As pre-Code as they get, and very un-MGM-like for 1932, this stage success and remake of "West of Zanzibar" is both hilariously racist and quite creepy, with nightmarish imagery and lots of sadism. Walter Huston, hamming it up entertainingly, is the warped, lame white-boss-man whose appetite for vengeance leads him to make a disastrous mistake. He's surrounded by some MGM players at the modest peaks of their careers: Conrad Nagel as a drug-addicted doctor, Lupe Velez as Huston's two-timing mistress, and most memorably, Virginia Bruce (without makeup, very unusual for the time, and emoting affectingly) as a convent school girl driven into prostitution and drink. The love story between her and Nagel is more convincing than usual: These two do seem made for each other, and there's little of the hearts-and-flowers romantic excess of the era. But the prime appeal is how beastly Huston is to all around him, and how memorably he gets his comeuppance. The natives' ooga-booga costumes, dances, and obeisance to the white massa are kind of hard to take, and William J. Cowen's direction is workmanlike at best. But the piece is, in its own way, as horrifying and memorable as that other atypical MGM horror classic of 1932, "Freaks."