Just watched Lionel Atwill at his heinous height in Murders in the Zoo. This 1933 pre-code horror flick also stars Kathleen Burke, the woman most famous as the "Panther Woman" in Island of Lost Souls. Add in a bumbling Charlie Ruggles for humor and rather stiff Randolph Scott for classic heroics and you have a movie my friends. In fact the hero of the piece ends up being the girlfriend Gail Patrick who doesn't even rate a poster mention.
The word that came to mind after I finished it was "ghastly". We see Atwill dispatch some people with a cold-blooded effectiveness that leaves you breathless at times. The movie opens with him sewing the lips shut of a man who kissed his wife, and a who then is left to tied to survive in a savage jungle. The metaphor of the zoo itself, a place where wild animals are barely restrained by the slimmest of civilized precautions is evident as the sophisticated Atwill is as deadly as any snake, cat, or other critter aching to get loose.
The movie is lurid and creepy and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's like there's danger everywhere, and man himself is not removed really from the savagery on every front. One harsh part of this flick is seeing the zoo conditions which were I assume standard at the time, and are pretty rugged and even cruel. So if you can get by man's true viciousness to his fellow creatures, then you might enjoy this drama about his cruelty to his own kind. If you can get a copy or catch sometimes on the television, I say do so. It's worth the effort.
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