Arsenic and Old Lace is director Frank Capra's spin on the classic Joseph Kesselring stage comedy, which concerns the sweet old Brewster sisters (Josephine Hull, Jean Adair), beloved in their genteel Brooklyn neighborhood for their many charitable acts. One charity which the ladies don't advertise is their ongoing effort to permit lonely bachelors ...
One of the best of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals, Top Hat centers on a typical mistaken-identity plot, with wealthy Dale Tremont (Rogers), on holiday in London and Venice, assuming that American entertainer Jerry Travers (Astaire) is the husband of her friend Madge (Helen Broderick) -- who's actually the wife of Jerry's business manager ...
It took British author James Hilton six weeks to write his visionary novel Lost Horizon. It took director Frank Capra two years-and half of his home studio Columbia's annual budget-to bring it to the screen. After a lengthy preamble, inviting audiences to imagine their own ideas of Utopia, the film opens on a chaotic scene at a Chinese airfield. ...
This comedy is notable as the final onscreen appearance (non-speaking) of Edward Everett Horton, a staple comic supporting actor from the early '30s onward. Dick Van Dyke plays an ambitious small-town minister who rallies the whole town to meet a challenge bet by a tobacco corporation. Cooked up by the tobacco company's public relations head (Bob ...
The seventh of RKO's Fred Astaire--Ginger Rogers musicals, Shall We Dance casts Astaire as a world-renowned ballet dancer and Rogers as a musical comedy headliner. Rogers' manager Jerome Cowan concocts a phony romance between his client and Astaire in order to garner publicity for them both. Eventually, of course, the twosome falls in love for ...
The final pairing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, an adaptation of a Rodgers & Hart musical, stars Eddy as a playboy who fantasizes that he is romancing an angel (MacDonald). ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
Based on Dwight Taylor and Cole Porter's play of the same name, The Gay Divorcee centers on Mimi (Ginger Rogers), a woman seeking a divorce from her husband. Mimi travels to an English seaside resort, pursued by the love-stricken Guy (Fred Astaire), whom she mistakes for the hired correspondent in her divorce case. Among the many musical numbers ...
Deanna Durbin offered her fans a change of pace in this mystery story seasoned with elements of comedy and music. Nikki Collins (Durbin) is a small-town girl visiting New York City to meet with Mr. Haskell (Edward Everett Horton), her family's attorney. As her train pulls into the station, she looks out her window into a nearby office building. ...
Both film versions of Phillip Barry's stage comedy Holiday have their merits, but the 1938 version has the added advantage of supercharged star power. Katharine Hepburn and Doris Nolan play Linda and Julia Seton, two daughters of a very well-to-do family. Linda feels a bit lost in the shuffle as sister Julia prepares to marry self-made financier ...
Generally considered one of director Ernst Lubitsch's lesser works, Angel stars Marlene Dietrich as Maria, the neglected wife of Sir Frederick Barker (Herbert Marshall), a British diplomat who travels often and seems little concerned with his spouse. Maria has nearly reached her breaking point when she travels to Paris to visit her old friend Anna ...
Ernst Lubitsch used Laszlo Aladar's play The Honest Finder as a springboard for one of his most delightful early-'30s Paramount confections. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins play Gaston and Lily, a pair of Parisian thieves, both disguised as nobility, who decide to rob lovely perfume company executive Mariette Colet (Kay Francis); Gaston gets a ...
This first of four film versions of the Ben Hecht/Charlrd MacArthur Broadway hit stars Adolphe Menjou as explosive Chicago newspaper-editor Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as his star reporter Hildy Johnson. Hildy is on the verge of getting married and retiring from Burns' dirty little tabloid, but he agrees to cover one last story: the politically ...
Lucille Ball offers a seminal version of her Lucy Ricardo TV character in Her Husband's Affairs. Ball is cast as Margaret Weldon, the wife of advertising executive William Weldon (Franchot Tone). Though Weldon is successful, Margaret can't help but feel that he'd be more successful if she were to take an active part in his business affairs. The ...
