NitrateVille Radio Episode 67: Legendary Jungle Hoax Film Ingagi • Stars Under the Nazis
It's the follow-up episode, in which we talk about new releases on subjects we've covered before. (87:23)


(1:41) Last March we talked to Bret Wood about Kino's Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture series. One of the latest releases is a notorious hoax film, Ingagi—which purported to show a tribal ritual in which gorillas are mated with native women. In fact it combined old jungle expedition stock footage with scenes of zoo animals in LA and gorilla-suit actor Charles Gemora, leading to the FTC eventually banning it from further exhibition as fraudulent—but not before it made a ton of money, and got Gemora a role as another lusty gorilla in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross... not to mention convincing RKO that King Kong would be a hit.
Kelly Robinson, a writer on horror movies, tells us about the twisted history of this long-thought-lost exploitation hoax, for which she provides one of two commentary tracks on the Kino Lorber/Something Weird release. Her Bram Stoker Award-nominated piece on the 1910 Edison Frankenstein film is in this issue of Rue Morgue magazine.


Next: two years ago we talked with Rüdiger Suchsland, whose documentary Hitler's Holllywood examined the movies made under the Nazi regime. Now Kino, which released that documentary, is releasing two particularly interesting films made under the Nazi regime.

(26:47) Luis Trenker was one of Germany's top action stars and directors, known for his work in the "mountain" genre which pitted heroes against peaks and crags. Remarkably, three years after Hitler came to power, Trenker came to America to film a mountain film in the West—the story of Gold Rush pioneer Johan Sutter, The Kaiser of California. Though Trenker was not particularly sympathetic to the regime, there's a distinctly Gemanic air of heroic destiny to this superbly shot "western" that sets it apart from American films in the genre, as film historian Dr. Eddy von Mueller (who also does the commentary track) tells us.


(53:51) In Hitler's Hollywood Suchsland ranks Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 (Port of Freedom) as one of the best films made during the Nazi regime, and one that points toward a post-Nazi era with its melancholy portrait of sailors in Hamburg's St. Pauli red light district (recreated in Prague because of bombing in Hamburg). Film historian Olaf Möller, who has written for Film Comment and Sight & Sound and provides the commentary track on the Kino release, discusses why this film holds such a place in the hearts of Germans, as did its creators, star Hans Albers and director Helmut Käutner.


Port of Freedom comes out February 23 from Kino Lorber and The Kaiser of California comes out March 23; Kino has also released a postwar Käutner film, the noirish Black Gravel.
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"Deadly Roulette" "Whimsy Groove" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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