Following in the footsteps of Boris Karloff and his resurrected dead man films (THE WALKING DEAD, THEY MAN THE COULD NOT HANG, BEFORE I HANG), Paramount decided to try their hand at the gangster/horror genre with 1941’s THE MONSTER & THE GIRL. This time rather than bringing a corpse back to life, a doctor transplants the brain of a wrongly executed man into a gorilla. The gorilla then goes on a killing spree murdering the mobsters responsible for his frame up and for turning his sister into a prostitute. This plot also borrows a key element from Karloff’s 1936 British film THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND.
At the time this movie was made, brunette Ellen Drew was being groomed for stardom at Paramount. However those plans were scuttled after the success of THIS GUN FOR HIRE in 1942 which made a star out of Veronica Lake who became the blond prototype for film noir. Drew never became a full fledged star and by 1944 she was working in B movies at RKO. Although MONSTER was a B movie, it had quality production values and an above average cast with Paul Lukas, Marc Lawrence, Gerald Mohr, and George Zucco. The film was well directed by Stuart Heisler and has atmospheric photography from Victor Milner.
THE MONSTER & THE GIRL ran into censorship problems in 1941 for what was perceived as a “white slavery” angle concerning the treatment of the sister at the hands of gangsters (she unknowingly takes part in a mock marriage before being turned into a “party girl”). The Production Code also didn’t like the implication that the jury’s verdict may have been influenced by criminals. Reviewed at the time as “one of the strangest pictures ever made”, today MONSTER is fun to watch and at 64 minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. The picture quality of the disc is excellent and the sound is above average for a movie of this vintage.
The Capsule Critic 