The latest movie to benefit from this retrofitting trend, whose re-release is just in time for the Halloween season, is an obscure Marco Ferreri opus called La Donna Scimmia or The Ape Woman. (The film’s French title explicitly shifts the main character: Le Mari de la femme à barbe – The Husband of the Bearded Woman.)
The Ape Woman is Maria, whom Focaccia, a small-time carnival barker, discovers in the kitchen of a convent in Naples where he was showing slides of topless African natives supposedly taken during missionary work. Maria suffers from excessive body hair that makes her look ape-like, though she is perfectly human, and moments after he discovers her, Focaccia schemes to put her in a tree and sell tickets to anyone who wants to see the Ape Woman. Focaccia teaches her to walk and swing from a tree branch like an actual ape. (He appears in the act using a whip, just as Zampanó used a switch with Gelsomina in La Strada, but there the resemblance between the two films ends.)
Marco Ferreri (1928-1997) was an Italian filmmaker of the same generation as Lina Wertmuller and Elio Petri. His best film is also the one with which he is most often associated, La Grand Bouffe, about a group of wealthy men who gather at a chateau in order to eat themselves to death. The film had a marvelous cast of Italian and French actors, but they failed to make the material less – er – unsavory.
In his 1976 review of Ferreri’s The Last Woman, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: “His work hasn’t been free of the taint of exploitation, but it’s based in bitter satire.”(1) I haven’t heard about Fellini’s producers (including the self-same Carlo Ponti) on La Strada wanting him to film a more upbeat ending instead of the one in which Zampano learns of Gelsomina’s death, gets drunk, and ends up weeping convulsively on a deserted beach in the middle of the night. (This is, in fact, the film’s only weakness – Fellini’s imposition of a plot.)
But Ponti’s insistence on a happy ending for The Ape Woman was, for the sake of the film’s satire, a much better idea than the ending Ferreri wanted. Both endings are available on a newly released DVD, and only reinforce Ponti’s choice, not Ferreri’s. (Even if Peter Bradshaw insists “It isn’t a question of one ending being better or more authentic than the other: they have to be consumed in parallel... this dual narrative gives the film a new tenderness and complexity.” Baloney. Seeing both endings proves that, occasionally, an auteur’s “vision” can be faulty.)
Just before the film’s 79th minute, when we see the pregnant Maria on a terrace overlooking Naples, the film goes in two alternate directions. In the first, the film cuts to Maria dying in hospital, attended by doctors. Focaccia enters, sits down beside Maria, who asks him about the child (a boy, who died). He lies, telling her it is in an incubator, that he is normal and handsome. She breathes her last and Focaccia weeps. After her body is placed in a natural history museum in the name of science, Focaccia demands that her body be returned to him, since without even her dead body he can no longer make a living. The last scene shows him in his explorer gear and pith helmet (the same gear he wore in the striptease scene), half-heartedly telling a small crowd gathered around a lone carnival stage, about the body of the Ape Woman within. The camera pulls back to a wide shot of the city square with Teo Usuelli’s circus music taking us out of the film.
In the second ending, the scene cuts to Focaccia in a hospital waiting room, fetched by a nurse who takes him to see his “normal” child. Maria is shedding her hair, even as Focaccia tells her of another possible engagement in Paris. Next we see the three of them back in the kitchen of the convent, living on charity now that Focaccia has been deprived of his livelihood. Trying to eat his sandwich in a restaurant, he is recognized by a man who shows off his family of dancing midgets. Focaccia tells him he’s no longer in show business. Focaccia accosts a doctor at the hospital, demanding reparations for his curing Maria. He gets nothing. We last see him working as a longshoreman. Maria brings him his lunch on the docks, along with their growing son. Focaccia reads Paris-Soir and tells Maria what a life they could’ve had, but she tells him she is happy. The camera pulls away as Focaccia plays with his son. Ferreri’s ending is 14 minutes long; Ponti’s is slightly less than 12.
Annie Girardot was a familiar presence in Italian films. She married the fine Italian actor Renato Salvatore in 1965, but she had appeared in Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers in 1960. In The Ape Woman her performance is wonderfully natural. She apparently speaks her own Italian dialogue (nearly all films made in Italy were made in “the Italian manner” – with post-dubbed dialogue). She submits to Focaccia’s demands enthusiastically – and even manages to give her striptease scene an unsettling allure. Ugo Tognazzi is splendid as Focaccia, who manages to remain surprisingly human and believable, despite the otherwise creepy demands he makes of Maria.
When The Ape Woman was shown at the Lincoln Art Theater in 1964, Bosley Crowther, the American guardian of middlebrow taste, pronounced that “The only redeeming feature of this oddly distasteful film is the fact that a certain haunting pathos does emerge from it. The director has let so much anguish and humiliation show in Miss Girardot as she grimly submits to exploitation behind a silky, brunette beard that the viewer is filled with compassion for this unfortunate girl and a creepy contempt for the rascal who so brutally uses her.” (2) Crowther was rarely right, but at least he detected the “distasteful” element in Ferreri. (Crowther saw the happy ending, yet he detected “that the censors have used their shears on this film.”) Ferreri would subsequently raise distastefulness to greater proportions.
Peter Bradshaw, of The Guardian, wrote recently of The Ape Woman that “Maybe the time has come to see this film not as a black comic provocation, but something to put alongside Fellini’s La Strada, something intimate, a vision of uxorious poignancy.” (3)
Comparing The Ape Woman (the title itself is exploitative) to La Strada is just another indication of the downward spiral of the art of film. La Strada works on different levels, part stark realism, part extravagant poetry, to explore a drama that is more than simply a brutal carnival strong man’s abuse of a simple-minded girl. For one thing, Fellini’s film is one for the ages. Ferreri’s film had its day and when the day was done it was put in cold storage. The only reason why it and so many other forgotten films are being dug up and, as I like to call it, zombiefied, is because there is, thanks to online streaming, a voracious appetite for material to be streamed, and because younger critics who are bored with classic films that are the victims of critical overkill are searching for something to “discover” for themselves and younger audiences. But if indeed “the time has come” to see Ferreri’s film as anything other than his usual crass exploitation, then I no longer believe in evolution.
Still, The Ape Woman was named one of the “100 film italiani da salvare” – 100 Italian films to be saved.
(1) Before My Eyes (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 215.
(2) The New York Times, Sept 23, 1964.
(3) “The Ape Woman review – freakshow satire with bizarre alternative-ending payoff,” The Guardian, 7 October 2021.
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