[6] Walter Huston headlines this Howard Hawks prison drama about a district attorney who becomes warden of a facility where he’s responsible for half the men’s sentences. Co-starring is fresh-faced Phillips Holmes as a twenty-year old who accidentally kills a man during a bar brawl. Huston sympathizes with the young man, but sends him to prison for a ten year sentence. Once he’s warden six …
[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 …
[6] Frank Capra directs this tale of a struggling circus troupe trying to put on a show in Everytown, America, before the money dries up and the performers go their separate ways. Joe Cook plays the circus manager, a very Groucho Marx-esque personality who talks quick to outwit his prey and who can perform some pretty nifty juggling and balancing acts. Joan Peers plays the …
[8] Behold the glory of Barbara Stanwyck. One of classic Hollywood’s sassiest broads makes a big splash in this early talkie that’s leagues ahead of other early 30s flicks in terms of story, craftsmanship, and performance. Babs plays a “party girl” (we know them as escorts now) who serendipitously winds up hitching a ride in the middle of the night with a fuddy-duddy artist. Both …
[3] Dorothy Mackaill headlines as a newly-engaged Broadway song and dance star who’s confronted with a ghost from the past on the eve of her retirement. Noah Beery plays the bad guy — a man who tried to rape Mackaill’s character several years ago, and who shows up at the theater to (we assume) try again. Bright Lights (also known bizarrely as Adventures in Africa) …
[6] Norma Shearer, ‘the First Lady of MGM,’ won her Academy Award for The Divorcee. Shearer plays against Chester Morris, happily married until she discovers Morris had a fling with a floozy a few months in the past. While he’s away on a work trip, her despair sees her into the arms of another man. When the couple try to reconcile their indiscretions with each …
[4] Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, and Harpo are back for their second big-screen soire. This one hangs loosely on a stolen painting plot, with Groucho playing a returning safari hunter at a rich aristocrat woman’s house where all the action takes place. Like The Cocoanuts before it, Animal Crackers still suffers from being an un-cinematic Broadway stage adaptation. It’s just hard for vaudeville acts like these …
[9] The grand-daddy of ‘anti-war’ war movies is Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the first non-musical ‘talkie’ to win the best picture Academy Award. The film is stylistically way ahead of its time, with sweeping camera movement, realistic (non-theatrical) acting, deep layers of action in the photography, and sophisticated action choreography — all of which you just don’t see in most other …
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