No, it wasn’t the “first” man-in-a-monkey suit film (having been beaten to the punch by 1913’s BALAOO), but this 1920 programmer was quite the oddity: a curiously lighthearted horror-action-romance. GO AND GET IT was long thought lost until an Italian language print was discovered in the late 2010s in a Milan film archive.
Directed by the prolific Marshall Neilan (THE BOTTLE IMP), the film was well received in its day but doesn’t play too well now. The main narrative strand concerns rival newspapers, The Gazette and The Herald, the first of which employs the wannabe reporter Kirk (silent film acting legend Pat O’Malley). He gets romantically involved with Helen Allen (Agnes Ayres), the newly anointed editor of the Gazette.
This unlikely pair decide to launch an investigation into what has become the film’s most famous element: an experiment (the particulars of which are initially left vague) being carried out by one Dr. Boronoff, involving a large gorilla named Ferry (Bull Montana) and the soon-to-be executed prisoner Hogan (Walter Long).
Two weeks later Boronoff is mysteriously killed. More murders follow, leading to speculation that “A new type of Jack the Ripper” is on the loose. Kirk and Helen go in search of the doctor’s assistant, who’s fled the scene, leading to some truly hair-raising stunt work and the revelation that Hogan’s rage-addled brain has been transplanted into the head of the gorilla.
A “Super sensational story of the newspaper world”? Not quite, as the details of newspaper rivalries and reporter hook-ups are dull, outdated and inaccurate. Those things didn’t stop Neilan from devoting most of the runtime to them, and continuing to do so even after the action and horror elements were concluded, leaving us with a final ten minutes’ worth of uninteresting boardroom drama and an even more uninteresting last minute twist.
The horrific elements barely register, watered down as they are by the jaunty tone. What impresses is the gorilla suit and make-up sported by actor Bull Montana (who again played an ape-man in the 1925 LOST WORLD), which reportedly made several women faint. The extensive stunt work, involving airplanes, a train and an early 20th Century motorboat, is impressive (being the only occasions in this film that the camera moves), if completely gratuitous narratively.
Vital Statistics
GO AND GET IT
Marshall Neilan Productions
Director: Marshall Neilan
Producer: Marshall Neilan
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Cinematography: David J. Kesson
Cast: Pat O’Malley, Wesley Barry, Agnes Ayres, J. Barney Sherry, Charles Hill Mailes, Noah Beery, Bull Montana, Walter Long, Lydia Yeamans Titus, George Dromgold, Edward Cooper, Charles West