David Copperfield was MGM's major Christmas release for its 1934-1935 season and also the first of producer David O. Selznick's major "literary" films for that studio. While a great deal of editing and streamlining was necessary to distill Charles Dickens' massive novel into 133 minutes of screen time, the end result was so successful that only ...
Al Jolson's "comeback" picture Hallelujah, I'm a Bum is an offbeat Depression-era concoction with script by Ben Hecht and S.N. Behrmann and music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Jolson plays a genial hobo who wanders happily around Central Park, neither seeking nor accepting honest employment. He is imbued with a sense of ...
At one time Universal's "prestige" director, James Whale had slipped off the A-list by the end of the 1930s; even so, his films remained both intriguing and entertaining. In Whale's Sinners in Paradise, an airplane cracks up during a storm and crash-lands on an uncharted South Sea island. All nine passengers survive unscathed, including runaway ...
In his only visit to Columbia Pictures, Paramount's resident crooner Bing Crosby stars in a sentimental musical drama. In jail on a trumped-up charge, Crosby meets a condemned prisoner, and promises the doomed man to look after his little girl (Edith Fellows) when he gets out. The girl's grandfather (Donald Meek) is also part of the "deal," and ...
Transatlantic Tunnel is the English-language version of the 1932 French-German speculative drama The Tunnel. Set sometime in the future (complete with two-way televisions, art-deco airships and self-propelled automobiles), the film stars Richard Dix as McAllen, a visionary architect who devotes his life to the construction of a tunnel linking the ...
Based on an idea by Will Rogers, the story concerns the efforts by the President of the United States to get the public's mind off the Depression. To this end, he appoints Broadway impresario Lawrence Cromwell (Warner Baxter) to the new cabinet position of "Secretary of Amusement." Wasting no time, Cromwell sets about to nationalize the ...
Gangster Cagney allows his powerful political connections to appoint him "deputy inspector" of a state reform school. There he finds the youths abused and battered by a brutal, heartless warden and his thuggish guards. It is a nurse who informs Cagney and pleads with him to clean things up. Something touches Cagney's normally hard heart and he ...
Zoë Akins' archetypal "gold-digger" stage comedy The Greeks Had a Word for It was transferred to the screen in 1933, with the "It" changed to "Them" in the title, reportedly at the insistence of over-cautious producer Sam Goldwyn (this became a moot point in the 1940s, when the film was reissued as Three Broadway Girls). Ina Claire, Madge Evans, ...
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