Ingagi (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by William Alexander; directed by William S. Campbell; screenplay by Adam Hull Shirk; cinematography by L. Gillingham, Ed Joyce, and Fred Webster; edited by Grace McKee; music by Edward Gage; starring Arthur Clayton, Louis Nizor, Charles Gemora, and Mel Koontz. Blu-ray and digital, B&W, 82 min., 1930. A Kino Lorber release.

The extremely unsung Charles Gemora had a decidedly unusual career, working for decades as a studio artist, costumer, and makeup technician and acting in scores of movies between the late Twenties and early Sixties, playing the same generic character—a gorilla—in almost all of them, with an ape, chimpanzee, Martian invader, or “wild man” occasionally added to the list. One of his more interesting credits is William S. Campbell’s pseudodocumentary Ingagi, where he makes a bravura appearance in the last two reels. And according to the audio commentaries on Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray edition of the 1930 release, he was much more than a stunt double hopping around in a hairy suit. Known by insiders as the King of the Gorilla Men, he took his vocation seriously, studying primates at the San Diego Zoo, assiduously refining his movements and body language, and making costumes like the one for Ingagi, which involved a mechanical jaw, teeth carved from toothbrush handles, and yak hairs individually crocheted into the surface. Like almost everything about the film, the gorilla is as bogus as can be, but the talent of the actor in the outfit is genuine, and exhibiting his artistry is among the few good reasons to revive this scurrilous production, which was out of circulation for ages, banned by the Federal Trade Commission, no less. It’s the newest addition to “Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture,” an ongoing Kino Lorber series [see “God-Awful Sex Thrillers, Sermons, & Vicarious Thrills: In Praise of the American Exploitation Film” by Darragh O’Donoghue in Cineaste, Winter 2020], and while 4K restoration might seem a bit overgenerous for a cobbled-together feature that couldn’t ever have looked particularly terrific, the new edition gives the picture a fair degree of seedy appeal.

Ingagi means “gorilla” in the Kinyarwanda language of the Belgian Congo, as the country was known before gaining independence in 1960. Produced by a short-lived American company called Congo Pictures, the film actually has no gorillas, relying instead on Gemora and spliced-in footage of bonobos, orangutans, and chimpanzees. Much of that footage is copped from other movies, most notably the long-lost 1915 documentary Heart of Africa, also known as Lady Mackenzie’s Big Game Pictures, named after Lady Grace Mackenzie, the white explorer whose expedition photographed the material. The safari sequences of Ingagi are therefore a hoax, and one of many ironies surrounding the film, as the commentary by Forbidden Fruit curator Bret Wood points out, is that Mackenzie was also a hoaxer, whose title “Lady” was bestowed by herself. She at least mounted an actual expedition, though, which is more than Congo Pictures could say. Her movie provided much of the material—animal footage, dancing natives, canoes on a river, a fakir doing cigarette tricks—that gives Ingagi whatever authenticity it has. Campbell shot the rest in Los Angeles, largely at the Griffith Park Zoo, with additional animals borrowed from the collection of motion picture pioneer William Selig, another jungle movie entrepreneur.

Campbell came to Ingagi with a background in comedy shorts, several of which feature an orangutan billed as “the world’s only monkey comedian” and other animals; his only post-Ingagi credit is a 1931 cannibalism opus with some of the same Ingagi personnel, including Gemora, narrator Louis Nizor, and Arthur Clayton as Daniel Swayne, a supposedly real explorer. The utterly fraudulent, utterly racist conceit of Ingagi is that deep in the dark heart of Africa a native tribe regularly offers up women to the gorillas they revere and fear, and that the resulting interspecies sex has produced an unknown number of human-gorilla hybrids living shadowy lives in the jungle domain. The first hour is a string of safari episodes wherein Swayne and his crew accomplish such feats as capturing a python, escaping a lion’s charge, and discovering a “tortadillo,” a hitherto unknown species so blatantly bogus (imagine a turtle with paper scales stuck on its shell) that a kiddie-matinee crowd would hoot it off the screen. All this is the buildup to the last twenty minutes, when our intrepid trekkers come upon their long-sought quarry: a group of naked women, a possibly half-breed child, and Gemora in his gorilla getup. This half-baked spectacle, described by the narrator with deadpan awe, is the distasteful climax to an already distasteful film where Black people are casually abused by condescending whites, Californian kids play the role of native “pygmies,” and a phony cloak of scientific inquiry veils a steady stream of assaults on common decency and common sense.

