utgard14
Enjoyable Pre-Code drama centering around activity in New York's famous Central Park. Of course, it's filmed mostly on sets with rear projection effects used to place it in the park but it's not cheesy or anything distracting. The primary focus of the plot is on a couple of young jobless people (Joan Blondell, Wallace Ford) getting mixed up with gangster Harold Huber and his associates. There's also some interesting side stuff going on with Guy Kibbee as an aging policeman with bad eyesight and John Wray as an escaped lunatic who unleashes a lion in the park. Kibbee's got a week to go until he can retire. We know what that means in modern films but does it mean the same in a movie made in 1932? Watch and see. It's a good B movie that gives you a look back at Depression-era New York. That little slice of history, coupled with a short runtime, some exciting action scenes, and a quality Warner Bros. cast makes this one classic film fans will want to seek out.
MartinHafer
Generally, Warner Brothers made terrific films--lots of fun and with some wonderful actors. However, this B-movie just never seemed to gel for me--mostly because the script was so bizarre and uneven. Even with Joan Blondell, Wallace Ford and Guy Kibbee trying their best, it's still a sub-par film.The film is unusual for a Depression-era movie in that it actually acknowledges that their is a depression!! Too often, films throughout the 1930s were about rich society folks--yet most people in the country were barely scraping by. Here, the film finds Ford and Blondell homeless and without jobs. They manage to scrape by here and there but have to sleep in the park because they just haven't got enough money even to eat. Later, their need for a job manages to merge with another plot--this one involving a cop with bad eyesight (Kibbee) and an escaped maniac. Both plots (particularly the Kibbee one) are just weird and tough to connect with. How they later intersect is also odd. Now I like novel ideas--but they need to be realistic or at least enjoyable. However, I just kept waiting and waiting for some payoff but by the end of the film I just came to realize that this was a bit of a bust. Not terrible--but also not particularly good. Considering that Blondell was a very new starring actress, this sort of throwaway role isn't all that surprising. Most actors did a few turkeys like this on their role to stardom.
bkoganbing
Central Park is a short not quite an hour B film that starred Joan Blondell and Wallace Ford who meet in the famous park over a pair of purloined hamburgers. They are the leads in a series of interconnected incidents involving a robbery of the famous Central Park Casino, an escaped lion from the zoo, Guy Kibbee as a beloved patrolman who is slowly losing his vision and trying to stick it out until retirement and an escaped mental patient who happens to be the former zoo keeper.Of course the zoo and the Sheep Meadow are there, but today's audiences unless they're read in the history of the times wouldn't know about the Central Park Casino or that there was gambling and a nightclub on the park grounds. And in 1932 when the film came out, the Central Park Casino was the favored hangout of Mayor James J. Walker. An added dimension that theatergoers of the day had that people watching on TCM can't appreciate.The film is structured kind of like Boogie Nights or Crash with the separate elements all coming together at the end. For B film, Warner Brothers put a lot of care into this one.
Fred_Rap
A lightning-paced Grand Hotel knockoff that crams more incidents into its brief running time than most films twice as long. It's a marvel of fat-free story telling, hokey, predictable and rarely less than delightful. Manhattan's famous landmark is re-imagined as an urban Sherwood Forest filled with merry paupers, evil bandits, benevolent Irish cops, homicidal madmen, and even a herd of braying sheep. Destitute Wallace Ford and Joan Blondell meet in the park, trading flirtatious smiles and glib wisecracks in the face of hunger and homelessness. The action quickly shifts into overdrive when Joan is suckered into a gangster's robbery scam. Meanwhile, a vengeance-seeking psycho prowls the park and an abused lion escapes from the zoo. John Adolphi, director of George Arliss' screen vehicles, seems to bask in his freedom from stodgy period pieces, taking lurid pleasure in protracted fistfights, gory lion maulings, and Blondell's plunging décolletage. His lowbrow enthusiasm is infectious. With Guy Kibbee in a rare non-comic turn as a park cop dreading retirement, John Wray as the giggly, eye-rolling maniac.
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