Often (and accurately) described as a model of the whodunit genre, The Kennel Murder Case stars William Powell, making his fourth screen appearance as S. S. Van Dine's dilettante detective Philo Vance. This time the story involves intrigue at the Long Island kennel club. The murder victim is Robert H. Barrat, who works overtime making himself a ...
Dissatisfied with his postwar Republic westerns (not to mention his comparatively low salary), Gene Autry switched his base of operations to Columbia in 1947, where he wore two hats as both star and producer. Autry's first Columbia effort, The Last Round-Up, is a vast improvement over the Republics that preceded it. The story finds Autry arranging ...
James Whale's Wives Under Suspicion is remake of Whale's own 1933 production A Kiss Before the Mirror, with a few noticeable concessions for the more militant censors of 1938. District attorney Jim Stowell (Warren William) is convinced that every murder should be sentenced to the electric chair, regardless of motive or circumstances. He remains ...
Way Down South ranks as among the better Bobby Breen musicals, if only because of its impressive production credits. The film is set in antebellum Louisiana, where young Tim Reid's (Breen) inheritance is highly coveted by crooked attorney Martin Dill (Edwin Maxwell). With the help of kindly Cajun innkeeper Jacques Bouton (Alan Mowbray), Tim is ...
The bloom of youth had long faded on actor James Dunn when he starred in Shadows Over Shanghai. Even so, he is fairly convincing as hotshot newspaperman Johnny McGinty, on assignment in war-torn China (courtesy of the General Service Studios backlot). McGinty is one of several interested parties involved in a stolen Chinese amulet, which allegedly ...
It's hard to separate fact and fancy from the many accounts of what happened on the set when all three of the fabulous Barrymores -- Ethel, John and Lionel -- appeared together for the only time in Rasputin and the Empress. As for the end result, John offers the subtlest (!) performance as Russian Prince Paul Chegodieff; Lionel throws all caution ...
Mannequin stars Joan Crawford as Jessie Cassidy, a girl of the tenements (though this being an MGM film, her slum dwellings are cleaner and more lavish than most middle-class bungalows!) Hoping to escape her grimy surroundings, Jessie marries Eddie Miller (Alan Curtis), a childhood acquaintance who has made good with a variety of dishonest ...
A remarkably smooth 110-minute adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's marathon eight-hour play, Strange Interlude was advertised as "the picture in which you hear the characters think," a nod to O'Neill's technique of having the characters speak their innermost thoughts out loud between dialogue passages (on-stage, the actors stood stock still while ...
More than one aficionado of Universal's horror films has cited Night Monster as the weakest of the batch. Part of the complaint lies in the fact that, despite their first and second billing, Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill are utterly wasted, with Atwill getting bumped off in the first reel! The nonsensical farrago of a plotline concerns a ...
This barely-disguised but effective riff on The Thin Man (1934) stars that film's lead, William Powell, opposite Ginger Rogers instead of Myrna Loy. Clay Dalzell (Powell) is a suave attorney fonder of solving crimes than trying cases. His elegant girlfriend, Donna (Rogers) hopes that Clay will settle down and marry her. A friend, Tim Winthrop ...
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 ...
In this drama, a bookkeeper ignores his employer's disapproval and continues to see the boss' daughter. Later the boss ends up accusing him of theft and gets him jailed. Upon his eventual release the bookkeeper endeavors to get his revenge. He ignores his former employer's apologetic attempts to do right by the man. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie ...
Hollywood and Vine is set in a drugstore located at the intersection of the title. James Ellison plays a successful screenwriter who likes to do his research first-hand. Assigned to write a film about Hollywood hopefuls, Ellison gets a job as a drugstore soda jerk. Wanda McKay plays Daisy, a small-town girl with dreams of stardom who hangs out at ...
The disfiguring disease of acromegaly-which grotesquely extends the bones and distorts one's facial features-was the "gimmick" in the PRC horror opus The Monster Maker. J. Carroll Naish stars as Markoff, a mad doctor who has no qualms about experimenting on human beings. Markoff's unwitting victim is famed concert pianist Lawrence (Ralph Morgan), ...
Roy Rogers and Trigger, "The Smartest Horse in the Movies," enjoy above-the-title billing in Heart of the Rockies. This time, Rogers (playing himself) is pitted against Andrew Willard, a crooked but very powerful landowner, played with relish by Ralph Morgan. Opposing the construction of a new highway, Willard dispatches his toughest henchmen, ...
The real-life Yellowstone National Park provides a colorful backdrop to this melodramatic actioner. Henry Hunter stars as park ranger Dick Sherwood, who gets mixed up in a series of murders. The killings are tied in with $90,000 in stolen money, which the four villains had hidden in a Yellowstone cave 17 years earlier. Upon their release from ...
This follow-up to RKO Radio's near-perfect adaptation of Little Women was produced by small but enterprising Mascot Pictures (the forerunner to Republic). Erin O'Brien-Moore and Ralph Morgan star as Jo March and Professor Bhaer, the characters played by Katharine Hepburn and Paul Lukas in Little Women. Now married, Jo and the Professor decide to ...
The second of Universal's "Inner Sanctum" thrillers, Weird Woman stars Lon Chaney Jr. as Norman Reed, a college professor worried about the sanity of his new bride, Paula (Anne Gwynne), who was raised in Hawaii with all manners of superstitions, including voodoo. Jealous of Paula, Norman's former girlfriend, librarian Ilona Carr (Evelyn Ankers), ...
In this Alaskan adventure, a surgeon becomes a pilot to help him distress after a failed operation. Unfortunately, he is caught in a storm, crashes and finds himself cared for by a lovely woman at a trading post. He gets a chance to reclaim his self-esteem when her son suddenly needs the operation the surgeon botched. This time the operation is a ...
In this musical, two young people inherit their foster father's nightclub. The joint teeters on the brink of bankruptcy until they bring in exciting jazz music and entertaining acts ranging from comedy to cartoonists. Songs include: "Shoo-Shoo Baby," "The Music Goes 'Round and Around," "Roundabout Way," "Bullfrog Jump," "How Could You Do That to ...
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