Sensation Hunters

Older movies often center on manners. What some call melodrama, in this case, is 1930's survival. There is no Russian Bolshevik to save the day, which leaves people catting around looking for their place in the world. Women would join a low rent musical troupe to try for success or a husband. There are some comments on relative status aboard the ship on which the movie starts. The men are scrounging for work & wives.

I enjoy the movies & plays in which manners & human behavior are important. This is missed in modern super-hero epics that are contests of super-powers. If you wish an old-fashioned contest of manners, then you should enjoy this film. It might remind you of 'A Farewell to Arms' (1932) with Gary Cooper.

Sensation Hunters is a pre-code melodrama set in the tropics of the Panama Canal Zone. The action mostly centers around Trixie's Bull Pit a kind of upscale dive owned by Juanita Hansen who is Texas Guinan like character for the low brows.

Two women are going to work there, good time girl Arline Judge and newcomer Marian Nixon. The girls are kind of on the menu there as well and millionaire aviator Kenneth McKenna. He might be the answer to Nixon's prayers, but it doesn't work out that way.

Preston Foster who I usually enjoy is completely wasted in a role that only calls for him to be a shoulder that Nixon cries on. The whole story despite its trash setting is an old fashioned Victorian melodrama not likely to be revived

Nor should it.

A showgirl finds herself romantically torn between a daring pilot and a mining engineer. It's hardly surprising that Arline Judge never really made a name for herself if her weak performance here is anything to go by, and she isn't helped by the inconsequential quality of the material here. Former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Juanita Henson, presumably in the period between her cocaine and morphine addictions, stands out as the brassy, bullying leader of a dance troupe, and a youngish Walter Brennan appears in a couple of scenes as a gormless waiter. Sadly, these two provide the only scenes worth watching.

From a really cinema and score lover I feel like movies like this one that keeps hidden on a pre-code section are destinated for the ones that feels the urge to understand how society was back in the day and how the cinema was made!

I like it.

A tawdry, mundane unsexy demonstration of why you should avoid poverty row pictures. The randy young men of 1933, to whom this was clearly marketed, would have been so disappointed to find that the only saucy thing about this was the very misleading posters of a semi naked Arline Judge.

Charles Vidor, in his first picture certainly doesn't show any promise that he'll eventually become a talented director. He fails completely to engage you with this tired formulaic story populated with clichéd stereotypes. The peppering with so-called comedy is cringingly un-funny and the inclusion of musical numbers serves simply to sabotage the flow. Those musical sections are actually pretty dire - don't expect Busby Berkley here! OK, Monogram might not have had much of a budget but it looks like like they only had one camera available when filming those lifeless numbers. They're presented almost in the style of a 1929 early talkie; no imaginative cinematography, no close ups of the pretty ladies (I assume they're pretty ladies but they might be blokes in wigs - you can't tell!) and the songs are hardly memorable either.

After her superb performance in Gregory La Cava's excellent AGE OF CONSENT, it's so disappointing to see how appalling Arline Judge's acting is in this. What is meant to be a brassy, ballsy personality comes across as an amateurish and crass cartoon caricature. Of course, it goes without saying that she wasn't in the same class as say Joan Blondell but even so, she was better than this. Also sad is seeing poor old Juanita Hansen, the former beauty of the silent screen attempting a career comeback with an embarrassingly poorly written character. With a few exceptions, what's needed to be a successful 1920s screen goddess is not what's needed to be a successful actress. She had significant personal problems so it seems cruel to be critical about her but it's not a good performance.

Like those unsuspecting sensation hunters lured into the cinemas under false pretences back in 1933, you also might be tempted to watch what you might think is a racy, sexy pre-code movie. Spare yourself the disappointment, the boredom and the futility of this and just be grateful that this first incarnation of Monogram went bust shortly after making this saving the world from any more of this type of garbage.