Congo

It won't be shown during "family" hours, so stay up or set your VCR. This pre-Code tale of revenge, sex, brutality, and, ultimately, redemption was one of Walter Huston's best performances (not that he was capable of a bad one). It's like a train wreck--you don't want to watch, but you can't turn away. Virginia Bruce is excellent as the innocent convent-educated girl who becomes a pawn in Huston's diabolical revenge scheme. Drug addiction and abuse of women run rampant, along with racism and superstition. Sweaty, dirty, and disheveled characters, sex, violence, drugs, and great performances. It doesn't get any better than this. Even though you'll guess the ending early on, you'll still want to watch it, and you'll want to see more of Walter Huston's films.

Walter Huston steps into Lon Chaney's wheelchair to play the evil crippled magician commanding a "juju" cult of natives who burn women alive. Lupe Velez is on hand [and narrowly escapes getting her tongue twisted out with a wire]. Enter blonde Virginia Bruce, a convent girl forced into prostitution in Zanzibar, but now a hopeless alcoholic. Enter Conrad Nagel, a doctor who is now a hopeless drug addict [his cure involves being covered with leeches and buried up to his neck in a swamp]. Don't worry: there's still MORE plot! Everyone sweats a lot, on leftover sets from RED DUST, but the direction is rudimentary and lacks the courage of the plot's kinkiness. Still, it's some kind of must-see since they sure don't make them like this anymore!

As pre-Code as they get, and very un-MGM-like for 1932, this stage success and remake of "West of Zanzibar" is both hilariously racist and quite creepy, with nightmarish imagery and lots of sadism. Walter Huston, hamming it up entertainingly, is the warped, lame white-boss-man whose appetite for vengeance leads him to make a disastrous mistake. He's surrounded by some MGM players at the modest peaks of their careers: Conrad Nagel as a drug-addicted doctor, Lupe Velez as Huston's two-timing mistress, and most memorably, Virginia Bruce (without makeup, very unusual for the time, and emoting affectingly) as a convent school girl driven into prostitution and drink. The love story between her and Nagel is more convincing than usual: These two do seem made for each other, and there's little of the hearts-and-flowers romantic excess of the era. But the prime appeal is how beastly Huston is to all around him, and how memorably he gets his comeuppance. The natives' ooga-booga costumes, dances, and obeisance to the white massa are kind of hard to take, and William J. Cowen's direction is workmanlike at best. But the piece is, in its own way, as horrifying and memorable as that other atypical MGM horror classic of 1932, "Freaks."

The acting was so avant-garde for a 1932 version, I had to go back to the schedule twice to make sure it was filmed in the early days. I've seen Emmy-winning 1999 TV soaps that didn't have the shine the soapy scenes here have. Lupe Velez was, to me, a very untalented stock actress until I watched her in this tropical human-condition story. She almost outshines Walter in her portrayal of a love-starved wench stuck in an outland of men. But both women did better, in my opinion, than some of the Actors' Guild graduates today. Thanks.

You're immediately plunged into a nightmare world similar to that psychotic, psychedelic half-world which Colonel Kurtz presided over in APOCALYPSE NOW. It's so unreal, it's like a never-ending bad acid trip which you can't believe it's actually happening but can't escape from. This is not a normal picture. If you've seen SAFE IN HELL or RAIN made around the same time and think this will have a similar feel, you're wrong. This is unique; it's strange, disturbing cruel sick and nasty but like the drug you feel you must have taken to experience this, it's totally addictive.

Walter Huston plays a crazed character who has devoted his life to hatred. The theme of this picture is hatred and everything you see is of a result of his insane dedication to vengeance. He rules an isolated tribe of savage cannibals like people from prehistory but it's he who is the least uncivilised and is virtually a base savage beast. His 'Flint' might be the least likeable character ever put onto celluloid. Although he is beyond evil, by the genius of Walter Huston's manic (over)acting, it is he and not the innocent girl he captures, degrades and tortures whom we empathise with. It's exceptionally clever filmmaking.

The direction and stunning, claustrophobic photography (by the same guy who filmed THE WIZARD OF OZ!) create an absurdly over the top sense of menace, dirt and utter unpleasantness. The expressionistic lighting makes Flint glow with evil whilst allowing darkness to hide the edges of the frames - the fuzziness enhances its dreamlike quality. You can't see everything which is happening, you can't see Flint's henchman raping the girl, you just get to see Flint's manic grin outside the door. You don't see the people being burned alive on Flint's pyre but you hear the screams, you hear the pain. The sound makes the nightmare real. There's constant noise, constant drums, the constant sound of eternal despair.

Sound is massively important to this film. It's a remake of the silent WEST OF ZANZIBAR made just a few years earlier but without sound, that is a million times inferior to this. In the original, there's an explanation of why Flint became this monster but in this version he's just thrown at us - the shock value works so much better. We don't need to see that he was a third rate music hall magician. We don't need to see how his rival (Lionel Barrymore!) ruined his life. We don't need to see the humanity he once had. If he is to be our antihero-hero, we have to accept him for who is is now.

A lot of symbolism can be seen in this; there's good versus evil, there's redemption, there's humanity versus savagery and of course love versus hate. Unlike in the original there's even an allegory of Adam and Eve. Lupe Velez is inexplicably attractive and sensual amongst the filth, grime and squalor representing temptation. She's doesn't need to seem real, she is simply Flint's manifestation of unrestrained sexual desire, tempting and offering forbidden fruit.

Irving Thalberg at MGM loved to (and indeed could afford to) take risks, to do something a bit more edgy than normal and nothing in 1932 was more edgy than this. It's not a happy film, it's actually genuinely disturbing but it's also pretty amazing and will be something you will always remember.