First of all, this is a filmed play with bewildering time skips. It's the weather that clues us in to "six months later" or "that following spring" as characters don fur coats or dress in short sleeves. I was confused in the beginning and at the end of movie, figured the whole thing occupies about two years.My, it's well acted. After Harding feels clucky when idling her transatlantic voyage away by playing companion to a two year old of a fellow voyager, she decides to take up her live in lover's, Howard's, proposal of marriage. He's proposed numerous times, and she supposes he'll be thrilled that she agrees at last to make it legal. Her giddy expectation that he'll be happy with a/her baby needs and b/her revelation that she's artistically ready to paint made me smile. Surprise! He's found Loy, a sultry young lady ready, after one month, to marry him. He still wants Harding as Dear Friend, waiting in the shadows until he's ready to dribble out some time to her, hooboy, now that's never happened in the history of the world. :SNow comes the tangling of lives and families that make up the Barry play blueprint of Domineering Parent and Befuddled Child. The child, Howard, has integrity up the wazoo but not much ready cash. As a sidenote, all these characters have varying degrees of wealth, living as "Bohemian" in spacious apartments with glorious views or living in well-appointed homes in the country. I guess if you live in a mansion, like Parent, you want your child to do likewise.Eight stars for acting from the cast: Gargan as an unlikely butler, Loy as schemer (to me, she was written as completely unsympathetic), Harding as full of herself while blind to Howard's eventual tiring of her resistance to marriage, and most of all Howard for his end scene with Loy in which the lights come on about which woman acts Nicest and Kindest to him. He portrays superbly the realization that now is the time to act and not waffle with words.

Leslie Howard is pompous and stiff, playing a character who is the same. Myrna Loy is beautiful, sometimes charming, but also a little stiff. She seems unused to the role of the woman who loses in the end. Ann Harding has always come across as mannered and stiff to me, and this movie is no exception.Being that it is a pre-code, the man is permitted to choose his mistress over his wife-very unusual indeed and you won't see that again after 1934 for many decades. But he knew what his wife was when he married her, yet he acts so affronted and disgusted when she lets him know that she really wants him to accept his father's offer to live in the city, as she is unhappy and bored in the country. She wants a more exciting life.Ann Harding's character seems anything but the footloose artist. She comes across as very priggish and upright to me. Yet we are to believe she is a "free soul". It is even less believable that Howard's character is such a person. They seem like two prigs, who probably do belong together after all.

I came away from this with a somewhat different message than the playwright intended (the same playwright, I should point out, who started The Philadelphia Story with a comedic stylization of wife-beating). The hero, played by Leslie Howard, starts a publishing enterprise devoted to the avant-garde works admired by his friends. He marries, and surprise, his wife, played rather icily by Myrna Loy, has the philistine idea that he should publish a few titles which will actually reap a profit so that he can at least finance his little enterprise without losing the family fortune. The movie leaves no doubt that such a money-grubbing attitude is worthy of the deepest condemnation. Hubby naturally finds himself longing for his former without-benefit-of-clergy bedmate, played by Ann Harding, who understands his sensitive soul and is more likely to indulge his dissipating his wealth, since she has no more sense than he does.Oh, I enjoyed the movie, but I'm surprised that so many seem not to notice how shallow and stupid its ideas are. Leslie Howard does his best to make the protagonist seem noble, and I guess that for many viewers, he succeeds. Loy, not yet a star, is lovely as always.

That was a line from another Philip Barry play which had a bit more screen popularity than The Animal Kingdom. Philip Barry as a playwright was able to find an audience in two distinct eras of American history, the carefree Roaring Twenties and the poorer socially significant Thirties. He did with a clever mixture of social commentary while writing about the privileged classes enjoying their privileges.The Animal Kingdom had a 183 performance run on Broadway the previous year and its star Leslie Howard was a movie name already on two continents. So Howard, Bill Gargan, and Ilka Chase repeat their Broadway roles here. Good thing for Howard, he got to do this screen version of one of his Broadway triumphs. Probably in a few more years Cary Grant might have gotten the call.Howard is a rich young man rather bored with his life and living without benefit of clergy with bohemian artist Ann Harding. But family pressures force him to marry society girl Myrna Loy. Guess who in the end he winds up with or watch the film to find out.A lot of similarities here with Holiday, a Barry play that got a more well known screen adaption. An overbearing parent, snobbish friends/ relatives and two women to choose from, and some down to earth friends for the hero.The players do well here and a special note should be made of Bill Gargan who plays Howard's butler who is a washed up former prizefighter. The Animal Kingdom was Gargan's feature film debut and I wouldn't be surprised if Leslie Howard did the same service for him as he did for Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest.The Animal Kingdom despite good notices failed to find an audience in Herbert Hoover America. Howard's problems do seem trivial in the face of what a lot of people were dealing with. Still it's a good and faithful adaption of a good play.