User reviews

Hank (William Bendix) is a coal stoker on a ship that travels between New York and Lisbon. He is brutish, shouts a lot and enjoys fighting. When he has an encounter with Mildred (Susan Hayward) who calls him a "Hairy Ape", he is so enraged that he wants to square things with her. They land at New York and Hank traces her and confronts her in her apartment. Can they resolve their differences?

The film is much better in the second half as we see more from Susan Hayward's character. She takes the acting honours in the film. The scenes between her and Bendix are emotionally charged and she portrays an unlikeable wealthy spoilt brat very convincingly. Dorothy Comingore is also good as her friend Helen, who finally abandons her after Mildred's appalling treatment of her friend, Tony (John Loder). Bendix is good in the lead role but this film is ultimately let down by the noise levels. The shouty dialogue is very annoying and the film is occasionally inaudible because of the shouting. Thank goodness for the scenes with Hayward where we can involve ourselves with the dialogue more clearly. The film starts badly with lots of shouting and a fight in a bar that goes on for far too long. Unfortunately, half of the film is delivered in this intrusive way, so it's ultimately just not very good.

Back in 1922 The Hairy Ape premiered on Broadway and in the role played now by William Bendix, Louis Wolheim starred in the title role. It only had a run of about 3 months so it was not a big commercial success for Eugene O'Neil. Still even second rung O'Neil is a lot better than most.

But if you expect to see much of O'Neil here you will be disappointed. In fact you'll be down right discouraged when you see that O'Neil's play has been turned into a cut rate version of Of Mice And Men. Maybe John Steinbeck should have sued.

Knowing that Wolheim originated the role of the ship's stoker I can see why Bendix was cast. He certainly played a lot of blue collar types in his career. And in a straight dramatic no deviation production of The Hairy Ape he might very well have given an outstanding performance. He's not bad in this film.

All the social commentary of what O'Neil was trying to say about the failures of capitalism and the inability of socialism to provide a meaningful alternative are missing. The film is also updated to provide references to World War II, the ship is part of a convoy. What you're left with is the fact that some are born richer and better looking than others and never the twain shall mix.

Bendix as a stoker is a man happy with his lot and in truth it's the guys who are shoveling coal into the ship's furnace that do make her go, up on top the rest just steer. And it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Susan Hayward plays a rich society bitch who is teasing ship's officer John Loder for a little amusement even though her best friend and traveling companion Dorothy Comingore is in love with him. One day she wanders into the engine room and is so repelled by the dirty, sweaty, hairy Bendix that she tags on him the title of the film.

It bothers Bendix that this is how the world might see him even coming from this shallow society queen. Like Lennie from Of Mice And Men he's both repellent and pitiable. Unlike him he very well knows his own strength.

For what we get here both Bendix and Hayward deliver some fine performances. But if you want to see fine film productions of Eugene O'Neil I would check out The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night.

I never saw or read the Eugene O'Neill play of this title, but the movie is little seen so I jumped at the chance to view it. Despite many drawbacks, it is a curiosity and definitely worth a look. And it does contain an extraordinary scene, a moment that I feel must have inspired a greater and more famous play.

Among the more serious flaws are a too schematic, over-determined plot, sluggish pacing and murky photography. Obviously shot on a low budget by an 'independent' (or as close to it as one came during the studio days) none of this is a surprise. If the picture was good or had been more popular at the time, it would be better known today. The information provided by commentators here is interesting in the way it fills in the lefty backgrounds of many of the talents behind and in front of the camera, though all inexplicably fail to mention Dorothy Comingore. Famous for CITIZEN KANE, most of us have never seen her in any other picture and it has often been reported that her career suffered from the blacklist. This would make her, not director Santell or Bohnen perhaps this pictures' greatest victim of that injustice.

The liberties taken with O'Neill's play are pointedly sexual, and they make commercial sense, though they render the plot both melodramatic (in a different way than in the play) and ludicrous. Here, both Hank and Mildred are deeply affected by their first long look at each other, and the iconography of KING KONG and decades of melodramas have led us to expect Hank to menace and possibly rape and murder Mildred, the beautiful, disdainful rich bitch he cannot forget. Instead, there is wisdom, humor and a happy ending for all. But that isn't what the viewer is left with.

