• Directed by Harry Fraser
• “From a Story by Monro Talbot” (Fraser)
• Starring
  • Ray Corrigan
  • Lorraine Miller
  • George J. Lewis
  • Francis Ford
  • Charles King
• Produced by Louis Weiss and George Merrick

Ray “Crash” Corrigan had a two-track Hollywood career. On the one hand, he made a living at cheap western and adventure features and serials through the ’30s and ’40s, often as characters named, oddly enough, “Crash Corrigan.” On the other hand, he was the go-to guy for man-in-a-suit ape roles; he had had a couple of costumes constructed for himself in the early ’30s which were far superior to the cheap ape suits used up until then, and plied his role as human gorilla for a couple of decades. (It was his suit which was used in The Bride and the Beast (1958), another Louis Weiss production, after Steve Calvert bought Corrigan’s gorilla outfits.)

In The White Gorilla, Corrigan plays two roles: Steve Collins, African jungle guide, and the white gorilla who stalks him. Not that either role gets as much screentime as you would think; in a movie which just barely limps across the “feature-length” finish line at 62 minutes, fully half of the footage is cribbed from a 1927 serial produced by Weiss, Perils of the Jungle, which Corrigan narrates so it will seem as if it has some passing connection to the new footage of Collins and the white gorilla.

To facilitate the necessary narration, most of the movie is told in flashback. At a trading post in Africa run by Mr. Morgan (Charles King) and patronized that night by Messrs. Stacey and Hutton (Francis Ford and George J. Lewis), Collins comes stumbling out of the jungle to collapse on the porch. They haul him inside and clean him up, and when he’s lucid they ask him what became of the Bradford party, which he had led into the jungle in search of the “cave of the Cyclops,” and what’s all this talk about as white gorilla? Cue the stock footage!

“Bring — cue card — closer!”

Here’s the pattern we’re going to follow: Collins explains in voiceover what we’re seeing in the old silent footage (and tries to make it relate to a rudimentary plot), while he “watches” from the sidelines. Bradford and his sidekick are captured by savage natives and about to be burned at the stake when a white boy in jungle furs, riding an elephant, shows up at the native village and demands the prisoners be set free. The natives meekly obey the kid, and Bradford and his friend run into the jungle. Collins then watches as Bradford finds a white girl living in the jungle, apparently unrelated to the jungle boy, and saves her from a hippo attack. (Cool — Collins watching stock footage, which itself uses hippo stock footage!)

As Collins summarizes, the girl (never given a name) has been living in the jungle with her father, a jungle explorer who has been stricken blind. Offscreen, Bradford moves his entire camp in with the girl’s party so that they’re all there together when — lions attack! (Male lions. Hunting. In a pack. In the jungle. I guess a white gorilla’s not such a stretch, right?)

Speaking of the white gorilla, Collins’ listeners at the trading post are prodding at him, because he started out talking about the white gorilla, and then when he gets into his tale… no white gorilla. But eventually he gets to that. According to local legend, the white gorilla is an outcast from his kind because of his fur color (his face is still dark, so he’s not an albino), and instead of being just a mopey emo ape, he reacts with hatred against anything on two legs — normal gorillas, humans, chickens…

Nope, there’s not enough Grecian Formula in the whole dark continent to take care of that.

So. While walking through the jungle (far enough behind Bradford and the girl that he doesn’t need to be in any of the same shots), Collins is stalked and attacked by the white gorilla. As both Collins and the gorilla are played by Corrigan, you may wonder at what point Corrigan uses a stand-in inside the gorilla suit. The answer is, Heck, I dunno. This movie is short on credits; the entire cast listed is, “Ray Corrigan, Lorraine Miller, and an All-Star Cast.”

Anyway, Collins escapes because the gorilla is distracted by Carter (who? Oh, a guy from the old man’s camp that isn’t mentioned until now), and then Corrigan’s gunfire starts an elephant stampede from the serial which menaces Bradford and the girl until the jungle boy shows up and calls off the whole elephant herd, while Collins “watches” from the bushes.

But wait! Collins then “watches” as Bradford and the girl are ushered into the cave of the Cyclops by the Tigermen, a native tribe who worship the Cyclops statue and its priestess, the jungle boy’s mother, a white woman lost in the jungle who maintains her status and safety by having the jungle boy crawl inside the statue and operate its arms. How does Collins know any of this, when all he can do is “watch” from outside the cave? Well, he’s reading the script and it says so right there on the page.

What’s in your spam folder?

Because there’s nothing he can do to rescue Bradford and the girl, Collins sets off hoping that he can make it to civilized areas and get back with help in time. But as he treks — the white gorilla! He gets thoroughly trounced before the white gorilla is distracted by a rival black gorilla, leaving Collins to stumble back to the trading post. Here ends his story.

Morgan, Stacey and Hutton set out to rescue Bradford and the girl, leaving the injured Collins in the charge of Stacey’s pert young daughter Ruth (Lorraine Miller), who showed up halfway through the story. Ruth’s instructions are not to leave the trading post while the able-bodied menfolk are away, but when word reaches her of a native child who’s wandered off into the jungle, she grabs the rifle and sets out.

And there she meets… the white gorilla! (And what the hell is Corrigan still narrating for? It’s not his story anymore, and anyway, the script no longer needs to cover for repurposed silent footage — it could just be written right in the first place!) She misses with her first shot, then screams, drops the rifle, and faints. Just like Collins said, “You know this is no place for a woman.”

“Ebonyyy and ivoryyyy…”

Collins comes running — well, limping — when he hears the scream. It’s a good thing for Ruth that she holds the fascination for great apes that all white women do; he strokes her hair, then starts to carry her off. Collins comes first on Ruth’s dropped rifle, then on the ape himself, and a few shots later the white gorilla is dead.

All that’s left, then, is for Morgan’s party to return to the trading post. They found the cave, they say, but there was no sign of Bradford, the girl, the jungle boy, or his mother. Huh. I guess they didn’t have appropriate footage to bring about any sort of closure, so instead Collins makes a speech about how he’s leaving the jungle because it should belong to the animals and the natives. The end.

The White Gorilla seems more like an audiobook than a motion picture (a bad, bad audiobook). Corrigan’s narration is absolutely essential to tie the silent footage into the new plot, such as it is, but because the only purpose for the narration is to convey the story which isn’t adequately conveyed in the images we see, it ends up seeming like somebody describing a movie to you from the other room. Obviously, the script bears most of the blame, but Corrigan has to shoulder his fair share too; with a career as long and constant as his was, I assume he was an adequate performer even outside of an ape suit, but you couldn’t prove it by his performance here. Both his voiceover narration and his before-the-camera acting has less personality than an old tennis shoe.

Gorilla bait. Mrowr.

As the lower half of a double-bill created solely to use up stock footage (and not just from Perils of the Jungle, either — there are dozens of shots of all sorts of wildlife inserted here and there) and intended to run at drive-ins at which the audience had either left after the first feature or were too distracted by the other occupant of the car (wink, wink) to notice how bad it was, The White Gorilla accomplishes its purposes, I guess. But as a piece of entertainment worthy of even the partial attention of a halfwit, it misses the mark by a country mile.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2 (offscreen), plus 1 white gorilla
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0