Central Park

I wonder was it some sort of challenge at Warners back then to see who could stuff as much action and content into one of these fabulous little First National quickies. This one is overflowing with every trope, theme, cliché, and idiom that every early thirties WB film ever had. It's not going to stretch your brain, it's not going to challenge you but it is going to entertain your totally. As crazy as the fastest of fast moving plot is, the clever script manages to fit all the different stories together seamlessly.

What makes Central Park that little bit special is its charm. That charm is provided by its three main stars who are really natural and believable. The one scene which sets this is a beautifully endearing moment when Joan Blondell and Wallace Ford, our two heroes just about staving off starvation are sharing a stolen hot dog - this memorable moment epitomises the whole plight of the homeless during The Depression - it's so moving and touching.

Guy Kibbee who is usually used simply as light comedy support, really gets to shine in this one, He plays a loveable old policemen with just one week to go before he retires - hoping that nothing goes wrong (maybe this wasn't such a cliché back in 1932?) He doesn't account for the gangsters and the escaped man-eating lion of course!

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.

This movie is beautifully photographed. George Cukor did well by Central Park a couple decades later. In between (and after) -- has the beauty been paralleled?

In this Central Park, there are actual sheep in Sheep Meadow!

There are also the always marvelous Joan Blondell, Wallace Ford, a lion, gangsters, a touching cop losing his eyesight, and as many plots as there are in "Grand Hotel" (though this movie seems less dated than that more famous one.)

Central Park (1932)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Dot (Joan Blondell) and Rick (Wallace Ford) are both as broke as broke can be when they meet each other in Central Park. After stealing a couple hot dogs to eat the two agree to meet up later in the day. They both end up getting small jobs by the police. Rick gets one from a nice policeman (GUy Kibbee) who is losing his vision. Dot thinks she's working for cops for a charity benefit but she's actually getting double crossed by a gangster.

CENTRAL PARK is without question one of the strangest films you're ever going to see from this era of Hollywood. I'm going to guess that the screenwriter had written four or five incomplete scripts and just decided to throw bits and pieces of all of them into one film. This movie starts off dealing with the depression, which is something rare for this era. It then turns into a cute romantic comedy. Then, out of nowhere, it turns into a bizarre murder film with a nut escaping from a mental hospital. Then it turns into a film about an escaped lion. Oh, then we get back to the woman being double crossed by gangsters.

As you can tell, there's all sorts of crazy stuff that happens in this film and what's even more shocking is that they pack it all into a short 58 minutes. Is this a good movie? Not really but with so much weird stuff going on you can't help but be entertained. The greatest thing going for the picture are the three leads who deliver fine performances. Again, with such a short running time they don't get too much to do but what's here is a lot of fun. Blondell and Ford have a lot of nice chemistry together and Kibbee is always watchable no matter what he's doing.

CENTRAL PARK isn't a well-known movie, which is a shame. I'm sure if more people watched it it could gain a cult following because of how nuts it actually is.

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 patrolman dreading retirement, John Wray as the giggly, eye-rolling maniac.