#660: Murders in the Zoo
Man is the most dangerous animal in this crazy pre-Code chiller
Initial release: March 31, 1933
Director: A. Edward Sutherland
Leaving aside the disturbing modern trend among some Gen Zers of praising the Hays Code, the general consensus among people who even know what the Hays Code even is is that its abolishment is a blessing, that its implementation was an appalling kneecapping of film’s growth as a medium in the United States. Like the Comics Code of 1954, it was essentially a moralist censorship regime that operated on a sense of morality that would be utterly alien to most people today: women didn’t deserve agency, interracial relationships were immoral, LGBTQ people just straight up didn’t exist. (Not for nothing that when the video game industry adopted their own self-regulating scheme, they modeled it after the far more permissive MPAA age rating system. Even if not perfect — queer relationships were seen as pornographic well into the 2000s — it’s better than it was before.) But looking at the context of the Hays Code’s foundation in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it’s easy to see why the America of 1930 — you know, that one — felt such a thing was needed, given the stories of degeneracy and scandal supposedly coming out of Hollywood. (This feels familiar, almost as if reactionary rhetoric against Hollywood never went away.) But there was a blessed period, between 1930 and 1934, where filmmakers almost defiantly pushed against the impending censorship regime with envelope-pushing movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and Freaks and Baby Face. And then there’s A. Edward Sutherland’s Murders in the Zoo, starring a deliciously unhinged Lionel Atwill and some shockingly grisly murders by 1930s standards.
Murders in the Zoo’s very premise is pretty dark: Atwill plays Edward Gorman, a middle-aged, wealthy zoologist who is insanely jealous and has a propensity to murder any man who gets too close to his young wife. His wife, meanwhile, can’t hardly stand him, and gladly — if discreetly — gets friendly with the younger, more handsome men who try to court her. The film opens with Gorman sewing a man’s lips shut and leaving him at the mercy of the jungle for the crime of kissing his wife; later, back in the States, he murders his wife’s boyfriend with a fake mamba head, ingeniously designed to inject real mamba poison in the fashion of a snakebite. When his wife figures it out, he chases her down at the zoo and feeds her to the alligators. Yikes!
Even by 1930s standards this film was pretty grim, and a lot of that is thanks to A. Edward Sutherland’s sharp cinematography and a daring screenplay by cynical writer and satirist Philip Wylie and accomplished screenwriter Seton Miller. I couldn’t tell you who wrote what, but knowing what Wylie was like, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one responsible for the shockingly dark, even perverse, tone the film takes. Atwill’s Gorman is smooth and Satanic; when he tells his wife that their colleague — the one whose mouth Gorman had sewn shut — had chosen to leave the party, she asks him, “What did he say?” to which he responds, “He didn’t say anything.” Indeed.
The zoo itself is also something of a character in this. Zoos have long been a thorny ethical question, but the Hagenbeck model is not on display here, with much of the zoo’s animal population shut up in cages. Several major scenes are set in the cat house, which is lined by large cages with big cats — lions, tigers, et cetera — enclosed in them, with little to do but pace and roar at the people who come to gawp at them. It’s depressing, and honestly almost as horrifying as Gorman himself is. He claims to like animals, but like any other wealthy ghoul he only really likes owning them.
Beyond the zoo, the other memorable character — and I use this word in only the most sarcastic terms — is Peter Yates, Charlie Ruggles’ stuttering alcoholic who manages to weasel his way into a job as the zoo’s publicist, which is quite the feat considering how openly he hates and fears the animals within. He’s a thoroughly obnoxious character, whose role in the film is largely intended as ham-fisted “comic relief” from what’s admittedly a shockingly grisly film.
Murders in the Zoo, unlike a lot of its contemporaries in the rush to get out flicks that pushed social mores before the production code made it impossible, kind of slipped under the radar. It shocked audiences at the time but doesn’t seem to have made much else of an impact; it lacked the star power of a Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff, though Atwill nevertheless was a solid B-list choice who’d recently been in productions of the now infamous Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum (the basis for the more well-known Vincent Price flick House of Wax.) Despite this relative obscurity, I think it’s actually one of the better examples of the Pre-Code era, a stunning display of malice that, while certainly not perfect, is definitely worth watching.
-june❤
