The Animal Kingdom

1st watched 12/7/2004 - 7 out of 10(Dir- Edward H. Griffith): Surprisingly honest and frank drama about a man who can't decide between two women in his life. One, ties him down to a commitment and is a solid person and the other doesn't ask for a commitment and is a great friend but doesn't have the stability of the first. I never did figure out why the movie was called "Animal Kingdom", but I believe it has to do with how we as humans tend to become survivalists like those in the animal kingdom do when things aren't going well. This is one of the most complex character studies that I've seen in awhile especially from a movie made so long ago. The acting is kind of up-and-down but the story is consistently intriguing as we try to figure out what Tom(the book publisher) is going to do in his life from one moment to the next. Every character in this story is interesting in one way or another and the movie works hard to follow these characters and not just make a happy-go-lucky movie experience. There is a uniqueness in this film's open attitude towards love and friendship and how to piece them together that I have not seen often.

One of the great pleasures of being able to see these talky pre-Code films so many years after the fact is that they offer us a photographic record of what the stylized Broadway theater of the Twenties and Thirties was like--lots of witty and heart-felt dialogue as beautiful people move from chair to sofa, drink champagne and cocktails, and occasionally lean against a mantel piece to say something profound or moving. No one back in the Thirties seemed to find it odd then that two of the principle characters, father and son, upper-class American inhabitants of Connecticut, were played by Englishmen-- Henry Stephenson and Leslie Howard. It was an accepted convention that all people with money sounded English. In this story, Howard, the charming but weak idealist he was to play again and again, is torn between his love of two stronger women: Ann Harding, the bohemian painter, and Myrna Loy, the ambitious society bride. Harding chooses to plays the role correctly (in my opinion) as more of a Vassar girl dilettante, the sort that Mary McCarthy was to satirize, than a starving Greenwich Village bohemian, and Myrna Loy is the beautiful but manipulative rich girl out to trap her man into living a secure and comfortable life. The vastly underrated Phillip Barry, whose play this film adapted, was an excellent chronicler of upper middle-class American life as in was once lived in the Depression. He has a great deal of empathy for his characters and enormous skill as a dramatist. His greatest triumph was to be a vehicle Kate Hepburn commissioned a few years later, The Philadelphia Story, but this earlier play introduces many of the social themes he was to write about in all his plays. As always, Barry wrote demanding parts for women. Myrna Loy (who was soon to be Nora in the Thin Man series) never again had a role that demanded so much of her. She is absolutely perfect. The film produced by David Selznick was an enormous flop in its day, but it's wonderful to have it around now.

I caught this by accident the other night trolling on amazon prime. WOW. I had never seen Ann Harding before - now I'm searching for all her films. Her scenes with Leslie Howard are timeless. She reminds me a bit of Helen Hunt - the intelligence, integrity and genuine affection she displays jump right across the screen. Her character is a total opposite to the completely controlled and controlling wife played by Myrna Loy. I never liked Philadelphia Story all that much so I was not anticipating that I would sit through the entirety of another Phillip Barry story, but I was wrong. Philadelphia Story asked us to smile at the elderly father's affairs with younger women and dismissed his daughter's opposition solely because her mother declared "it doesn't bother me", when clearly the reverse situation would have been unthinkable and abhorrent. Animal Kingdom instead shows us a woman typically viewed by society as "dishonorable", living a life of integrity. Not what you would expect from this era. I only wish we'd had a final scene with Harding and Howard, but I'm a romantic.

very good movie that the censors couldn't destroy. amazing for it's blatantly adult themes in 1932. the story hasn't aged one bit. lesile howard is brilliant in his role. i saw this on tv one night and searched for half a year to figure out what it was called. fantastic.

That was a line from another Philip Barry play which had a bit more screen popularity than The Animal Kingdom. Philip Barry as a playwright was able to find an audience in two distinct eras of American history, the carefree Roaring Twenties and the poorer socially significant Thirties. He did with a clever mixture of social commentary while writing about the privileged classes enjoying their privileges.

The Animal Kingdom had a 183 performance run on Broadway the previous year and its star Leslie Howard was a movie name already on two continents. So Howard, Bill Gargan, and Ilka Chase repeat their Broadway roles here. Good thing for Howard, he got to do this screen version of one of his Broadway triumphs. Probably in a few more years Cary Grant might have gotten the call.

Howard is a rich young man rather bored with his life and living without benefit of clergy with bohemian artist Ann Harding. But family pressures force him to marry society girl Myrna Loy. Guess who in the end he winds up with or watch the film to find out.

A lot of similarities here with Holiday, a Barry play that got a more well known screen adaption. An overbearing parent, snobbish friends/ relatives and two women to choose from, and some down to earth friends for the hero.

The players do well here and a special note should be made of Bill Gargan who plays Howard's butler who is a washed up former prizefighter. The Animal Kingdom was Gargan's feature film debut and I wouldn't be surprised if Leslie Howard did the same service for him as he did for Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest.

The Animal Kingdom despite good notices failed to find an audience in Herbert Hoover America. Howard's problems do seem trivial in the face of what a lot of people were dealing with. Still it's a good and faithful adaption of a good play.