The Ape Man [Impossible Voyages #21] – Blue Towel Productions

As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over last year, which has extended to this year (2026). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1942 to 1943 with this movie, #21 in this series.

The idea of people and apes turning into each other is so uninteresting to me that I never would have guessed I’d watch one film about the subject, let alone two. But that’s what happened now, thanks to the general popularity of the idea back in the 1940s, and the general unavailability of other options for this series. Last time, in Dr. Renault’s Secret, the story was about an ape that had turned into a human being (more or less). This time, it’s the opposite.

Oh, incidentally, my viewing of this movie came with a giant meta-twist, which I’ll get to at the end of the article below.

Spoilers Ahead

The Ape Man (1943)

Directed by William Beaudine

The Story:  Scientist James Brewster struggles to undo an experiment which has partially converted his body into that of an ape. To do this, he needs to get spinal fluid from live donors, which kills them. He is aided by his ghost-hunting sister, Agatha. When his colleague Dr. George Randall refuses to help and even threatens to inform the police, Brewster kills him. His acts are investigated by the reporter Jeff Carter and his new (female) photographer partner, Billie Mason, who is nearly killed by Brewster.

Oh, Brewster also has a semi-obedient ape that helps him commit his murders, and in the end it attacks and kills him, before being shot to death by the police. Jeff and Billie bond over the experience and appear on the verge to become a couple.

Starring: Bela Lugosi as Dr. James Brewster, Wallace Ford as Jeff Carter, Louise Currie as Billie Mason, Henry Hall as Dr. George Randall, and Minerva Urecal as Agatha Brewster. Emil Van Horn plays the Ape. Ralph Littlefield plays Zippo, a mysterious onlooker who pops up through the movie (see my big twist, below).

Comments: In the last couple of films that I’ve watched for this series (Dr. Renault’s Secret and Man Made Monster), I’ve poured out a lot of praise for the pacing. If a story’s doing a good job steadily unpacking its plot while presenting strongly delineated characters and interesting ideas or themes, it’s often pretty enjoyable even if what’s actually going on is pretty silly. Unfortunately that is not the case with The Ape Man. In this movie the plot is pretty thin, the characters never really get where you want them to in terms of depth, and the ideas, while potentially interesting, are underdeveloped.

The movie starts with the reveal that the famed scientist Dr. James Brewster, who it’s been reported has mysteriously disappeared, actually hasn’t disappeared. He’s just hiding out from the public because the experiment he conducted on himself was too successful. Exactly what this experiment was or why he was doing it is never really unpacked, but the unfortunate result is that now he’s turned himself into an ape man.

When we meet him, his sister Agatha is discovering this for herself, seeing him sleeping in a cage (which he has put himself into) with an actual ape–an ape that sometimes listens to his instructions but is sometimes also kind of antagonistic toward him.

Why he’s hanging out with this ape or how he has the ability to tell it what to do is also not unpacked…it’s just one of those things that happens when you turn yourself into an ape man, I guess.

The famed Bela Lugosi plays Brewster, and while it’s interesting to see the horror legend do almost anything, both his performance and his make-up here are spectacularly goofy.

In itself, that’s okay but character-wise he doesn’t have a lot do except be tortured…so tortured that he’s willing to kill people to get the spinal fluid he thinks will cure him. What exactly is it about him that makes him like this? Who knows, it’s just the way he is. Maybe it’s a family thing because his sister seems pretty okay with being an accessory, or at least with not trying to stop him.

(Oh, she’s a ghost-hunter too; just an extra little detail thrown in there for free. It’s really important, but it is a thing about her, which is nice because otherwise she’s a bit of a blank slate.)

Slightly less accommodating is his colleague, Dr. Randall, who keeps insisting that he won’t help Brewster, but also doesn’t do anything to stop him from committing murders, even after his butler becomes the first victim. (Actually, Dr. Brewster doesn’t commit the murders directly–he orders the ape, who I guess is evil, to do it for him, while he watches on with a kind of glee). When Randall finally grows a backbone, Brewster finally gets his hands dirty directly and breaks it for him.

Now while all this is going on, the other half of the movie’s runtime is spent with wise-cracking reporter Jeff Carter and his improbably beautiful new partner, photographer Billie Mason.

