Forrester Harvey - Cookie Harris Curtis Nero - Fuzzy Everett Brown - Native Reporting to Gregg (uncredited in film) Charles Irwin - Carl (uncredited) Sarah Padden - Nun at Convent (uncredited) Crew Douglas Shearer - recording director Production notes Certain exterior scenes in Kongo are recycled footage shot four years earlier for West of Zanzibar. That footage includes, for example, the scene when the "Juju" spirit frightens the African ivory "bearers" so Flint's men can steal the elephant tusks they drop while fleeing. Another scene employing recycled footage depicts the natives and the funeral pyre during the ritual sacrifice. Kongo was filmed at MGM between August 4 and early September 1932. News updates in trade papers at the time confirm that production work on Kongo actually began several weeks ahead of another project at the studio, the romantic drama Red Dust starring Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Mary Astor. In fact, some of film sets for Kongo, which were designed by MGM's art director Cedric Gibbons, were also used for Red Dust. Reception Many film critics and movie-industry publications in 1932 objected to what they viewed as the gruesome, salacious content of Kongo. In its distribution to various locations, especially in metropolitan areas like New York City, the film was often consigned to lesser theaters or "houses" and used as a filler on theater schedules until more highly anticipated or "prestigious" productions arrived. In its November 22 issue, the influential trade paper Variety states that Kongo "misses completely for the ace houses", adding "it was kept out of Loew's Broadway deluxer, the Capitol, and spotted into the Rialto as a stop-gap until Par's own 'Sign of the Cross'". In his overall assessment of Kongo for Variety, reviewer Abel Green describes the picture as essentially a tedious remake and a waste of good acting talent: Another widely read trade paper at the time, The Film Daily, agreed with Green's general assessment of Kongo, describing it as a "far-fetched tropical melodrama" with a "disagreeable theme", one replete with "squalor" and "high-tension hokum that makes the affair hard to believe". The monthly The New Movie Magazine, which promoted itself in 1932 as having the "Largest Circulation of Any Screen Magazine in the World", was not as directly critical of Kongo as the previously cited publications. The popular fan magazine, however, in its November edition did prepare its readers for John Huston's appearance in