Thursday, June 19, 2014

Nabonga (1944)

How bad is it? It's actually one of the better gorilla movies of the 1940's - which isn't saying much.
Should you see it? Yeah.


Ray "Crash" Corrigan, besides being in a ton of westerns, played a gorilla in more than 20 films. This was (I believe) the first. Julie London, in her first film (age 18), plays a girl raised by gorillas in the jungle, who somehow learned how to accessorize, and is revered by the locals. Buster Crabbe is a great white hunter type that she introduces to her gorilla friend and, together, they fight two villains among stock footage and backlot fake jungle. The female villain for some reason looks like a German barmaid, though she's supposed to be local. It's hard to separate this from director Sam Newfield's "White Pongo," released soon after this - to be reviewed here later - except for the presence of London.

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