William Bendix makes a very strong impression as a bully with a frightening, unstoppable power and potential for violence. But his performance isn't quite as nuanced as his fan club here suggests. At the time, Susan Hayward made a bigger splash, garnering some good notices from critics and the film industry after languishing for years at Paramount as house ingénue and support to bigger stars. It was as a strong-willed, sometimes shrewish woman that she began to make her name, and here she is fresh, insolent and lovely, without the calculating hardness that had set in by the '50s. And Santell gives her (not Bendix) the single greatest and most haunting moment in the film and the best acting opportunity. It happens as Mildred enters the infernal engine room in her white dress and first spies Hank in all his grotesque power and virility. As she enters the closeup frame and the camera tracks in on her face, Hayward must suggest all that the script could not because of censorship restrictions. For that suspended few seconds we see she is transfixed, fascinated, aroused, repulsed -- disgusted as much by her own attraction to Hank as by his ugliness and brutishness. It is a revelation that seems to shatter both of them. The next scenes suggest they have had a kind of breakdown, that they are linked by destiny, are under a sort of sexual spell of what each represented to the other. This and not what follows provides the real emotional climax of the film.

It's an indelible movie moment, and the match-up of sheltered girl and animalistic male suggests the Blanche-Stanley relationship at the heart of the great A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. There too, the working class slob goads the archly feminine upper class lady. Except in STREETCAR it is the woman who is insecure and fragile and the man who is beautiful and arrogant. In THE HAIRY APE, rape seems a likely outcome because Santell daringly implies it is what both characters fear and long for. In STREETCAR it actually does come to pass and forms the climax of the play. It is as if Williams had seen HAIRY APE, was provoked, inspired and aroused by its one sexually galvanizing moment, but rethought the form and implications of the plot to serve his own art and suit his own demons

When I saw that this was playing on TCM, I was thrilled. I had never seen this movie before, and it seems impossible to find anywhere. As a Eugene O'Neill fan—I think he is the greatest American Playwright, ever--I was anxious to have this movie for my collection of films and movies based on his plays I have almost all of his major plays (often two versions) and some his minor ones.

My glee at finally having this movie, was short lived when I noticed that, although the film had been restored, its technical quality looks as if it hadn't been--and needed to be. It's hard to imagine what this film looked like BEFORE it was restored!!

In addition, there is very little similarity between O'Neill's play and this movie--either in plot or dialogue. Any similarity between the two is purely superficial, and the movie leaves out the GUTS of O'Neill's play altogether. Perhaps that's why the movie made such little sense and hardly held together at all. Although both the PLAY and the MOVIE stress the way that the classes view each other, O'Neill's PLAY (written in 1922) has a healthy dose of anti-capitalism and a bar speech suggesting Marxism, even if only by a comical drunk. The 1944 movie seems to have expunged any hint of these references.

Near the end of the PLAY, fellow workers tell 'Yank' to get even with Mildred's wealthy father by joining the Wobblies or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). No one mentions this to 'Hank,' (William Bendix): unlike in the play, Hank never tries to join the local I.W.W. (Even the protagonist's name is changed from 'Yank' in the play to 'Hank' in the MOVIE. The name 'Hank' could be short for Harry, suggesting 'Hairy' in the name of the play.)

In the PLAY, Mildred willfully does volunteer social work in Manhattan's Lower East Side and is ridiculed by her aunt for 'slumming.' In the MOVIE, Mildred (Susan Hayward), pretends to do social work--in Lisbon, while having fun instead. Here, her longtime friend and companion, Helen (Dorothy Comingore), is the real do good-er who chides Mildred for her not doing the work assigned to her in Lisbon. In the PLAY, Mildred's critic is her aunt, who says that her good works just make the lower class feel worse. Again, there are complete changes in characters and motives from the aunt in the PLAY to the friend in the MOVIE!!

In the PLAY, Mildred is NOT the vixen-like villain that she is in the MOVIE. True, Hank is arrested and jailed for a disturbance outside of Mildred's 5th Avenue apartment, but not for the same reasons as in the movie. After being jailed, he is put in cell alone, not with other prisoners who talk to him about labor unions (as in the PLAY).

