Enjoyable Pre-Code drama centering around activity in New York's famous Central Park. Of course, it's filmed mostly on sets with rear projection effects used to place it in the park but it's not cheesy or anything distracting. The primary focus of the plot is on a couple of young jobless people (Joan Blondell, Wallace Ford) getting mixed up with gangster Harold Huber and his associates. There's also some interesting side stuff going on with Guy Kibbee as an aging policeman with bad eyesight and John Wray as an escaped lunatic who unleashes a lion in the park. Kibbee's got a week to go until he can retire. We know what that means in modern films but does it mean the same in a movie made in 1932? Watch and see. It's a good B movie that gives you a look back at Depression-era New York. That little slice of history, coupled with a short runtime, some exciting action scenes, and a quality Warner Bros. cast makes this one classic film fans will want to seek out.

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!

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

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.