Captive Wild Woman (1943)

An endocrinologist (John Carradine) kidnaps a female circus gorilla and experiments on her, eventually turning her human in the form of the statuesque Acquanetta (TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD WOMAN). An early directorial effort of Edward Dmytryk (THE CAINE MUTINY), this is a rather ludicrous minor horror effort from Universal. The film is barely over an hour long yet it still feels padded out with tiresome lion taming footage which I suppose 1943 audiences found thrilling. But the lion taming footage looks pretty tacky by today's standards principally because it is so obviously not the leading man Milburn Stone (best remembered as the doctor on TV's GUNSMOKE) doing the whip snapping but the famed Clyde Beatty. It also doesn't help that most of the process shots interpolating the actors with the wild animals are poorly done. With Universal's resident scream Queen, Evelyn Ankers (THE WOLF MAN) as Stone's love interest, Martha Vickers, Lloyd Corrigan and Paul Fix.