I finally got around to watching some of the huge pile of cheapo DVDs I’d been given for Christmas. Among them were the 1940 film The Ape starring a slumming Bopris Karloff and 1943’s The Ape Man starring a slumming Bela Lugosi*. I’d seen the latter many times, but not since I was a kid. I’d never seen the former. Both films are about gorillas on the loose and about people using them as a cover for murdering other people for their cerebrospinal fluid.
The later film probably stole from the former – the similarities are heavy (The bad ape costumes, Bela and Boris as Mad Scientists in small towns, the breaking of the bottles of spinal fluid that causes both to go on murderous rampages, etc.) Nevertheless, I’m still surprised at two 1940s flicks that revolve around the use of spinal fluid as a cure. In the Karloff film it’s a cure for polio, enabling an afflicted wioman to walk. This was back when polio was still a major problem, the Salk vaccine hadn’t been inveted yet, and the president of the U.S. was afflicted with it, so it’s kinda like habving a cure for, say, Ebola today. Or AIDS.
How the heck does Spinal Fluid end up as a plot McGuffin in these films? The Karloff film was based on a 1927 play, but I don’t know if the spinal fluid angle or polio figured in that. Was someone particularly notable doing research on spinal fluid cures?
Forgot to add the footnote. Actually, footnotes:
1.) Yes, I do mean Lugosi was slumming. To read some people, this is a sign of his inevitable decline. But The Ape wasn’t much better, and Karloff was making plenty of films at the low-rent places like Monogram. Look up his oriental detective flicks, or Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. And Lugosi was still working with the big studios.
2.) I saw this in the 1960s on WPIX’s Chiller Theater, which featured clips from The Ape Man in its opening montage (before it changed the opening to the six-fingered hand animation). Chiller Theater showed some flicks so often that it seemed to own copies, and just showed them in rotation – The Ape Man, Attaxck of the 50 foot Woman, Voodoo Island, The Black Sleep, The Cyclops, The Cape Canaveral Monsters.
It looks like there was indeed high profile research along these lines in the period. From this 1956 article (somewhat inevitably reproduced on an anti-vaccination website), with added bolding:
Although it isn’t said explicitly there, at the time research on polio was concentrated on spinal fluid - Landsteiner’s experiment on the monkeys involved showing that the infecting agent could be transmited in it via injection. The tests that were developed for the disease then also used samples of it.