FERNANDO’S CORNER ~ Posted July 5th, 2016
After many years I revisited the very adult and extremely well-acted film “The Animal Kingdom” (1932), one of my favorite early thirties films.
It has such an intelligent dialogue and all the performers are so perfect in their roles. As much as I like Ann Harding, who is always sublime, I feel that Myrna Loy pretty much stole the show with her smart performance as the duplicitous and manipulating Cecelia.
Cecelia traps idealist Publisher Tom Collier (Leslie Howard) into marriage. He’s had a long-standing, free, no-strings-attached relationship with smart and wise artist Daisy Sage (the lovely Ann Harding) and Cecelia uses sexual allure as a weapon.
With Daisy, Tom has an open, mature, friendly, congenial relationship, based on trust and similar ethics and values; while with Cecelia, he has a relationship based on sex and manipulation. In fact, the woman who used to be the mistress (Harding) behaves really like a wife and the wife (Loy) behaves as a mistress.
A brilliant film.
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CineMaven's ESSAYS from the COUCH 
I’ve only ever seen Myrna Loy in post-Code films. This character looks to be a jarring change from her later “perfect wife roles”. Thanks for the introduction to this film. I must find it.
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Thank you Silver Screenings for your kind words. You must indeed check Myrna’s Pre-Code roles in films like “Penthouse“, “The Wet Parade”, “When Ladies Meet“, “Topaze“, But especially in “Love Me Tonight“, IMO the best musical of all time, in which she plays the sex-starved cousin of Jeanette MacDonald’s character and in “The Barbarian“, in which she lures Arabic Ramon Novarro, a mischievous, sexy romp.
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