In the MOVIE, after he is released from jail, he visits the gorilla cage, notices that the gorilla likes to smash things, and then sneaks into Mildred's apartment to 'smash her.' In the MOVIE, we don't know how he gets any revelation by 'seeing how the other half lives' and deciding that their lives are just like his. That is, if he doesn't 'smash her,' as his voice-over tells him to do, we don't know why. Most importantly, the final scene of the PLAY is at the gorilla's cage of the carnival. The MOVIE just kind of throws that scene in earlier--BEFORE he sneaks into Mildred's apartment to 'smash her.'

While there ARE SOME common scenes between the play and the movie, the MOVIE SO mixes up the intent of the PLAY that I am not sure why O'Neill--who must have had to agree with some of the movie content--even agreed to let the movie be shown as a representation of the PLAY.

Eugene O'Neill's play is used only as a frame for this production, with even the name of the eponymous lead being changed, and the action brought forward in time into the Second World (U-Boat) War period, wherein are added additional sub-plots, characters and dialogue not even remotely descended from the original. It is notable, therefore, that O'Neill's powerful brand of Expressionism is incorporated within the making of this work, by director Alfred Santell, displaying the strongest creative impulses in his career, by the splendid cinematographer Lucien Andriot, as well as production and art designer James Sullivan, and others. The result is a cultural hybrid, geared partially to please wartime audiences, but marked by the finest performance in the career of William Bendix; a singularly consistent and vicious interpretation by Susan Hayward; and by fine work from always reliable Dorothy Comingore and Roman Bohnen - the few scenes that Bendix and Hayward share are incandescent and directed brilliantly by Santell.

Originally, "The Hairy Ape" was a play by Eugene O'Neill that was set in the 1920s. However, in this Hollywood version, it's set during WWII (giving it a patriotic flair) and the original tragic ending was replaced by a happy one!

When the film begins, Hank (William Bendix) is a merchant sailor who acts an awful lot like Popeye. He's big on fighting and drinking and working--and not much else. However, when a dreadfully spoiled and awful rich woman comes aboard the ship where he serves, she sees his ugly mug and she calls him a 'hairy ape'. This obnoxious comment, surprisingly, causes an existential crisis in Hank and he spends the rest of the film trying to figure out who he is...and whether or not he really is just a hairy ape.

As I mentioned above, the ending was changed and so all the shock and sting of the original play is gone. This makes the story quite tepid and along with surviving copies being lousy, this makes the film one that you could just as soon skip. Not terrible but I sure want to see a version that sticks closer to the original.

By the way, at the beginning of the film, they are in Portugal. So why are so many folks actually speaking Spanish?!

The play THE HAIRY APE is a hundred years old. The movie was made during World War II, but the worldview behind the play comes from before World War I. The protagonist, an uneducated laborer, considers himself a man who belongs, because he keeps the machines running; but a pampered heiress is shocked at the look and sound of him and in his resentment he goes off in a self-defeating attempt to fight the world, by communism or whatever else it takes. Such a fight would be no fit material for a Hollywood movie during WWII, when the idea was that all sectors of society stand together in common cause. So in the movie, the heiress touches off a different kind of conflict-- a conflict between the common cause and her particular personal selfishness, which she supports with unlimited money and allure. Susan Hayward in full-out "divine bitch" mode adds to the conflict an element of sex that is foreign to the play. In a way, the importance that the out-of-reach woman assumes for the protagonist, and his ultimately ambiguous breakthrough meeting with her at the end of the movie, seem like a topsy-turvy version of CITY LIGHTS. William Bendix is Chaplinesque, too, as lead actor. His best scenes are scenes of silent emotion, and they are impressive. But whether or not it has to do with what we've absorbed from his usual casting elsewhere as a "good-natured slob" (to quote from THE GLASS KEY), Bendix doesn't seem to play the role with the brutal primitivity that the play implies.

Not only does the movie give a different slant to the play, it also leaves out scenes (such as the communist scene) and it inserts others (beefing up Susan Hayward's role). The result is a good, watchable film albeit a little old-fashioned, but it's shocking to think that someone could see the movie and assume it gives a reliable idea of the play.

