Grotesque Burlesque

The Ape Woman puts a savage switch on the sly old joke about the monkey who notes hopefully that people look "almost simian."

The ape woman of the title (Annie Girardot) is a freak: a poor thing covered from head to foot with a coat of long, brown, silky hair. The leading man (Ugo Tognazzi), a Neapolitan spiv, finds her working as a scullion in a convent kitchen. "Mamma mia!" he gasps. "She really looks like an ape. I could start a freak show and clean up." The idea scares her half to death. She's not very bright to begin with, and on top of that she is painfully ashamed of her affliction. But the spiv aggressively jollies her out of her objections. To him she is no more than a hairy meal ticket. To her he seems little less than a god. She says si.

So begins a parable both squalid and sublime. The greedy little punk displays the creature as "a monster trapped in Africa, half woman and half ape." When he cracks his whip she gibbers like a monkey, rattles the bars of her cage, jumps around in a tree. To ensure his income, he marries the monster and hustles her off to Paris, where he sells her as a stripper ("The Hairy Angel") to appease the public appetite for the peculiar. One day the poor thing finds herself pregnant. "Oh well," he reflects philosophically. "Maybe the baby will be a monster too. Then we can use it in the act."

No such luck. The ape woman dies in childbirth. The spiv, robbed by a cruel fate of his bearded breadwinner, faces destitution--or even employment. But at the last minute he is saved by a master stroke of showmanship: he discovers that the public, which paid good money to see the ape woman alive, will also pay good money to see her dead.

So ends the film as it was shown in Europe. For U.S. audiences a new and much less ferocious finish has been contrived; Distributor Joe Levine seems to think it's all right to exploit the living but immoral to exploit the dead. Even so, The Ape Woman remains a lacerating and hilarious piece of misanthropy. The wedding procession, at which the bridegroom crassly compels the bride to regale the jeering crowds with a singing commercial for herself, will make most spectators shrivel with shame for their species. And the wedding-night episode, in which the spiv heroically forces himself to remember the lady's financial attractions and forget about her hairy shoulders, is simultaneously grotesque and burlesque.

Fun and fury make furious fun, but of the film as a whole Director Marco Ferreri (The Conjugal Bed) makes something more significant and affecting: a fable in which all the creatures that look human are really beasts, and the creature who looks beastly is the only one who is really human.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.