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By Hank Reineke

On 14 April 1940, W. Ray Johnston, the President of Monogram Pictures Corporation, was resting at the Baker Hotel in Dallas, Texas. On the following day he was to meet with Mpc’s company shareholders in the hotel’s ballroom. The New York Herald Tribune would report that Monogram, later lovingly christened the most famous of Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” studios, was to announce their ambitious 1940-1941 program of fifty films: twenty-six features and twenty-four westerns. One of the films announced for imminent production was The Ape, an adaptation of the Adam Hull Shirk 1927 stage play.

Johnston announced that big screen’s preeminent boogeyman, Boris Karloff, was to star in their horror new vehicle. Karloff would be cast as an obsessed scientist driven to madness and murder in pursuit of an otherwise noble goal. For Karloff’s fans, there was something familiar with this scenario.

The Ape

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1940 / 62 min. / 1:33:1

Starring Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon

Cinematography by Harry Neumann

Directed by William Nigh

William Nigh directed over 40 silent films before he signed on for The Ape, which might account for this 1940 film looking far older than its release date—the staging is rudimentary and the dialog so simple that intertitles would convey the action with all its meaning intact. Curt Siodmak’s storyline could have been plucked from a different era too—in particular 1931’s City Lights in which a flower girl regains her sight thanks to Chaplin’s perennial outcast, the little tramp. In The Ape the misfit is Boris Karloff as a scientist who helps a lame girl to walk—and though this low budget melodrama can’t compete with Chaplin’s sentimental masterpiece, like many silent era films, it has its own unvarnished appeal.

Karloff plays Dr. Adrian,...

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