A few comments concerning Roman Bohnen. He was indeed a solid character actor. He did considerable stage work with the Group Theatre and worked with The Adlers, Lee J. Cobb, Francis Farmer, and John garfield to name just a few. One would think with his early professional associations he probably was a little left of center. BUT, he made over twenty films after The Hairy Ape, including The Best Years of Our Lives and Brute Force, both major films with substantial roles for him. He died 24 February 1949, well before Senator McCarthy hit the political scene. McCharthy had nothing to do with HUAC (the House UnAmerican Activities Committee -- note House not Senate). The Black LIst was essentially to work of The John Birch Society with the willing complicity of Studio Heads on the movie front and Advertisers and sponsors on the TV front.

The pacing is perhaps a tad too relaxed just on account of how many scenes are allowed to linger too long, beyond what is necessary for the sake of the narrative. In fairness, the title at least makes use of some such instances to emphasize major storytelling elements: the unseemly beastliness of Hank, the astounding haughtiness and self-importance of Mildred, social classes, labor, the broader context of humanity and dire events amidst which the tale transpires. Still, in a runtime of only ninety minutes, the central conceit of the plot doesn't even come into play until after the film is already half over, which strikes me as curious. In the meantime, imbalanced sound design means that regular clamor in various scenes is all but genuinely hurtful for one's ears; overemphasis on Mildred is overbearing, as is the slightest contrived suggestion of romantic tinges; where a scene prominently capitalizes on characters smoking, they look so ridiculous that for a moment it's hard to even take the picture seriously.

I think the core ideas of 'The hairy ape' are terrific, and the screenplay boasts discrete elements that are especially biting - a lot of the dialogue, instances of the scene writing, the characterizations. The cast are outstanding, including not least chief stars William Bendix and Susan Hayward, but also players in supporting parts like John Loder and Roman Bohnen. The production design is outstanding, and I'm a fan of Lucien N. Andriot's cinematography. I do, in fact, like this. I also think that somewhere between the final form that the plot takes in writing, and director Alfred Santell's realization of it, the end result is pointedly imbalanced and a little misshapen. It seems to me that the wrong aspects are accentuated, and for whatever story the movie wanted to tell, I'm unsure if it successfully does so. As much as Mildred is spotlighted, she doesn't have a character arc; she's only a shrill, unlikable force of destruction. As much as we're to suppose Hank is experiencing personal revelations, every such instance is paired with subsequent illustration this is not true. When, within the last several minutes, the feature decides that there will be meaningful development in some capacity after all, the incidence is far too little, far too late, and excruciatingly unconvincing as a result.

Whatever complexities there are in the original 1922 play of Eugene O'Neill - ruminations on masculinity, industrialization, this and that - I just don't think they're present here. By all means, screenwriters Robert Hardy Andrews and Decla Dunning seem to be building toward something concrete and impactful with all the intelligence they otherwise pour into their effort. Yet it's a construction that with the laying in of one last brick sublimates the entirety into vapor instead of completing it. Whatever it was this Silver Screen adaptation wanted its 'Hairy ape' to be, I just don't see it. This is saved from sliding still lower in my esteem by the excellence of those facets that are genuinely done well; it's unfortunate that when all is said and done, I just don't think they amount to anything of real substance. Surely there's something I'm missing? Maybe I'm just not attuned to the proper wavelength in this case? I'm honestly kind of flummoxed. Usually in similar circumstances I find myself saying "I see what it was trying to do, and I just don't think it worked," but here, I really don't see what this movie was trying to do. I'm glad for those who get more out of this, but as far as I'm concerned this is a good swing and a weird miss.

Always liked Susan Hayward,(Mildred Douglas) who played the role of a gold digger, who would use men to her own advantage, get what she wanted and dump all the guys with a swift kick you know where. Mildred Douglas has to sail on a ship and meets up with Hank Smith,(William Bendix) a steam room coal shoveler who is hairy and she gets one look at him aboard ship and calls him a Hairy Ape. This comment brings a great deal of rage to Hank and Mildred becomes very fearful of this person and can hardly sleep at night. Hank even goes to a traveling Circus and views a large Ape in his cage and watches the Ape crush a rubber tire like it was a pretzel stick and gets the idea that he is going to smash Mildred's body just like the Ape was doing to the tire. There is a surprise ending to a rather entertaining 1944 film.

