Tiger Claw

Circus melodrama takes a turn for the weird when animal trainer Jonny Wilken discovers that his lady love has a secret admirer: Akbar, the tiger she raised from a cub, now the magnificent full-grown creature with whom she performs her circus act. Inflamed emotions errupt with an unspeakable rampage of bloody violence that leaves the audience horrified.

Harry Piel, a motion picture writer-producer-director in his native Germany since the silent days, also appeared in many of his own movies, so often opposite wild animals that he became German cinema's answer to Clyde Beatty. The man-woman-jungle cat triangle of The Tiger's Claw proves that love and hate are not "for humans only" and makes it one of Piel's most unusual films, told against a backdrop of death-defying circus routines. -- Tom Weaver