old houses became the rage. Most were adapted from popular stage plays of the day. The prototype for this kind of show was George M. Cohan’s Seven Keys to Baldpate in 1913, but the 1920 hit The Bat really jump-started the genre. The main ingredient in these plays was some creaking abode, complete with secret panels and passageways, lights flickering on and off at will, claws protruding through solid walls, and, of course, murder. Movies soon chimed in with adaptations of The Monster (1925) and The Bat (1926), and the floodgates opened.
The Gorilla started life on Broadway in 1925. In addition to the above mix of regular Old Dark House ingredients, playwright Ralph Spence added a killer gorilla and a pair of vaudeville-style comedy detectives. The movie version upped the artistic ante with the stylish and atmospheric cinematography of Arthur Edeson. Borrowing from the bravura camerawork of German Expressionism, Edeson deployed a gliding camera and looming ape shadows for a feeling of creeping dread and the hint of menace lurking around every corner.
Edeson had had some practice for The Gorilla when he shot The Bat the year before and went on to photograph the horror classics, Frankenstein (1931) and The Invisible Man (1933). Having begun his career in 1914, Edeson was regular cameraman for Clara Kimball Young throughout the 1910s and later for Douglas Fairbanks on The Three Musketeers (1921), Robin Hood (1922), and The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Edeson earned three Oscar nominations and accumulated an impressive list of credits that includes Stella Dallas (1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), They Drive by Night (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Casablanca (1942) before his retirement in 1949.
Director Alfred Santell began in silent comedy, first as a gagman and scenario writer at Keystone and American. After helming Ham and Bud one-reelers starring Lloyd Hamilton and Bud Duncan at Kalem, he bounced around all over, directing shorts starring Fay Tincher and the Hallroom Boys, among others. He had even directed a real simian, orangutan star Joe Martin, in a series of Universal shorts. His first feature was Beloved Rogues (1917) with the vaudeville team (Clarence) Kolb and (Max) Dill, and by 1924 he’d graduated to star vehicles on the order of Orchids and Ermine (1927), with Colleen Moore at the height of her fame. With sound, he continued to direct a mix of both dramas and comedies. One of his last was an adaptation of a Eugene O’Neill class-conscious play, The Hairy Ape (1944).
Quite a number of The Gorilla’s cast members came from the world of silent comedy, in particular the bumbling detectives played by headliners Charlie Murray and Fred Kelsey. Murray had been a Mack Sennett star for more than ten years and, in the 1920s, was in demand as a prototypical Irishman. Murray’s teammate Fred Kelsey was the perennial flatfoot of silent and sound movies—whenever a police sergeant, chief inspector, or house dick was needed, Kelsey was your man. From 1914 to 1920, Kelsey was actually a busy director for Thanhouser and of Harry Carey westerns at Bison, but once he settled behind a badge on screen, he worked as an actor until his death in 1961. The Gorilla ended up the biggest role of his career, but he had been a memorable presence alongside Charley Chase, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and Joe McDoakes for more than thirty years.
Leading lady Alice Day plays The Gorilla’s young heiress Alice Townsend. She was discovered by Mack Sennett (at the same time as her sister Marceline) and started as a love interest for Harry Langdon. With 1925’s Tee for Two, she had her own series of two-reelers. Billed by Sennett publicity as “a lump of sugar in the cup of happiness,” Day spent three years in shorts like Hotsy Totsy (1925) and Kitty from Killarney (1926) before moving on to features as an all-purpose light comedy ingénue in The Smart Set (1928) and Little Johnny Jones (1929), among others. Although she made an easy transition to sound, she retired from the screen in 1932.
Syd Crossley and Aggie Herring, who play the butler and the cook at the Townsend mansion, were longtime comedy supporting players. The British-born Crossley worked frequently for Stan Laurel in shorts like Monsieur Don’t Care (1924) and Starvation Blues (1925) and seemed to have the butler and valet market cornered in features like Play Safe (1927) and A Perfect Gentleman (1928). Aggie Herring was a comic foil for twenty- five years usually as a battle-axe or busybody in the films of Olive Thomas, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, and Jackie Coogan. Although French-born Gaston Glass was mostly known as a leading man in dramas, he also appeared in comedies like Santell’s Sweet Daddies and spent time at Hal Roach’s Lot of Fun, supporting, for example, Max Davidson in Jewish Prudence (1927). He later became a steadily-working production manager.
The rest of the cast was made up of other long-lived Hollywood regulars. Walter Pidgeon is young and handsome here as Stevens, Townsend’s choice of suitor for his daughter. He appeared in films from 1926 to 1977 and is best-remembered for his work in the 1940s: John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941) and his screen partnership with Greer Garson for Mrs. Miniver (1942) and seven more titles. Other of his memorable roles include Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet (1956) and Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl (1968). Character player Claude Gillingwater specialized in crusty old crabs whose heart was won over by movie tykes like Jackie Coogan and Shirley Temple. After a distinguished stage career, he made his film debut in 1918 and worked nonstop until 1939 in pictures like My Boy (1921), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), and Poor Little Rich Girl (1936).
The miserly millionaire’s brother is played by Tully Marshall, another character actor with remarkable longevity. After entering movies in 1914, he played prominent roles for a host of directors ranging from D.W. Griffith to Victor Sjöström. He was a grizzled frontiersman in James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon and the disappearing lawyer in Universal’s Old Dark House classic, The Cat and the Canary (1927). He worked up until his death in 1943, playing one of the well-meaning professors in Ball of Fire (1941) and the capitalist mastermind of This Gun for Hire (1942). Last, but not least, is John Philip Kolb, a generally uncredited bit player of the 1920s, who may have had his largest screen role as the titular primate.
After the popular success of The Gorilla, the Old Dark House films continued unabated through the end of the silent era and carried far into the talkies. The Gorilla itself had two sound remakes: 1930’s with comics Joe Frisco and Harry Gribbon as the detective duo, which morphed into a trio for the 1939 version starring the Ritz Brothers and directed by Allan Dwan. Laughs combined with chills have been winners at the box office ever since. Some later examples include The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Men in Black (1997), and Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Sadly, today’s special effects capabilities have removed much of the atmosphere from the modern laugh thrillers. With CGI able to create almost anything imaginable, it’s made obsolete the suggestive camerawork, sly wit, and sheer fun of a picture like 1927’s The Gorilla.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius