Bride Of The Gorilla (1951)

Starring Barbara Payton, Lon Chaney Jr., Raymond Burr, Tom Conway, Paul Cavanagh
Directed by Curt Siodmak
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

The foreman of a jungle plantation murders the owner in order to have his attractive young wife, but is then cursed by a native servant into becoming something far from human.

Written and directed by Curt Siodmak, who wrote several screenplays for the classic Universal horror films of the 1940s, the picture has been compared by film historian Tom Weaver to The Wolf Man, which Siodmak also scripted, as I recall from a commentary where he noted a number of interesting parallels between the two productions.  This movie is not in the same league as that film, but Burr has a brutish presence that works for his character, and although Chaney is not ideally cast as a native police commissioner, he approaches the role seriously and pulls it off with distinction.  Payton as the film's star is lovely to look at but her performance didn't make much of an impact on me- I thought she was a bit better in Four Sided Triangle.  For my money, Siodmak wasn't as talented a director as he was a writer, and that may hurt this film a bit, which drags here and there, but thought he was successful in creating a memorable jungle setting and atmosphere.

Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Starring Barbara Payton, James Hayter, Stephen Murray, John Van Eyssen, Percy Marmont
Directed by Terence Fisher
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

A pair of childhood friends grow up to become scientists and perfect a duplicating machine, but when  one of them marries the woman the other also loves, the rejected one aims to duplicate her.

I'm very fond of this picture, a science fiction effort made by Fisher for Hammer Films before their success in horror movies, and it has an excellent concept and script adapted for the screen by Fisher and Paul Tabori from a novel by William F. Temple.  The photography by Reginald Wyer is crisp and features some very beautiful closeups of the lovely Payton, and the score by Malcolm Arnold has the proper flourishes during the well-directed laboratory scenes, in which Fisher shows the prowess he would bring to Hammer's Frankenstein films.  The only thing that holds the picture back in my opinion from being a complete success is some visual representation of the emotion Payton's character has for Van Eyssen's as it becomes critical to the story in the film's latter half.  I'm not sure if this is due to Payton's range as an actress or the lack of romantic clinches in the movie, but an improvement in this regard would have just completely sold me on the film.  Nevertheless, it's still a fine production and a quality early effort by Fisher.