(Night #2 of the 12 Days of Ed Wood Acidemic Holiday Special)
"If you must go into the jungle, leave her there!"
FORWARD:
It all started with a 1930 faux documentary called INGAGI - which mixed real documentary-style African safari footage folded in with North American wildlife (armadillos, alligators, tortadillos) and staged footage of native (topless) women being offered up to lusty gorillas, and living like apes amongst the gorilla. A censor outrage (especially as it proposed to be a true documentary), today its relentless scenes of unconscious white man cruelty (shooting elephants, crocodiles, etc.) and shocking racism (with native children labeled 'pygmies' living "wild as march hares") is what outrages us (god knows what those poor black lady actresses were thinking at the time), but at the time it was the Christian protest against the depiction of gorillas who've mated with (and reproduced with) the local black women, and the women being topless, that caught in the censor's craw. Regardless or because of, it was a huge hit and very influential. Even those who didn't see it knew all about it and the lurid theme really caught on with the general public, dovetailing with anxiety about Darwinism and resulting in a host of old movies featuring gorillas lusting after white women (could they be next?) and a lot of work for stuntmen with their own gorilla suits like Ray "Crash" Corrigan. The women being white helped with the racism, and since the mating never came off, so to speak, things became less incendiary. Thanks to the code, these apes couldn't even get a fade-out with their sexy prey before being plugged by the timely hero. This was the law...
In 1956, Ron (MESA OF LOST WOMEN) Ormond struck a gong and declared: Law... no more and unleashed his UNTAMED MISTRESS (1956) on a slack-jawed public.
Velda (Jacqueline Fontaine) is the titular mistress, wild, savage, busty. She grew up with the apes in deepest Africa, was mated to their 'chief,' then 'rescued' by a Maharaja (Brian Keith) who relays the tale to a pair of white hunters after they find the pair of them in the 'jungle.' This allows Ormond to finally get to use a sizable chunk of an old Sabu film he made a few years earlier, for a flashback. Seems this maharaja came to Africa on a hunting expedition, didn't see a single animal, or Sabu, does find a a cursed shrunken head. Fortune gone, he roams the plains as a penniless freelance guide; 'rescues' Velda after killing her ape lover in a fight; and--well--getting badly injured. It must be that damned head! Lugging around Velda doesn't help either. Maybe these white hunters, since they're heading that way anyway... might return that cursed shrunken head to its point of origin, and to bring Velda back to her 'people'?
Before they leave, the 'raj cautions the age and species-appropriate Jack (Allan Nixon) against hitting on Velda: "someday her soft caresses could turn into hairy steel claws at your throat!"
Like all B-movie safaris, there's a lot of wandering around, pointing at mismatched stock footage (courtesy Ormond's neighbor's safari vacation movies) as characters narrate: "the zebra, as usual, was comical to look at...") A very familiar strategy of B-jungle movies, but no other narration of such footage had previously dared to ask: "Could natural selection influence the mating instinct of a girl who was brought up half-human, half-gorilla?" This one not only does, it answers.
Mellow but never dull, highlights include when a shrunken head magically flies into Velda's hands while she dances to music from some unseen diegetic source. She pulls up her skirt to show her plump things and twirls around the shrunken head like a hat dance sombrero (evoking Tarantella's dance in Ormond's Mesa of Lost Women). Footage of African tribes (and topless women, of course) mix with the old man prospector guides' taking pictures, and doing comical shimmy. Occasionally an evil white trader appear to swap some shots. Tip offs like collared shirts and baseball caps of the assembled natives at the "gorilla" dance, leading one to wonder what those modern revelers would think if they knew they would one day be standing in for headhunting savages who send one of their most beautiful maidens each year (topless, of course) to the neighboring gorilla tribe, to placate their bestial lusts."Every year Garuda come for sacrifice," explains Velda, "for girl!!"
"The natives consider it an honor," affirms Jack's guide. "Not one of the women have ever been found dead." Hmmm.
