Dojo Classics - Gorilla At Large!

Gorilla At Large is an outstanding title for a movie. Alas this 1954 (originally 3-D) effort falls short of the stellar title.

The set up is pretty basic. A small circus features a somewhat weird headline act which combines a beautiful trapeze artist Laverne (Anne Bancroft) and a seemingly vicious gorilla called "Goliath" for a thrill spectacle to go along with the usual rides and whatnot. The place is owned and run by Cyrus Miller (Raymond Burr - not yet Perry Mason and doesn't even rate a mention on the posters somehow) who also it seems is married to  Laverne and there is history galore as the circus it seems is bristling with ambitions and dashed dreams.

Into this mix come two innocents, a pair of lovebirds named Joey (Cameron Mitchell) and Audrey  (Charlotte Austin) who are just using the circus to scare up enough money to get hitched and for Joey (a Marine vet) to go to college and get his law degree. But Laverne seems to have eyes for Joey's muscles much to the chagrin of her hubby who it seems might've once upon a time had the Joey role himself, as Laverne's former husband Kovacs (Peter Whitney) still works for the circus as Goliath's trainer.
 

Throw in a few more oddball characters including weirdly Lee Marvin in a comedy relief role, and you have a  brew which bubbles along while the movie tries over and over to attack your sense with some meager 3-D gimmicks (which by definition fall flat in my dvd versions...sigh). A few murders happen and Lee J. Cobb shows up to do his turn as a small town cop trying to find out what dark secrets lie beneath the big top, and after a while he starts taking direction from the erstwhile Joey. Why Cobb doesn't smack the smart alec kid is anyone's guess, but he doesn't and I guess we're supposed to root for Joey, but I find him mostly a doofus.

Goliath is played by George Barrows, a veteran ape actor who is not terribly convincing as an ape, but certainly puts on a pretty decent character.

Barrows had played "Ro-Man", the peculiar helmet-headed alien invader in the aptly named Robot Monster from 1953,

Gorilla at Large is harmless movie with a rather impressive cast but a seriously stupid mystery which makes less sense the more you think on it.

I watched Gorilla as Large on a Midnite Movies Double Feature. The other flick was a tiresome 1981's yawner titled Mystery on Monster Island which is not worthy of an individual review (at least by me). Aside from some brief scenes by veteran Peter Cushing the movie is a large waste of time. To be fair though it does contain some of the most laughable forced perspective giant monsters I've ever seen in a professional movie.

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The Savage Kane!

It's possible that Gil Kane is underrated. That seems impossible given the adulation he's gotten for his important work on Silver Age classics like Green Lantern and The Atom and lesser known Atomic Age efforts like Rex the Wonder Dog, but it's still likely that Kane  is still seen pretty much as an artist. Not unlike Jack Kirby, Kane was an artist who was bristling to break out of the confines of the ghetto of comic book production and takes his skills to new markets and larger audiences. To that end he produced two important contributions to comics lore -- His Name Is...Savage and Blackmark. Today we look at the former.

His Name Is...Savage was a magazine, not a comic. In the style of Warren Publications, this was an attempt to tap into a more adult audience, one not drawn to the spinner rack, but the newsstand proper. To that end the single issue has a very odd appearance with a painted rendering of the title character looking exactly like actor Lee Marvin.

That's largely because the pitch for His Name Is...Savage involved Lee Marvin to no small degree.  According to what I've read Gil Kane was much impressed by Marvin's movie Point Blank, a rugged and rather bizarre adaptation of the hard-nosed crime novel The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake). This movie tells of a rugged robber named Walker who is betrayed and left for dead by his wife and partner and spends pretty much the rest of the movie trying to get back what he's lost, which as we all already know is not possible. Walker as presented by Marvin is dangerous and cruel. It's no-holds-barred violence that Kane wanted to portray on the page. To read fuller review and a look at the later remakes of this classic go here.

In a story entitled "Return of the Half-Man" Kane tells the story of an agent who is activated to foil the plot of a deranged former general named Mace, who is the half-man of the story's title. Mace was in an explosion and much of him is now machinery. It's against this quasi-science fiction background that the noir-inspired Savage operates. He has a history with Mace and the government feels only he can penetrate the organization and forestall its plan to assassinate the President of the United States. We see Savage kick in teeth and kill with brutal intensity as he follows the menace to its dangerous core. Archie Goodwin was tapped by Kane to write the script to accompany his art and the words as well as the pictures move in concert to a fatal finale which is worthy of the set-up. To read this classic go here.

But His Name Is...Savage was by reports a sales failure and no further installments were forthcoming. Fantagraphics reprinted the magazine with a more polished type in 1982. In 1986 in an issue of Anything Goes from Fantagraphics Kane returns to give us a silent vignette featuring Savage. It's a mere glimmer of an adventure and while well crafted is only a coda to the one and only Savage story published for the first time so many years before.

Gil Kane was an artist, with a style and panache unlike any other, but he aspired to be more. It's a shame for the industry that he could not achieve his goal in any lasting way.

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