[5] Katharine Hepburn won the first of her record four Oscars for this film about a naïve, aspiring actress who ingratiates herself into the Broadway social circle. She isn’t taken seriously at first. In fact, she’s pitied. But a childish sense of self-confidence helps her endure until the opportunity arises to show the theater world what she’s got. The story of Morning Glory is a …
[4] Errol Flynn stars as a surgeon who takes the fall for an older colleague who accidentally loses a patient under the knife. As fate would have it, he then falls in love with the deceased patient’s daughter (Anita Louise), but when she learns he’s the one blamed for her mother’s death, he flees in self-imposed exile. Searching for new meaning to his life, he …
[4] James Cagney stars as a racecar driver who sacrifices his relationship with Ann Dvorak to help his kid brother (Eric Linden) follow in his skid marks. But when Dvorak gets even by encouraging a girlfriend (Joan Blondell) to take the brother’s eye off the game, the plan backfires. Linden and Blondell really fall in love, and after a tragedy on the race track, Cagney’s …
[6] George Cukor directs Katharine Hepburn as Jo March in one of the earliest screen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a chronicle of the lives and loves of four sisters growing up in New England during the Civil War. There’s intrinsic nostalgia and sentimentality to the storytelling, but Cukor never lets the film become maudlin. That’s largely owed to Hepburn’s contribution. The then-controversial …
[8] William Wellman directs Clark Gable in this loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel. While the book is entirely from the point-of-view of Buck, a weathered sled dog, this film version focuses more on human characters. Gable and his comedic sidekick (Jack Oakie) are on a quest for gold in the Yukon when they stumble across a lone woman (Loretta Young) fighting off wolves. …
[7] Two train engineers put their friendship to the test when one of them falls in love with the other’s wife in this noteworthy drama from William Wellman (Battleground, The High and the Mighty). I really enjoyed the first half of this movie, as Wellman gives us an intimate look at the everyday life of railroad workers. He puts the camera on top moving trains, …
[8] Director James Whale (Waterloo Bridge) was given free reign by Universal Pictures to craft a sequel to his highly successful Frankenstein. The result is a more daring and stylized film considered by many to be the most remarkable in all the studio’s legacy of classic monster movies. In The Bride of Frankenstein, both Frankenstein and his monster survive their apparent deaths at the end …
[8] Barbara Stanwyck stars in this pre-code drama about a scrappy young nurse trying to save two sick children from an evil chauffeur (Clark Gable) whose poisoning them so he can marry their drunk mother (Charlotte Merriam) and steal their trust fund. Night Nurse is a great vehicle for Stanwyck, who spends the first half of the film befriending wise-cracking Joan Blondell and falling in …
[5] Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film is emblematic of his usual content, if not his his trademark style and suspense. Murder! centers around an actress (Diana Baring) found in a fugue state next to a bloody fire poker and a murdered acquaintance. After she’s convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, a skeptical juror (Herbert Marshall) — a fellow actor in a local troup …
[5] Sylvia Sidney (Madame Butterfly, Sabotage) plays a rich girl smitten with a drunkard. Fredric March co-stars as her somewhat charming but sobriety-challenged lover, effectively doing a dry-run for the type of role for which he’d receive an Oscar nomination five years later with A Star is Born. Despite the warnings of her father (George Irving) and friends, Sidney marries March and things go as …
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