A zoo employee who steals the visitors' fur coats, a boarding school intern who is turning eighteen and is about to be "sold" as a cheap worker in a tannnery, a little boy who wants to ride the elephant, all three become fugitives hiding in a zoo.
Visually dazzling and genuinely romantic, this film comes to prove what an underrated director Lee was (he also made a very good The Count of Monte Cristo). On a deeper level, the plot and imagery have symbolic dimensions which are clearly Freudian. The zoo stands for the human mind, in a clever way. All those unleashed beasts are obviously expressing the fundamental drama of two young people who discover their sexuality after a history of confinement.
This film is number 5 in Dale Thomajan's top ten list for 1933.
Rating: 73
(Number 7 in my favorites list for 1933.)
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