A semi-sequel to Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Columbia's Down to Earth is a camp- and kitsch-lover's delight. More beautiful than ever, Rita Hayworth stars as Terpsichore, the Goddess of Dance. From her perch Up Above, Terpsichore discovers that Broadway producer Danny Miller (Larry Parks) intends to put together a musical satire, lampooning herself and ...
Director Josef Von Sternberg and his greatest discovery, Marlene Dietrich, worked together for the last time on this historical melodrama, which was a notorious and controversial box-office flop in its day. Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero), a young military officer, meets a mysterious and alluring woman named Concha Perez (Dietrich) and soon falls ...
Practically everybody on the Warner Bros. lot shows up in the wartime morale-boosting musical extravaganza Thank Your Lucky Stars. Believe it or not, this one has a wisp of a plot. A pair of enterprising producers, played by S.Z. Sakall and Edward Everett Horton, want to hire singer Dinah Shore for their upcoming Cavalcade of Stars. Unfortunately, ...
It's hard to go wrong with such stars as Bob Hope, Burns & Allen, Martha Raye and Edward Everett Horton, and College Swing doesn't-go wrong, that is. The film begins in 1738, when a pact is drawn up between the Alden family and a highly respected Colonial college: If any female member of the family can pass her college exams within a 200-year ...
In this elaborate big-budget musical, a handsome businessman follows a beautiful woman aboard a luxury liner and begins to woo her. This doesn't set well with her fiance. Later the fellow learns of the stock market crash and develops a taste for booze. Romantic mayhem ensues until the inevitable happy ending. Look for a young Bing Crosby singing ...
In this romantic comedy, two warring neighbors are aghast when their respective daughter and son fall in love and plan to marry. Despite their parents' objections they begin planning and getting the legal paper work done; it is then they learn they could be brother and sister. Fortunately, the situation is straightened out and the two find out ...
Five characters find themselves playing a lively game of musical beds in this saucy pre-Code comedy. Richard (Edward Everett Horton) is a well-known lawyer who has a rather surprising reputation as a ladykiller. Felix (also played by Horton) is a nightclub impressionist who wants Richard's permission to spoof him in his stage act. Richard tells ...
Sgt. Andy Mason Jr. (James Ellison) is on the eve of shipping out from New York with his unit -- he's the son of Andrew Mason Sr. (Eugene Pallette), a wealthy, blustery Wall Street financier. While paying respects to his father and the latter's business partner, dithering fuss-budget Peyton Potter (Edward Everett Horton), at the Club New Yorker, ...
Robert Montgomery plays saxophone-playing boxer Joe Pendleton, who insists upon piloting his own plane, much to the consternation of his manager Max Corkle (James Gleason). Just before a championship bout, Joe's plane crashes. When he revives, he finds he has been whisked away to Heaven by the overanxious Messenger #7013. Checking with the man in ...
Sunny was one of three RKO Radio Broadway-musical adaptations tailored to the talents of British favorite Anna Neagle by her soon-to-be-husband Herbert Wilcox (the other two were No No Nanette and Irene). The story has been updated a bit and transposed to New Orleans' Mardi Gras, but remains at base a "Cinderella" yarn, replete with a poor girl ...
Dapper musical comedy favorite Jack Buchanan is practically the whole show in The Gang's All Here. Buchanan plays John Forrest, top investigator for the Stamford Insurance Company. Retiring from the firm, Forrest intends to devote the rest of his life to writing detective fiction, but this plan goes out the window when his former employers are ...
It's a Boy was freely adapted from a German play by Franz Arnold and Ernest Bach. On the eve of his marriage to Anita Gunn (Heather Thatcher), Dudley Leake (Edward Everett Horton) is confronted by Joe Piper (Albert Burdon), who claims to be Dudley's illegitimate son. Best man James Skippett (Leslie Henson) smells a rat, especially when Joe demands ...
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