Tag Archives: 1930s

Dink Purcell loves his alcoholic father, ex-heavyweight champion Andy “Champ” Purcell, despite his frequent binges, his frequent gambling and their squalid living conditions. And there’s nothing Andy wouldn’t do for Dink. When Andy wins a race horse gambling, he gives it to Dink and they race it at a Tijuana track. There, Dink meets Linda Carleton, a race horse owner herself, and they have an immediate rapport. But Linda’s rich husband sees Andy and realizes Dink is Linda’s son, who she gave up when she and Andy divorced. Andy is bribed $200 to allow Dink to visit with Linda, but refuses to allow Dink to spend six months with the Carletons. When Andy loses the horse gambling and winds up in jail after a drunken tirade, he realizes Dink’s place is with his mother. Dink tearfully goes but sneaks out and returns at his first opportunity, filling a depressed Andy with a desire to make good. So Andy goes into training after his managers arrange a boxing match with the Mexican champion.
Read More »

Two Americans in England–a wealthy playboy and an actress–join forces to stop international spies.
Read More »

A poor factory worker, employed by a wealthy uncle, falls in love with a beautiful heiress but his happiness and promising future are jeopardized by a previous affair with a coworker he impregnated.
Read More »

Marion is a factory worker who hopes to trade the assembly line, for a beautiful penthouse apartment. Mark Whitney, a wealthy and influential lawyer can make her dreams come true, but there is only one problem, he will give her everything but a marriage proposal. Will this affair ever lead to marriage?
Read More »

Jonathan Street is a struggling composer when he meets and marries Annette. The problem is that Jonathan was drunk and does not want to be married. Annette does go with him to Paris and does the cooking and cleaning. To get his music published, Annette takes it to Paul and he is won over – by her voice and not the music. So he manages her career and she becomes a star as an opera singer everywhere she goes. Since Jonathan cannot sell anything he writes, he leaves Annette and that makes Annette sad as she wants only to be his wife.
Read More »

It is pouring with rain at one minute to midnight on Friday the thirteenth, and the driver of a London bus is peering through his blurred windscreen as his vehicle sails down an empty road. Suddenly, lightning strikes, and a vast crane above topples into the path of the oncoming bus… Then Big Ben begins to wind backwards. Time recedes. And we discover the lives of all the passengers and the events that brought them to that late-night bus journey, from the con-man with a hundred-pound cheque to the businessman’s distraught and elderly wife. Time flows on, inevitably, to the crash – and past it, as some live and some die.
Read More »

The real “message to Garcia” was delivered by an American lieutenant to Cuban rebel General Garcia, asking for the General’s help in the Spanish-American war. The fact that the lieutenant made his way to Garcia in absolute safety was ignored in 20th Century-Fox’s Message to Garcia–which is just as well, since otherwise the movie would have been eight minutes long. In the film version, lieutenant John Boles is guided through the treacherous Cuban jungle by Barbara Stanwyck, doing her best to convince us that she’s an Hispanic senorita. Also along for the trip is renegade marine Wallace Beery, who may not be as friendly as he seems. Fighting off Spaniards and spies at every turn, Boles successfully completes his mission. As history, Message to Garcia is about as reliable as the Hearst newspaper dispatches which triggered the Spanish-American war in the first place.
Read More »

Gold-diggers Kay Francis and Lilyan Tashman meet susceptible lonely businessmen at conventions in this ribald preproduction code story. The millionaires lavish the girls with expensive gifts. Francis falls for poor but virtuous Joel McCrea. Eugene Paulette is a copper king who gives Tashman jewelry. His wife reacts not with jealously but by trying to imitate her rival’s style.
Read More »

Paul Lavond was a respected banker in Paris when he was framed for robbery and murder by crooked associates and sent to Devil’s Island. Years later, he escapes with a friend, a scientist who was working on a method to reduce humans to a height of mere inches (all for the good of humanity, of course). Lavond however is consumed with hatred for the men who betrayed him, and takes the scientist’s methods back to Paris to exact painful revenge.
Read More »

Leopold Pichler (Pallenberg) is a very orderly and trustworthy chief cashier who is asked by his boss to get a large sum of money from the bank which the boss urgently needs on a trip to Vienna. Due to some circumstances, getting the money takes a little longer than expected and the director leaves for Vienna without it. But Pichler sees himself as a reliable man, and so he and his assistant Wittek (Rühmann) follow the director to Vienna with the money kept in a bag. In Vienna, the two provincials however are mistaken for guests of the director and spend an evening at a posh night club. But when it transpires that the director actually won’t come to the night club that evening, Pichler and Wittek have to pay the bill with the money from the bank. And their subsequent attempts at reimbursing the money lead to situations of ever-increasing hilariousness…
Read More »

Theodor Fontane’s novel about a young girl who as a teenager marries a stiff bureaucrat, has a love affair out of boredom and loneliness and has to suffer the consequences years later should be well known.
Read More »

A nightclub singer marries the rich owner of a rubber plantation. When she returns with him to his estate in Malaysia, she finds out that he is cruel, vicious and insanely jealous. She and the plantation’s overseer develop a mutual attraction, but are terrified at what will happen if her husband finds out.
Read More »

The remarkable location-filmed Eskimo was adapted from two books: Die Flucht Ins Wiesse Land and Der Eskimo, both written by naturalist Peter Freuchen. Director Woody Van Dyke, in the tradition of his White Shadows on the South Seas and Trader Horn, took his cast and crew on location to the Arctic, arriving by whaling schooner at the topmost settlement in Alaska with author Freuchen as his guide. Van Dyke, Freuchen, and cinematographer Ray Wise also played prominent on-screen roles in the film. Eskimo Ray Mala (billed only by his last name) essays the title role, speaking in the tongue of his ancestors (even though his English was excellent). Rather than use superimposed titles, Van Dyke resorted to old-fashioned silent-movie subtitles in several dialogue sequences. The story concentrates on the more exotic aspects of Eskimo life, notably the race’s (alleged) casual approach to sex. Though tribal leader Mala has, by his own admission, slept with 20 women without benefit of clergy, woe betide anyone who tries to steal his current sweetheart – as a rapacious trader discovers when he’s harpooned to death by the cuckolded hero. Mala is ultimately undone by the Canadian Mounties, whose efforts to civilize the Eskimo community result in a sudden and tragic shift of the balance of power. Editor Conrad A. Nervig won an Oscar for his Herculean efforts to bring cohesiveness to the story. Performing respectably at the box office, Eskimo inspired another location jaunt in 1935: Last of the Pagans, which also starred Ray Mala.
Read More »

A small country on the verge of bankruptcy is persuaded to enter the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as a means of raising money. Either a masterpiece of absurdity or a triumph of satire, depending on your mood, but it’s quite possibly the funniest movie ever made, and becomes even funnier with subsequent viewings.
Read More »

In a spooky New York City mansion, a wealthy but mean old woman threatens to return her sister to the home’s secret torture chamber when the sister objects to the woman’s trying to ruin the lives of relatives she doesn’t like.
Read More »