Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's whimsical Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play You Can't Take It With You was transformed into a paean to populism by director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin. This is the story of the zany Sycamore household, presided over by Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), a former businessman who has turned his ...
Tom Destry (James Stewart), son of a legendary frontier peacekeeper, doesn't believe in gunplay. Thus he becomes the object of widespread ridicule when he rides into the wide-open town of Bottleneck, the personal fiefdom of the crooked Kent (Brian Donlevy). His detractors laugh even louder when Destry signs on as deputy to drunken sheriff Wash ...
In this tuneful Italian holiday film a scroogy old miser decides to evict Santa Clause and Company from the North Pole because the dead-beats are behind on their rent. Children from around the world rally 'round the Jolly One and send him their pennies and save the day. Songs include: "Christmas Is Coming," "The Christmas That Almost Wasn't," ...
Film collectors take note: Hal Roach's Pick a Star is not a Laurel and Hardy picture, though the popular comic duo does make a brace of amusing cameo appearances halfway through the film. A remake of Buster Keaton's Free and Easy, this is the story of how small-town gas-station owner Joe Jenkins (Jack Haley) tries to help his sweetheart Cecilia ...
This late-30s gem is an engaging spoof that features the U.S. film debut of the French acting beauty Daniell Darrieux. She appears as a French model who's come to New York to find a job. Things go a little awry in her first interview when she applies for a nude modeling position and gets the addresses mixed up. When she shows up at the wrong place ...
Deanna Durbin, the teenaged soprano who literally saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy, made her feature-film debut in Three Smart Girls. Durbin, Nan Grey and Barbara Read play three wealthy young sisters, living with their divorced mother (Nella Walker) in Europe. The girls learn that their father (Charles Winninger) has made plans to remarry ...
This third film version of the hectic Margaret Mayo-Salisbury Field stage farce Twin Beds officially stars George Brent and Joan Bennett, but it's Mischa Auer's picture all the way. Newlyweds Mike and Julia Abbott (Brent and Bennett) can never be "alone at last" thanks to the unwelcome drop-ins by their friends, including flamboyant Russian ...
An early Technicolor musical that concentrates on the fashions of the late 1930s, this film was reissued under the title All This and Glamour Too. The top models of the era, including several who are advertising household products, are in the cast. The plot centers around a chic boutique, whose owner, George Curson (Warner Baxter), tries hard to ...
Slow moving, overly complicated, and badly acted in key roles, this low-budget melodrama from Poverty Row company Progressive Pictures was directed by silent screen actress Dorothy Davenport, the widow of the late matinee idol Wallace Reid. A girl detective, Barbara Hammond (Claudia Dell) is found with the corpse of the woman she has been ...
In Condemned to Live, Ralph Morgan stars as Professor Paul Kriston, the kindly and generous doctor of a tiny European village. So well-liked is Kriston that the beautiful Marguerite Mane (Maxine Doyle) is willing to marry him, even though she loves another man, young David (Russell Gleason). Things take a sinister turn when a series of murders ...
This ultra-cheap murder mystery stars Jack Mulhall as Devlin, a dapper police detective with a quick wit and a way with the ladies. During a seance, much-hated millionaire Richard Lang (Philips Smalley) is murdered with a rare oriental dagger. Everyone present at the seance falls under suspicion, obliging Devlin to sift through the morass of would ...
Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Charlie Chan, was responsible for the international-espionage yarn Inside the Lines. The time is WWI, and the place is Gibraltar, where English girl Jane (Betty Compson) is accidentally reunited with her pre-war sweetheart, German-born Wodehouse (Ralph Forbes). Each suspects the other of being an agent for the ...
In this light and lovely romantic musical, a Hungarian woman (Deanna Durbin) attends a fair in Austria and buys a card from a gypsy fortune teller. It says that she will meet someone important and is destined for a happy marriage. Afterward she gets a job as a baker's assistant. She then meets a handsome army drummer (Bob Cummings) who secretly ...
Also known as Mr. Arkadin, this flawed late effort by director Orson Welles recalls the structure of Citizen Kane, centering around an investigation into the past of a powerful millionaire. This time around, however, the millionaire is very much alive; in fact, it is Gregory Arkadin (Welles) himself who orders the inquiry, claiming to suffer from ...
It is difficult to believe that this ultra-cheapie ever actually scared anyone; it's just possible that audiences laughed as loudly at the film in 1932 as they do today. On a dark and stormy night, Hero and heroine Rex Lease and Vera Reynolds head to Reynolds's ancestral mansion to claim her inheritance. Everyone in the house takes great delight ...
Hellzapoppin' is the film version of the "anything goes" Broadway hit starring Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. The original production was part musical comedy, part "blackout" revue, with wild sight gags, zany props, audience participation sequences, dirty jokes, and never-ending gunshots. There was no plot, and in fact no two performances were ...
Set in the South Seas, Seven Sinners stars Marlene Dietrich as a cabaret singer whose reputation as a troublemaker has gotten her kicked out of one port of call after another. Once more causing a riot, Dietrich takes refuge on the first ship out, together with her underhanded cohorts Broderick Crawford and Mischa Auer. During her next stopover at ...
In this French family-oriented comedy, a man with a passion for all animals takes on the Russians to protect a mouse and a dog from being sent up into space, via a satellite. He obtains them after the creatures escape and all the prompting from French and Russian scientists is to little avail, compelling them to try even stronger measures that ...
Mischa Auer's fake Swami Yomurda of Sinister Hands returned in Sucker Money, a crime drama set among newspaper reporters. Assigned to investigate the psychic rackets, cub reporter Jimmy Reeves (Earl McCarthy) goes undercover and is hired by the Swami to impersonate the clients' dead relatives. The gang, which also includes the alcoholic Mame (Mae ...
The first of British director John Guillermin's two 1952 offerings was Song of Paris. Dennis Price stars as stomach-pill sales representative Matthew Ibbetson, who goes to Paris to close a business deal. While taking in the sights, Ibbetson inaugurates a casual affair with French chanteuse Clementine (Anne Vernon). Upon returning to London, ...
Up in Mabel's Room was one of a mid-1940s series of profitable film revivals of venerable theatrical comedies, all produced by Edward Small and directed by Allan Dwan. Previously filmed in 1925, this rusty-dusty stage perennial was written by Otto Harbach and Willson Collison; Tom Reed was the scenarist hired to bring the play's creaky plot ...
A judge investigating two Wall Street brokers accused of stock manipulations learns of a mysterious invention, a "DXL Accumulator" with which its inventor, Prof. Farrington, plans to harness solar power. The judge decides to visit the professor at his mountain hideaway. When he arrives, he finds that the professor's daughter and her boyfriend are ...
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