A real hit in the mid-50s southern markets, Untamed must have tapped right in to the sludgy vein of the miscegenation and anti-evolution anxiety that was fermenting the tightly sealed mash barrels of the bigot belt, leading eventually to the explosiveness of their Civil Rights era pushback. (Yes, I am king of the alcoholic metaphors) But now, we see a topless black woman, obviously contemporary performers, going by their perfect, large breasts (the well kept kind, not the droopy National Geographic kind) running around with the apes (all the old ape suits from the 30s-40s are here!) and waving stalks of wheat and doing nature dances like some Russ Meyer utopia.
Today, the sordid subtext of Untamed Mistress hits for different reason than nudity or racism or whatever made it a hit in the South at the time. Today it hits because of the screwy genius of Ed Wood colleague Ron Ormond, and his ability to deliver just about anything but boredom delivering on the promise of Mesa of the Lost Women. And because it goes all the way. I always rooted for the monster in movies as a kid. I was always sad and mad they died while the square jawed idiot hero got the girl. And they always died, and never got the girl.
Until Ron Ormond rang that magic gong, that is. Garuda (like Ramboona!) never fails.
Two years later: Ed Wood and Adrian Weiss (Jack's brother) sidestepped any racial subtext by pairing the gorilla with a civilized modern (white) woman, and made it less about 'did they or didn't they?' and more about reincarnation (the Bridey Murphy story was big at the time) and the idea that, in a past life, a western (white) human could have been "queen of the gorillas." Is that why she loves "fur-like material" (and is wearing one of Ed's angora sweaters) and married a Great White Hunter?
Welcome, then THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST (1958)!
Dan (Lance Fuller) is a big game hunter, (presumed) millionaire with an adult male gorilla (named Spanky!) in the cellar behind the secret panel in his boudoir. New bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) wants to meet him! The honeymoon is literally stormy, after Dan goes to sleep she sits up in their plush bedroom amidst the taxidermy wildlife, caressing her angora, smoking-as crashing thunder and flashes of lightning seem to power her psychic connection with Spanky (Ed loves storms as much as I do, see also-His Powers are lightnings!")--. As she dreams of the jungle, Spanky busts out, climbs the stairs and approaches her. She stares at him blankly, walking towards him, and all but falling into his capable arms. Dan wakes up in time to shoot Spanky right as he tears off her nightgown. (thankfully, Ed's angora sweater is undamaged).
She doesn't sleep well after that, but she's unhurt, not at all traumatized "Spanky never meant to hurt me," she tells Dan in her soft weird voice, that it was "almost like he meant to be kind.... tender." Dan is no prick though. He never belittles her over her strange connection with the jungle. Her never paternally dismissive in the way other great white hunters would be in other movies. Meanwhile she just keeps rubbing that angora fur sweater, staring into the fire, and whisper-talking about a 'weird sensation.'
As in all Ed's best scripts, even the most mundane details pulse with giddy wonder. Nothing is played for carny side show sleaze or cheap laffs; there's no camp here, no winking. Ed's compassion for his freaks is without measure and he takes it all seriously (and now in HD it looks fantastic). We still root for the ape to get the girl, and she's never less than respectful to both man and beast, even apologizing to Dan for causing him so much trouble after he has to shoot his Spanky. On the one hand, Dan is the romantic hero, but on the other, he keeps a giant ape a cage in the basement lit by torches and accessible via secret panel, straight out The Monster Walks or The Ape Man. It's hard not to root for any caged animal to break free and carry their captor's bride off into the night.
The next morning, Dan declares her receptive reaction to Spanky's caress in the boudoir was not "normal." He brings in a hypnotherapist friend who puts her under and learns she was once 'queen of the gorillas!' (a white gorilla - luckily Ray Corrigan is available, and used just such a suit in The White Gorilla and White Pongo, and of course Untamed Mistress).
