When the call of the wild dials your number, be sure to answer with "ooga booga". That's the mentality of this wonderful Universal farce that takes bad taste to a new level and refuses to apologize for it. Robert Paige has written a book on alleged jungle head hunters and when columnist Louise Albritton criticizes it, he sets out to teach her a lesson she'll never forget. She goes to the jungle allegedly where he did his research and tries to find a "specimen" to bring back to try to "take". What she doesn't realize is that of the ones she could have picked, the one she ends up with is actually Paige in dark makeup and "war paint" who ends up being sponsored by her and turns society upside down in the process.
A great sense of fun takes over the moment the credits end, and it never lets up. He turns a hotel lobby upside down, with Walter Catlett taking over for Franklin Pangborn as the nervous clerk, then going back and firth from disguise to his real self, pretends to have a "sacred" ritual in his attempt to fool them, and creates fake shrunken heads to scare Albritton and her family, which includes Helen Broderick as her suspicious mother and Nydia Westman as a nervous aunt. Robert Benchley as Paige's publisher and Edward Everett Horton as his pal are also very funny. Universal before its days as a studio of blockbusters had some great films outside of Deanna Durbin musicals and monster movies, and this is one of the best of the many I've seen.
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