Pre-Code Horror: MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933)

A word to the wise. If you tend toward criminal or maniacal behavior and possess uncontrollable, if warranted, jealousy, stay away from exotic animals, their habitats, and zoos. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) is hosting the Early Shadows & Pre-Code Horror blogathon this week and I could not resist the topic. So much so, in fact, that I chose two classics at random that I have never seen. This is the first. Directed by A. Edward Sutherland starring a stellar lot of players including Lionel Atwill, Charlie Ruggles, Gail Patrick, Randolph Scott, and Kathleen Burke, it’s Murders in the Zoo from 1933.

Let me preface this humble commentary by a simple fact that invariably affects my reaction to horror pictures, I am afraid of everything. Although, I have been watching scary movies my entire life (through my fingers), and with them all sorts of monsters: the unquiet dead, the depraved, the deformed, the debased, and the debauched. From my experience and the ones that affect me most are the debauched, in the vein of Dr. Moreau from the island where souls are lost. It’s the brilliant doctors and the millionaires and the famous who harm with a gusto one can taste. There is something particularly heinous about the crimes committed by these people, the pre-code menaces of lore. What we have here, in Murders in the Zoo, is not that.

Let me start in the beginning when the promise of a nightmare appears on the screen. It is the opening, and we see a man kneeling in a jungle. That man is inflicting the unthinkable on another man who is writhing in pain below him. We get the gist; the one man is sewing the other man’s mouth shut to prevent him from “kissing another man’s wife.” Holy mother of fright, what am I in store for?

Eric Gorman (Atwill) is a wealthy big game hunter and zoologist who also happens to be insanely jealous. After capturing exotic animals in the jungle somewhere, Gorman and his wife Evelyn (Burke) return to America where Gorman plans to display his new animals in his zoo. On the ship back home, it takes no time at all for Evelyn to get over the man who was eaten by tigers after he was abandoned in the jungle with his mouth sewn. She is now head over heels in love with Roger Hewitt (John Lodge) whom she plans to marry. Evelyn seems to forget periodically that she’s already married – to Eric Gorman who happens to be insanely jealous with emphasis on insane. Yes, Evelyn is more than a bit pre-code-y. She is a lovely young woman who does not lack for attention from the opposite sex and acts on it when the moments arise.

Anyway, they get back to the zoo where Evelyn’s love interest meets a premature death thanks to the poisonous bite of a black mamba snake. The death was planned to perfection to occur during a lavish zoo dinner party by none other than Eric Gorman. Honestly, Evelyn and Roger are ridiculously apparent in their cheating. Not that I’m judging, mind you, but be a little smart about it, for crissakes. What does one expect a man with access to a black mamba to do?

At the zoo we meet press agent Peter Yates (Ruggles who tries to bring some joy to the proceedings), Dr. Jack Woodford (Scott) who is in charge of medicals in the zoo’s laboratory, and Jerry Evans (Gail Patrick) who assists in the lab and is Woodford’s paramour. Those are the players who experience a homicidal maniac running rampant at the zoo. Among the happenings are a death by alligator meal, an attempt at another black mamba bite because – in case you didn’t know – you can cut the head off one of those snakes and they can still kill you with their bite, and the release of the wild beasts of the bible. I mean, at the zoo. A lot of them and they seem pretty ticked off to be uncredited in a movie.

Murders in the Zoo never again lives up to the overt cruelty of that first act in the jungle that opens the picture, and which is the stuff of nightmares. The censors agreed with that too upon the movie’s release, but the sequence stayed in. The rest of Gorman’s acts seem mild in comparison if one were to rate one murder over another. Gorman lacks the overall panache of Laughton’s Moreau and he doesn’t have the enjoyable sadism of Count Zaroff (played by Leslie Banks in The Most Dangerous Game ’32), but Lionel Atwill doesn’t need much to be menacing, His level of hamminess here with the occasional smile to the camera showing his pleasure at being evil and delivering payback for marrying a woman who would rather tango with everyone else but him, is fun to watch. Overall Murders in the Zoo delivers the man as the cruelest animal message quite well.

The now familiar names of the supporting players are (mostly) lost in the shuffle of the zoo although no doubt brought in in hopes of repeating the success of the far superior Island of Lost Souls (1932). This is especially true of Kathleen Burke who is little more than a pretty face worth killing for – until it is she who uncovers the mystery and becomes the hero of the story. That is all I will say about that.

Murders in the Zoo was made quickly, released in late March of ’33 and did not do well at the box office. The reviews were mixed. I guess mine would be too although I enjoyed this one overall. In hopes of not spoiling everything, know that not every major player in this production makes it to the end credits. A plus – Eric Gorman’s necessary demise is satisfying. The shadows here have claws and fangs and at least one large one is made by a human. It’s the usual – the horror is the evil that men do.

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Substantial, unforgettable, menacing, hisorical early shadows & pre-code horror are lurking at the CMBA! Scream and cry all you want, but visit.