Will an African hunting expedition honeymoon let her work it out of her system? Not sure why Dan thinks bringing her to "gorilla country" is a good idea. But for us, and for Laura, and Africa's single gorillas, it surely is ideal.
Then the film gets--- according to some critics, including monkey suit maniac John Landis (in his Trailers from Hell intro--a little dull. To represent Africa without having to leave California, Weiss folds in lots of tiger (!) footage from Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948) and safari shots from Bride of the Gorilla (1951) over Laura's dreamy narration. Maybe Landis doesn't care for such cost-cutting measures, but me, Ive always had a soft spot for them and the clever effort of the editing (when it's done well, as it is here). Though some of the driving and chasing down giraffes and antelopes scenes--evocative of Hatari--are kind of alarming, one may rest assured the actors were nowhere around any of these creatures. Furthering the abstraction, when Laura dreams her way into the jungle past, the animal footage is shown in negative and overlaid with hypnogogic spirals and Austin's pretty sleeping face. As her zonked hypnotized voice, Laura names each animal is it appears in the footage via her past life ape POV ("trees and vines don't seem to bother me. I push right through them.")
Ed spares us the usual cliches. Laura is no mere victim or savage wanton, neither category of standard 50s wives, i.e. either subservient or ball-busting. Instead she's legitimately capable and seems genuinely turned on by Africa ("the jungle really gets in your blood, doesn't it?"). She digs the danger and she doesn't mope over the animals being killed, nor try to rescue prey items from carnivores the way Tarzan's often does. Speaking throughout the movie in a cool sexual purr, she's both mature and open-minded, gentle yet reaching deep in herself in pursuit of that strange 'sensation,' heedless of the end result. And all throughout, Austin doesn't overdo it or make the character ridiculous, campy, or belittled, neither tamed nor untamed, but just present, receptive, mature, even when gushing in a rhapsody over her angora sweater ("soft like kitten's fur -- it felt so good on me") while under past-life hypnosis, or fighting back against.... someone.... trying to drag her away from someone else.. She's cool. Dan's cool, even with those haunted, sunken eyes. Ed's cool. We're cool. The tiger footage is very cool, rich in dark shadows, and with some excellent tracking shots as he stalks through the fonds. It's the coolest Africa yet, with Les Baxter mickey-mousing things, but never judging, never getting cutesy as baby chimps frolic or any of that other jungle movie nonsense. No endless treks with natives carrying boxes and getting scared by skulls on poles or endless ceremonial dancing, no bad white men looking for diamond mines. We go right from home to the plane to the jungle camp, and the focus is always on just Dan, wife, his turban-wearing servant who sounds like Dick Miller playing a Native American, a villager or two to get mauled. And that's it. Les Baxter pumps up the orchestration as the gorillas and/or tigers move in for the kill. In short, it's everything good and cool about 50s jungle thrillers and none of the bad or square. Maybe the haters like Landis only saw cropped blurry bad VHS prints? We're spoiled with how good it looks now. What I wouldn't give to see REVENGE OF DR. X get a new HD print from the negative, even keeping the wrong credits - they're part of the legend now.
So now you know. I would rather see Bride and the Beast twice than the entirety of the Captive Wild Woman trilogy once, so there you go. It's over too fast to get offended, and--if you're freaky deaky--it's a ride you'll want to turn around and get in line for again. I've already seen it like five times since discovering it a few months ago. Don't laugh at me for waiting so long!
And SPOILER - don't worry about human love and the conventions of matrimony winning the day here either. For we, the savage beasts of the twilight time, victories like these are too rare not to howl and beat our chests over. In the words of the narrator of. Glen or Glenda, "Little Miss Female, you must be quite proud of the situation".
Or in the diagnosis of the psychiatrist at the end of Beast, "weird."
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See also the Other 11 Nights of Wood, and Wood-esquery:
(And check out The White Gorilla, too! No bestiality but just as innovative use of stock footage and narration. )
You are a champ for peeping these. Bestial love can be unnerving.
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