I dare anyone who watches this film to take his or her eyes off William Bendix even for a moment. For anyone who remembers him as the bumbling sidekick in those old war movies and the miscast role as Babe Ruth and humorous radio's Life of Riley - will be amazed at this multifaceted role as the stevedore shoveling coal who ends up showing more character in his little finger than all the rest. Why he was not even nominated for Best Actor category must have been a disappointment. I read somewhere Eugene O'Neill disliked the movie (maybe because it had a happy ending!)

I caught this film on channel 13 wee hours on a Sunday morning.

I caught this movie late one night a few years ago and was delighted to the brink of satiety with the performances of all, especially Bendix and Roman Bohnen. It's worth noting that Bohnen's performance was so theatrically fine that I didn't even recognize him before I saw the credits, a considerable suspension of disbelief given that he's my Mom's favorite cousin, my granny's nephew. (He died untimely, a few years before I was born, in his 40's, a victim of the McCarthy witch-hunt. He went in style: in the intermission of a play, backstage... just days before he was being forced to testify for the HUAC pogroms.) Bendix was superb, a shining presence of earthy hues, a Steinbeckian character, such as we see in the Cannery Row books. Bohnen was a superb supporting touch, at a time when he had not yet lost prominent roles due to blacklisting, and still able to do a very colorful turn as Bendix's sidekick.

I'll rate not only the movie, but the comments: the first one above is hardly generous and pretty moronic, as the movie is a class act. The one below it, sandwiched between the Moron's and mine, is right on, and shows a nice appreciation of the humor and sterling acting involved. Bendix's hulking pirouette and popping of the quarter down Hayward's dress, in the closing scene, is high comedy, from the low-born to the high, and anyone who would not laugh out loud is a goof.... (I've sung opera in national broadcasts and on a Grammy-nominated CD myself, on the EMI Classics label, as a chorister with a famous orchestra. That may not give me last word as a critic, but certainly enough to straighten out the sad little homeboy who slammed this neglected movie.)

William Bendix stars as a hardworking ship stoker in The Hairy Ape. He enjoys his job and is well liked among the crew. Susan Hayward, a beautiful socialite on board the cruise ship, is used to getting her way and manipulating anyone in her path. She sneaks below to watch the men working and sees William Bendix, sweating, dirty, shouting, and acting unlike anyone in her social circle ever has. She's obviously attracted to his masculinity, but when he senses this and starts walking towards her, she shouts, "Get away from me, you hairy ape!"

Susan's insult hurts Bill deeply, and the rest of the movie shows how her words affect him. He gives an emotional, heartfelt performance that shows the Susan Haywards of the world that "macho men" have feelings too. I kept thinking of Gerard Depardieu and how fantastic he would have been in the lead if Hollywood had made a remake in the 1980s or 1990s. Plus, since William Bendix usually played the sidekick, it's a great treat to watch him take the lead in a film and put so much talent into the role. If you're a fan of his, or Gerard's, or if you like social commentaries, check out this very well-acted drama.

Only the most ardent fans of the man best known to the nostalgia-minded as the title character in the radio/TV sitcom THE LIFE OF RILEY have any business viewing this weak Eugene O'Neill adaptation. The impact of its contemplative dialogue is drastically lessened by static characters and a frustratingly implausible ending. For example, are we to believe that Bendix can get away with breaking into Susan Hayward's apartment tote her around in his arms while leering perversely at her and dump her on the sofa with the close-up clearly showing she will doubtlessly be traumatized for life by this experience and then have the film end with him yucking it up with his fellow coal stokers? This damaging flaw could have easily been replaced by a complete plot rearrangement in which Bendix softens Hayward's callous snobbishness through a comically developed friendship/romance with her. Instead all we get are 90 minutes of Bendix grunting and leering in one of the most unsatisfying and disturbingly sexist pictures to come out of the Second World War.