Central Park (1932)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

the audience applauded

Fantastic!

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

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.

Crazy and fun 1930s picture, the way that all 1930s pics seem to be, with sometimes little control or care for the plot. Joan Blundell and Wallace Ford star as the most two attractive bums you could ever meet. Blondell gets a job being a pretty girl for a ball, but little does she know that she's ACTUALLY going to be a switcheroo in a planned robbery of the benefit money! Oh, there's also a lion that escapes and wanders around terrorizing everybody, a nearly blind policeman who fails to catch the insane past-zookeeper who lets the lion free, and Wallace Ford.. is just there responding to everything. It's all pretty crazy.. and pretty darn entertaining!

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.)

All the action in "Central Park" occurs during a single day and night, in Manhattan's Central Park and in the area immediately surrounding it. This film uses the "book-ends" structure which was employed in so many Warner Brothers films of the early 1930s. In the opening shot of the film, we see a vaudeville-comedy "tramp" yawning as he wakes up in Central Park to begin a new day. In the last shot of the film, we see the same tramp yawning again, in the same place, as he prepares to bed down for the night in Central Park. Except for these two "book-ends", the tramp never appears anywhere in the film.Rick and Dot are two young people desperately trying to get through the Depression, one day at a time. Rick is so desperate for work, he agrees to wash several dozen policemen's motorcycles for an insultingly small amount of pay. Dot gets a job as a fashion model, but she doesn't know that the "fashion show" is a front for a criminal scam.The film features the usual cast of Warners supporting players, each with their own subplot. Guy Kibbee is excellent as a veteran cop on the beat. Tonight is his very last tour of duty: as he straps on his holster for the very last time, he remarks that he's managed to get through all his years as a policeman without ever once firing his gun ... so you just KNOW something's going to happen tonight. John Wray, a character actor who played Lon Chaney-ish roles in the 1930s (without Chaney's subtlety), hams it up here as an insane zoo-keeper named Smiley, who escapes from the loony bin and returns to his job at the Central Park Zoo to release the lions and get revenge on the head zoo-keeper who got Smiley sacked from his zoo job. (This is almost a parody of the role Chaney played in "He Who Gets Slapped".) One of Smiley's lions ends up in a taxi cab, on the way to Joan Blondell's fashion show. Yes, it's THAT sort of movie.Wallace Ford, always an under-rated actor, gives the best performance in this film. Blondell gives one of her usual bad performances. Most of Joan Blondell's early films feature a scene in which a bunch of men stand about, ogling Blondell and remarking on how gorgeous she is: there's a scene like that here, but I just don't get it. Blondell looked very cheap and common, and her appeal has always eluded me."Cental Park" can't decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama. It starts out funny, moves into serious territory with its Depression subject matter, dips into tragedy for the Guy Kibbee scenes, then just gets completely weird with its homicidal maniac zoo-keeper and taxi-taking lion. Fortunately, each of the individual plot elements is done well, with the usual Warner Brothers proficiency. But "Central Park" is like a mismatched jigsaw puzzle of good pieces from several unrelated films. One of the odder examples of a 1930s second-feature: enjoyable but weird. I'll rate it 7 out of 10.