Untamed (1929)

A movie that I saw ages ago but never did a blog post on is the Joan Crawford early talkie Untamed. (I did briefly mention it once since there's a completely different movie also called Untamed starring Susan Hayward on which I did a blog post over a decade ago.) It aired on TCM some months back, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it again and finally do a post on it. I've gotten around to watching that recording, and now you get the review.

The movie starts off with an intertitle, not uncommon for early talkies, informing us that the action is set in South America in the remote valley of Zoro. We then meet one of the main characters, Bingo (Joan Crawford), doing a dance for some of the oil workers in the area, at least for some values of dancing since this is after all Joan Crawford. Now you might think that Bingo is some sort of exotic native, but in fact she's really the daughter of an oil prospector Dowling who is presumably a widower, otherwise, Bingo would be back in the US with Mom. In any case Bingo's dance is exotic enough that all the men want to dance with her, including some locals who put the moves on her in a way she doesn't appreciate.

Back at home base, Dowling meets a couple of old friends he invited to help him with the search for oil, Ben (Ernest Torrence) and Howard (Holmes Herbert). While the three of them are in some sort of makeshift office, one of the locals who had propositioned Bingo at the dance shows up, telling Dowling that he's going to be pursuing Bingo. Yeah, right. Dad isn't about to have any of that, but instead of just saying no and waiting to escalate only if the guy tries again, he decides to use force to get the guy to back off. When Dad starts hitting the guy with his cane, the guy pulls out a knife and stabs Dowling fatally.

Ben and Howard aren't certain what to do with Bingo. They had been planning on going with Dowling farther into the wilderness in their search for oil, but with old man Dowling dead they don't know if taking Bingo with them is such a good idea. And besides, Bingo is technically rich since the oil wells were successful and she's inheriting the company. With that in mind, the two men decide they should take Bingo back to New York and make a woman out of her so that she can find a "suitable" man from among the smart rich set, even though she's never been around such men.

On the boat back to New York, Bingo bumps into Andy McAllister (Robert Montgomery). They've never met before, but the two immediately fall for each other, even though Andy seems to have a girlfriend with him on the trip. (There's one particularly humorous scene in which Bingo and the other woman nearly come to blows.) There's a problem, however, in that Andy doesn't really have wealth; he's the sort of guy in these pre-World War II movies who's trying to work his way up the ladder and you can see him getting an offer for a "job in South America" that may speed up proposing to his girlfriend.

When they get to New York, Ben tries to get Bingo to realize that Andy can't really provide for Bingo the way that a stereotypical man should be able to provide for a wife, and nobody wants Andy to be living off Bingo's money. So they separate for a while, but that's not going to cool their ardor. Things really get creepy when we learn that Howard also has some sort of feelings for Bingo and wants to take on Bingo as his duty to the late Mr. Dowling.

Untamed starts off in the vein of being crazy fun, with Hollywood's highly inaccurate look at Latin America while never getting off the back lot. The characters seem thoroughly unrealistic, but in a way that's strange and not tedious. Once everybody gets back to New York, the movie becomes more conventional, but it's never uninteresting because of its provenance as an early talkie.

Untamed got a DVD release from the Warner Archive MOD scheme many years ago, even before I posted about the Susan Hayward Untamed. In fact, the Susan Hayward movie eventually got a DVD release from Fox's MOD scheme not long after I posted my review on it back in 2013. So if you want to see the Crawford movie, pay attention to what movie you're getting.