Unlike your modern amusement park 3-D attractions, your Captain E-O’s, your Honey I Shrunk the Audience’s, Gorilla at Large, a feature-length 3-D film from 1954, has very little reason to exist in 3-D and boasts very few of the gags and visual shocks most typically associated with the format. Instead, 3-D is used primarly to enhance the gorgeous color photography and to take your mind off the awful dialogue and bizarre plot twists.

Large is a strange mix of genres: violent murder mystery, haunted revenge story, and schlocky monster movie; a shadowy film noir photographed in vibrant color and projected in 3-D. Cameron Mitchell plays Joey Matthews, a barker-turned-performer who also seems the most likely suspect in the murder of a recently fired carnival employee, who turns up impaled on the spikes of a gorilla cage not long after he’s seen reading The New Yorker (the preferred magazine of goons everywhere). The killer could be Goliath, the caged gorilla, whose whereabouts at the time are unclear (Goliath, for one, is not talking), or it could be someone dressed up in a gorilla suit. Other suspects include Raymond Burr as Miller, the carnival owner, and Anne Bancroft as Laverne, Miller’s wife and the trapezee artist. It’s up to Detective Lee J. Cobb (with sidekick Lee Marvin!) to decipher this mystery and maintain his dignity while caught up in a flaky, poorly-produced 3-D adventure.

Fans of nonsense dialogue will find plenty to savor as Cobb works his way through the list of suspects. At one point, Burr contemplates his fate while staring at a beheaded cupie doll and remarks to it and it alone, “You have waited a long time for this, haven’t you Cupie?” Later, one character discovers another could be the killer and remarks, with a sense of genuine revelation, “A woman couldn’t do it - unless she knew judo!” No, these remarks don’t make more sense in context, and regardless, they are delivered with obvious contempt for the material. Of course the grandest gag in the film is the fact that there is a “real” gorilla and a “fake” gorilla running around and both are just burly stunt guys in monkey suits that ain’t fooling nobody.

Even with the numerous goofs and gaffes, there’s something genuinely beautiful about Gorilla at Large. Director Harmon Jones uses the 3-D technique cleverly and subtly throughout, and there is something arresting about the way the human faces fall into relief and every detail is made crystal clear. At certain points you really lament the marginalization of 3-D to the amusement park ghetto, when there is obvious potential here for something far more important and powerful than a gorilla leaping into a camera lense could ever be. Gorilla at Large is unavailable in home formats, but a pristine print of the film has screened at New York’s Film Forum and was a true treat to watch. If they take it on the road, check it out.