It's hard not to sympathize with certain early movies. When I was a kid, I had this belief that anything from the past, especially from the 1950s backward, was considered art by the world at large and was therefore universally preserved. I've since been proven quite wrong. In my line of work I come across dozens of films and books that sound like they were absolutely wonderful, but which have been neglected by the ages, doomed to ever-increasing obscurity. Sometimes you'll be lucky and you'll just have to settle for something expensive, but much of the time you'll be lucky if you find any of these things at all. All the same, I like the thrill of hunting for something: I managed to find a copy of the '70s TV paranormal-kids thriller The Wednesday Children, which was believed lost. That was pretty neat, even if the movie was boring. In any case: it can be interesting to see what history has preserved and what it hasn't. A lot of these movies, especially the cheapies, have become tediously repetitious staples of public domain multi-packs, like The Ape, The Devil Bat, and The Corpse Vanishes. But others--including films made by bigger companies than Monogram, PRC, or other Poverty Row studios--have been harder to track down, with some of them still claiming Laserdisc as their most up-to-date release medium. It's weird to think of how many of the films of the '20s and '30s we fetishize simply because they were products of those eras, including ones which legitimately suck, and how many other, better-made films from those times have only found homes on rough VHS tapes, or DVD-Rs cloned from such. Sometimes, it's the pirates to the rescue: some films have only survived because of gray market labels or torrent sites. You never know how intense the battle for film restoration is until you're in it.
I say this because it sounds like it was very difficult to obtain Murders in the Zoo until about ten years ago, when Turner Classic Movies released a DVD of it. I find this odd because Murders in the Zoo is a Paramount film; on top of that, it is very good. Now, I realize it may not have been released because not many people have heard of it, but I've met a lot of people who will obsessively monitor every pre-'50s horror film, claiming each is some kind of classic. I heard people praise this film before the DVD came out, mostly hardcore Lionel Atwill fans, and that impression of theirs must have arisen from watching one of the low-quality VHS editions. But for once, those obsessive folk were right. Murders in the Zoo deserved a better touch-up, because thanks to it, I am now in that eccentric, minuscule camp of hardcore Atwill fans.
Lionel Atwill (praise him!) plays Eric Gorman, one of the most valuable employees of the Municipal Zoo. This movie wastes no time in telling us exactly who Gorman is, as the first scene is him stitching a man's mouth shut! He's out in Asia with his wife, Evelyn, looking for new specimens for the zoo, and it was Eric himself who found this man, Taylor, enjoying some smooches with Mrs. Gorman. Evelyn is immediately suspicious, as Taylor probably wasn't the first man to suffer an awful fate at the hands of her husband, and she grows more so when Taylor is eaten by a tiger. Fortunately, Taylor wasn't Evelyn's only lover: her heart truly belonged to Roger Hewitt, whom she is reunited with on the trip back with the captured animals. Here we are introduced to our protagonist, the alcoholic coward reporter Peter Yates, whose comic relief is extremely dull and should be skipped. He creates massive tone problems in this movie about a man who will stitch your mouth shut if you mess around with his wife. He is the unwitting agent of much of the film's conflict, however, when he mentions that Roger was staying in Evelyn's room. Later, at a dinner put on at the zoo to raise its public standing, Gorman murders Roger with what turns out to be the severed head of the venomous green mamba. When Evelyn finds the evidence (in a tense chase scene which is easily one of the movie's best sequences), she ends up as her husband's next victim. Of course, Gorman can't hide from his crimes forever, and if you use nature for your ends, nature will exact its price...
It can be a letdown sometimes when a movie lets us know upfront who our killer is, but if the killer is a character worth following, then it can be a great thing. Eric Gorman is indeed such a character. Gorman is a bastard; he knows and has known for a long time that his wife hates him, and rightfully so. One can infer that the zoologist's murderous trends only intensified Evelyn's desire to fool around with as many men as possible after she found about said trends. If this movie had been made in the '70s, we probably would have seen a much bitterer Evelyn, one who usually has a glass of scotch in her hand.
There's just one issue that bugged me about this: our main conflict is Gorman's obsession with Evelyn and the desire to "protect" her against other admirers in a perverse attempt to keep her love. While the movie doesn't lose traction or tension with the rest of the plot it plays, it's odd to have Gorman kill Evelyn so early in the runtime. We are then left with Gorman wanting to defame his coworker Jack Woodford, whom he faux-blames for Evelyn's death (playing the grieving husband to a T), which he uses as an opening to get the zoo closed down. But I don't know why he chooses to do that: if he does, where's he, y'know, gonna get his money from? He works for the zoo, after all, and does seem to take genuine pride in the animals he's brought into the zoo's keeping. I get that he's unhinged for having been the one to cut Evelyn off from himself forever, but it's strange to me that his way of working through that would be to destroy his own career.
I should also say, while commenting on the film's faults, that Peter Yates is an extremely annoying character. He really does seem to be an import from the hallowed halls of The Invisible Woman. Wait...he is an import from The Invisible Woman! His actor, Charlie Ruggles, played..."George," whoever that was. Unlike The Invisible Woman, however, he does get at least one joke that lands. After getting locked in a cage within arm's reach of a tiger, he discovers that his cage has a mamba in it, leaving him caught between a rock and a hard place. When the mamba is taken away, he gasps out, "Does this town have a good laundry?"
I laughed because this is proof that they had piss and shit jokes in films as early as the 1930s, not because it was actually funny. I shouldn't be surprised, since even the most prudish of historical eras have had cracks in their conservatism. I popped in another Lionel Atwill thriller after I got done with this one, which was the original Mystery of the Wax Museum, made in the same year. In that one, reporter actually gets to ask someone, "How's your sex life?" Mr. Hays--you know where you can shove that Code of yours.
I have now seen several thrillers with Lionel Atwill as the villain or a suspect for such, to say nothing of his myriad Universal appearances. Mystery of the Wax Museum wasn't as fun, but for awhile now I've been a fan of 1932's Doctor X and that one will probably turn up here at some point. Atwill has a wonderfully rich charm about him, and he does justice to almost every role I've seen him in. My unfortunate habit of comparing actors I like to Doctor Who persists, and I see a trace of William Hartnell, the First Doctor, in Atwill. They have a prideful composure even when they don't really have much to be proud about. If that makes any sense.
Anyway. I am pleased to say that Murders in the Zoo keeps such a nice, tight system of works that you will find yourself forgetting the comic relief as soon as we return to the real action. It is a well-devised thriller, a relaxing and engaging mystery, and a piece of Paramount history generally deserving a wider release. Bravo to TCM for taking on official duties with it--may many of its lost kin find similar fates.
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