Pouco Amor não é Amor

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.

The Animal Kingdom has Leslie Howard, Ann Harding & Myrna Loy which is enough reason to watch this film. Ann Harding was a big star at that time and got top billing. I have enjoyed watching several of her films. This is pre"Thin Man" Myrna Loy so her character is a departure from the likable fun loving spouse of William Powell. I have grown to like Leslie Howard after initially only knowing him from his "Gone with the Wind" role. This is a pre-code film and the subject manner reflects that. None of the later restrictions of moral codes. Others describe the plot so won't go into that. It is listed as a comedy and drama but don't expect any comedy from the lead actors. The only source of comedy is the butler of Leslie Howard. The story is really a drama about relationships with just a small amount of comedy relief. After viewing the film my impression is that it was a curiosity of the time period but had enough interest to recommend it to others.

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.

Once I actually spoke to Ann Harding on the telephone, but, alas, I didn't really know who she was. Yes, it was late in her life and early in mine, but if I had had the slightest idea what an extraordinary actress she had been, I would have been more forward, would have tried to spend time talking with her in person.

I knew the name. She had been a star. But now having seen her in "The Animal Kingdom," I am simply astonished at her ability.

In fact the entire cast is compelling. Even other people of whom I knew nothing or very little were impossible to look away from.

For example, "Franc," played by Leni Stengel, was such a strong, and well-written, character, she was never over-shadowed even by the major characters. "Joe," played by Don Dillaway, was another, and I had never heard of either actor before. Now I want to see everything they ever appeared in. The two actors were remarkable performers, contributing great talent to an already overwhelmingly talented cast.

Myrna Loy played a strong and attractive "society lady," but her character was different from the kind she is known for and gave her a chance to demonstrate she too was one fine actress, capable of variety, and not just a pretty face.

Leslie Howard played, as it seemed he so often did, a rather weak character, but one capable of greatness, or at least potentially of strength.

William Gargan was wonderful as a supposed-to-be-servant who just didn't "know his place." I've never seen him in this type of role, and he was just captivating.

But Ann Harding stole it all.

She was, of course, beautiful, but her mannerisms and gestures, under played, just proved definitely that she was an actress, and an actress of power.

Horace Jackson's script is based on a Philip Barry play so perhaps credit for the dialogue belongs mostly to Barry, but it's intelligent and entices an audience into sticking with everything happening on the screen, even though the actual story is rather sad. It's about misdirected desires, and sacrifices people really shouldn't make.

"The Animal Kingdom" is a good movie, one I recommend, and one I am grateful to Turner Classic Movies for presenting on 9 December 2016. It is and has much more than the one-sentence description found in TV listings. It is much more than a soap opera. It is a strong drama beautifully acted and written, and deserving of serious attention.

Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, and Myrna Loy are all members of "The Animal Kingdom" in this 1932 film based on the play by Phillip Barry. Barry in his way was a transitional playwright - he wrote about the upper class, usually negatively, but always gave a nod to the lower class - they were the ones that had more fun. Just a little bit later, plays about the upper class would go by the wayside for plays about the working class - Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing - as America moved through the depression.

Leslie Howard plays a member of said upper class who has engaged in a Bohemian lifestyle, living with an intelligent artist (Harding). They have a no attachment, open relationship, and he takes her at her word and gets himself engaged to a gorgeous, wealthy young woman (Myrna Loy) just as Harding decides she wants to settle down and have a family. She accepts his decision, but not his offer of continuing friendship.

There is a line about the "animal kingdom" in the film, but I prefer to think the title has to do with baser instincts. If Howard passionately desired Ann Harding, he wouldn't have wanted to be friends - and it's her desire of him that makes her reject his "just friends" suggestion. Let's face facts - Loy turns him on and knows it. In fact, she uses sex as a manipulative weapon, and he's putty in her hands. It's more blatant in this film than, say, "Harriet Craig" which was done under the code - but the power of sex is there.

Of course, a relationship based on sexual desire and nothing else eventually grows tired, and Howard finds himself going back to talk with Harding and spend time with her. She smartly keeps running. Clearly, Howard is a man who wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

Harding was an interesting leading woman - she was attractive but not beautiful and had a very low, distinctive speaking voice. She came from the Broadway stage, and her heyday in films was through the mid-thirties, though she worked consistently in films and television until the mid-60s. As was the case back then, at 31 years of age, her time as a leading lady was drawing to a close, and soon would be turned over to people like the younger Loy. Her performance in "The Animal Kingdom" is a very honest one. Loy is absolutely ravishing and wears beautiful clothes. She essays the part of the glamorous wife beautifully, reminiscent of Gene Tierney later on with the ultra-feminine facade hiding the steel underneath. Howard is handsome and thoughtful in the lead, and one can see it slowly occurring to him that he made a mistake.

Very good.