The genesis of MGM's Freaks was a magazine piece by Ted Robbins titled Spurs. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting Spurs for the screen, writers Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Wolf, and Al Boasberg retained the circus setting and the little man-big woman ...
Previously filmed in 1918 and 1923, Harry Leon Wilson's novel achieved movie classic status when it was remade by Leo McCarey in 1935. The story opens in Paris, circa 1908. Ruggles, beautifully underplayed by Charles Laughton, is the ultra-obedient manservant to the bibulous Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young). During one of the Earl's nocturnal ...
Jack Conway complained about being assigned to direct this comedy, claiming that a woman like the title character had almost ruined his own marriage. In a way he had a point , but only Jean Harlow could have made gold digger Lil Andrews a sympathetic protagonist. And Katherine Brush's racy novel (which first appeared, serial-fashion, in the ...
This first film version of H.G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau stars Charles Laughton as Dr.Moreau, a dedicated but sadly misguided scientist who rules the roost on a remote island. Shipwrecked sailor Edward Parker Richard Arlen finds himself on Moreau's island, agreeing to stick around until another boat can come along and take him home. But that's ...
Not the first of the prison pictures, but the one that truly put the genre on the map. Playboy Kent (Robert Montgomery), driving drunk, kills a couple of pedestrians and is sentenced to a 10-year manslaughter term. His cellmate is forger Morgan (Chester Morris), a tough but essentially decent con; the cell-block leader is Butch (Wallace Beery), ...
In his last silent film, Buster Keaton plays a pants-presser who pines for aloof stage actress Dorothy Sebastian. When she is jilted by her fiance Edward Earle, Sebastian spitefully marries Keaton. He is ecstatic (or as ecstatic as the poker-faced comedian ever gets) until he finds out why Sebastian has said "I do." Disconsolately, Keaton takes a ...
This touching drama follows the exploits of a big-hearted businessman. The financier is just about to close a major deal when he is forced to move to the desert to help his tubercular son recover. It takes two years, and during that time, the businessman's partner has written him off as a business failure. That may be true, but in other areas of ...
Sing, Sinner, Sing is one of several 1930s films based on the notorious, well-publicized romance between nightclub singer Libby Holman and tobacco heir Smith Reynolds (the most recent a clef incarnation of this scandalous affair was 1956's Written on the Wind). The Holman counterpart, torch singer Lela Larson, is played by Leila Hyams, while the ...
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