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ZOO IN BUDAPEST
Production: Fox. Supervision: Jesse L. Lasky. Direction: Rowland V. Lee. Photography: Lee Garmes. With Loretta Young, Gene Raymond, and 0. P. Heggie. Distribution: Fox.
This is one of the best films to come from Hollywood this year and an indication of new production ideas in the Fox studios in Hollywood.
For about two-thirds of its length the picture has admirable continuity, the three main threads of the boy keeper whose love for animals urges him to steal the furs of women visitors, the orphan girl who escapes, and the little boy who evades his nurse, being introduced, developed, and intertwined with an almost masterly skill. The curve continues in symmetry, with small explosions of suspense, leading up to the theft of another fur and the breakaway of the girl from her companions, followed by a very lovely sequence in the undergrowth beside the lake where the girl crouches, nervous and embarrassed about changing her uniform under the curious eyes of the waterbirds. I cannot recall a scene of such intimacy in which mood and meaning have been so superbly enhanced by photography. Evening falls and mists creep over the lake as the boy keeper and the orphan girl talk to each other for the first time, presently to wade through the water to a disused bear pit. Not until the search for them and the missing little boy is begun is the mood broken and sensationalism lays ugly fingers on the theme in the form of an orgy of broken cages and escaping wild beasts. Delightful romance is twisted into false conclusion when the Rich Man rewards the keeper's heroism by purchasing the orphan's freedom and making him the private keeper of his own luxury zoo. Ethical values are horribly distorted in the usual interests of Big Business.
Garmes' photography envelops most of the footage in a beautiful, sentimental, and almost idyllic quality which marks an advance on the treatment of Scarface, City Streets, and Shanghai Express. His capacity for reflecting the mood of a sequence by lighting and camera movement and his acute sensitivity to textures are, next to the continuity, the real importance of the picture. The treatment of the love scene beside the lake with its setting of pampas plumes and silently gliding birds will certainly remain in the memory, and ranks superior to his love scene by the waves in City Streets. Grand close-ups of animals are seen from the camera and not the human point of view.
Roland Lee's direction has a tenderness and attention to detail hard to reconcile with his earlier work. What share Lee played in
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