Quick-Seat Chair Goes To Hollywood – The Gorilla 1939
By Khadi Madama Quick-Seat Chair Wellness Coordinator
As a kid, I loved to watch monster movies on Saturday mornings. I can’t explain this attachment, which has followed me well into adulthood. So much so that every Saturday morning, if I’m at home, you can find me enjoying one of my old favorite black and white monsters—Sci-Fi—or horror flicks from the 1950’s and before. The only difference is that now I have another lens through which I can watch these gems from the past. That lens is a quick-seat chair, so I’m now very much more aware of the question that begs the answer, “Where are they all going to sit?”
The Gorilla is a fun movie starring Lionel Atwill, one of the horror genre’s favorite characters, whether he’s a villain or a hero. In this story, he’s the kind old uncle who is being threatened with a series of warnings from The Gorilla, each note sporting an ape-like handprint. He’s warned that he’s got until midnight to live. By the way, he’s the only one in the movie who has an actual chair! He calls in a group of detectives played by the Ritz Brothers, who are a cross between the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. They get to sit down, but only in a couple of short-lived scenes. Unfortunately, they all make the mistake of sitting in Lionel Atwill’s desk chair, which by the middle of the movie has taken on the property of being a ‘trick’ chair, one that dumps the sitter somewhere in the basement. Talk about having a “seating problem.” I should also mention that there are no kitchen chairs, save one, in the kitchen scene in one of those massive sprawling kitchens of big homes in the 30s. But what there is, however, is one of those wall-hung ironing boards, which also seems to have a mind of its own. It keeps opening up and clobbering one of the Ritz brothers senseless.
By this time, Lionel Atwill’s niece has arrived with her fiance, and they do get to sit together crammed in a small van. Where are the chairs? The nutty housekeeper, who is in a state of overly animated panic, played by comedic actress Patsy Kelly, is running around midst the radio turning on by itself with more Gorilla warnings and things that go bump in the night. Including secret passageways. Bela Lugosi portrays the kindred butler, who is even creepier when he’s being nice and who can’t resist doing a little Count Dracula bit with a coat while trying to cover Lionel Atwill’s niece, who is faint, and who manages to find a chaise lounge in a large room where there don’t seem to be any other seats.
The poor Ritz brothers never get a chance to sit at any time during the movie, meanwhile, my mind is looking around the rooms to see where a Quick-Seat Chair or two would fit so well, solving all of the seating problems in this creep-fest, including the gorilla’s cage, which is in the basement and where the housekeeper finds herself locked up, again without a place to sit. And she’s been there for over an hour in movie script time!
The lack of seating in this silly detective movie solves the mystery of where the phrase, “Gumshoe” comes from about detectives who are following a trial during a case. This movie should get the Gumshoe Award because these chaps wore their feet off trying to solve the identity of the gorilla. I hope they had someplace to sit in between scenes off-set, and I hope they were Quick-Seat Chairs. Quick-Seat Chairs will never dump you into a basement, flop open from the wall and clobber you, will never go bump in the night, and if you happen to have a pet gorilla in the house, a Quick-Seat Chair is sturdy enough to hold him up, like a kindred butler trying to make you comfortable, a Quick-Seat Chair won’t let you down and there’s no mystery to that!
Quick-Seat Chair. Temporary Seating That Closes Itself