They start out trying to interview Agatha for the story on her brother’s disappearance, but then get suspicious and start trying to look into what is going on her house more closely. The movie tries to imbue personality into them by giving them a relationship full of fast-talking snark, but while this is lively it never really settles down into feeling like they are authentic people.

In the last act, they both sneak into the house independently in the movie’s last act, which results in Billie accidentally knocking Jeff unconscious, and then getting grabbed–damsel-in-distress style–by Brewster for a new batch of spinal fluid. She wakes up (she’d fainted, I think) in time for there to be lots of screaming and wrestling around, before she accidentally opens up the ape’s cage.

The ape turns out to be in a bad mood that day and goes after Brewster, killing him in a pretty exciting ape-on-apeman wrestling match.

Then it starts to go after Billie, but she manages to get away to where Jeff and the police are, and the police shoot the ape and all is well. The movie ends Agatha finding the dead body of her brother, and Jeff and Billie kicking off a new romantic chapter in their lives when Jeff turns to her, takes her in his arms and utters those classic words that every woman longs to hear, “You know, I ought put you over my knee and paddle you good!”

Yeah, it’s a bit dated, I guess, and clunky and awkward just like the whole film. And maybe it doesn’t really work out for the two reporters–the movie ends there so we don’t get to see what’s next, and Jeff is clearly punching above his weight-class with Billie. He’s a decent guy and all, but definitely not attractive on the same level that she is.

The End!

But wait, here’s my big meta-twist!

So I was watching this movie on Youtube, uploaded there by a channel called Sinister Cinema (it’s easy to look them up if you want, they were also the means by which I watched The World Will Tremble). There presentation of the film includes some comments from the host at the start and at the finish. I was sort of in a hurry to get into it so skipped the introduction. It was only when the movie was over that I realised that what I had seen was not the actual way the movie ended!

So it turns out that this YouTuber had actually edited the movie before sharing it, because there was something in the film that he just thought was bafflingly out-of-place, and he wanted to see if he could cut out this element and keep the integrity of the film, and in general make it better (he admits it doesn’t make it a “good” movie, although he liked it better than me). In the closing section of the video, he shared the movie’s original ending, plus all the little clips that he had cut out.

See, it turns out that there’s this character in the film that the credits refer to as Zippo (although his name is never given). In the version I saw he only appears at the beginning, talking to Jeff and giving him the tip that he should pay attention to Agatha Brewster as she arrives off a ship, because she’s connected to at the big story of Dr. Brewster’s disappearance. Zippo then leaves and isn’t heard from again.

In the original version of the movie, Zippo goes on to appear a bunch more times, generally lurking about on the fringes of the film, not interacting with the other characters very much. He is seen watching things from afar…like, through windows and from behind bushes and so on.

He even steps out of the shadows to talk to a woman who is heading down a street where Dr. Brewster and his ape are waiting for another spinal fluid victim, effectively saving her life.

It’s not until the end that all this is explained. In the movie’s final moments, when Jeff and Billie are having their little potentially romantic interlude, and Jeff says his “paddle you good” line, Zippo suddenly speak up and says, “Don’t be a chump!” Jeff looks over and is surprised to see the guy sitting in his car. He asks him who he is, and he replies, “Me? I’m the author of this picture!”

Then he turns to the camera and says directly to it, “Screwy idea, wasn’t it?”

And he rolls up the window upon which is taped the words, “The-End”.

A screwy idea indeed!

I can see why the Sinister Cinema guy didn’t like this inclusion, and the fact that I watched his version instead of the original one is my fault, not his (like I said, I skipped the introduction, and it was right there in the video description), and I certainly didn’t feel like going back and finding another upload so I could see the movie again, just so I could see the extra footage integrated in.

But as to whether the film is better without Zippo in it (mostly, I don’t know. It’s certainly more straightforward, but given that I didn’t really enjoy the main movie all that much, maybe having some of that extra weirdness might have piqued my interest a bit more.

Other thoughts:

• Sunshine Sammy Morrison, an original member of the Our Gang troupe of kids, has a small role as a copyboy.

• This is not the first film by director William Beaudine that I have ever written about on this blog. While I was tagging his name in this post, it became apparent that he’s been tagged on my site before. It turns out he directed the silent dramedy, Little Annie Rooney which I watched for a completely different series, almost five years ago (for me). It was released in 1925.