Its incontestably low quality notwithstanding, Ingagi was a big hit in 1930, earning a reputed $4 million on an obviously miniscule budget and emerging as one of the year’s top-grossing pictures. Wood cites several reasons for this, very much including the use of a faraway locale and unfamiliar culture as the vehicle for displays of nudity and sexuality that would have sparked censorship in the normal run of commercial releases. Then, too, Ingagi rode the coattails of ethnographic films with legitimate pedigrees, such as Robert J. Flaherty’s Moana (1926) or Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), respectable pictures that nonetheless play their own games with the lines between documentary and fiction. At times Ingagi goes beyond pastiche to outright imitation, as when the explorers introduce new African acquaintances to the wonders of the gramophone, as Flaherty did with the eponymous figure in Nanook of the North (1922), his partly real, partly faked depiction of Inuit life.

In a second audio commentary, film historian Kelly Robinson locates Ingagi in the long tradition of entertainments about gorillas and their ilk, in which intimations of unnatural sex are sometimes a titillating ingredient. The genre appeared as early as The Mischievous Monkey (American Mutoscope, 1897) and ran rampant in the Twenties and Thirties, bringing good pictures like Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), where Gemora plays Bela Lugosi’s gorilla, and scads of negligible ones, some of which play on ape–human hybridity via brain transplants and such. Go farther back and you find antecedents in other art forms, such as Emmanuel Frémiet’s controversial Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman, an 1887 sculpture that set the Paris Salon abuzz and influenced a long line of advertising images and movie posters, including the original Ingagi one-sheet. Works likes these were inspired by the growth of African exploration in the nineteenth century, which generated a swelling wave of (exaggerated) news reports and (inaccurate) artist renderings, sometimes merged with misunderstood African folk tales, that imagined gorillas—shy, vegetarian creatures that don’t bother humans unless provoked—as monsters and predators, all the better to highlight the manliness and derring-do of the brave souls who sought them out. Speculation about the so-called missing link, a dead-end offshoot of evolutionary theory, also fueled interest in interspecies intercourse. Last but the opposite of least, the curse of racist ideology was a crucial component of the ape-entertainment bandwagon; in the year when Ingagi premiered, Robinson reminds us, miscegenation was illegal in most states and Africans were still exhibited in carnival sideshows. No wonder savages, cannibals, and witch doctors were a staple of the movies, and stayed so for years to come. The bandwagon kept rolling for years, reaching a milestone with Cooper and Schoedsack’s phenomenal King Kong (1933), its various remakes, and its innumerable progeny. 

Unfortunately for Congo Pictures, pop-culture trendiness and box-office profitability weren’t enough to keep Ingagi in theaters for long. Snoopers from Hollywood’s powerful Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America took a close look and discovered not only sensationalism but sheer dishonesty as well, and the press quickly pounced. “Ingagi is an affront to public decency,” opined the Houston Chronicle, “an effort to obtain money under false pretenses and a deliberate propagation of fabrications in the name of science. It is howlingly ridiculous, so obviously fake that one forgets to resent it.” Congo Pictures reciprocated with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the MPPDA and other parties, whereupon the magazine Motion Picture ran a detailed Ingagi exposé that identified footage from Mackenzie’s film, pointed out animals from Selig’s collection, explained that Africa has no orangutans and no place has any tortadillos, and outed the climactic gorilla as Gemora plying his trade. “I’ve shot that lion myself a half-dozen times,” a veteran animal-film director tells the writer. “That’s his trick—to be killed!” In a final blow, the Federal Trade Commission entered the fray, finding the film’s promotion to be “false, fraudulent, deceptive, and misleading” and ordering a halt unless alterations removed the movie’s pretense of being a true account. Congo Pictures stopped distribution and sold the rights, which later ended up in the perhaps inevitable hands of exploitation kingpin Dwain Esper, who got the FTC ban lifted in 1947. 

And now it’s on Blu-ray for all to see. In an unusual but welcome sidenote to his commentary, curator Wood admits to misgivings about reissuing this “sprawling, dishonest, spectacular, offensive, inhumane hodgepodge of a motion picture,” as he forthrightly describes it. What overcame his doubts was the urge to expose the movie for what it is—a dubious influence on subsequent films (looking at you, King Kong) and an inheritor and transmitter of the sordid racism embedded in uncountable cultural products that amuse unthinking audiences with vile misinformation about countries, cultures, and populations deemed “exotic” by people who know little about them and (in this case) even less about how to make a professional-looking movie. With its racial indignities, pseudoscientific lies, geographical misrepresentations, and uproarious parade of inconsistent film stocks, Ingagi is best regarded as a misbegotten joke, and in that spirit I agree with Wood’s decision to unleash it once again. Politically, ethnographically, and cinematically incorrect, it’s a cautionary specimen of exploitation film at its most shamelessly exploitative.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen books.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2