1932

[8] Barbara Stanwyck plays a lonely librarian who falls in love with Adolph Menjou on a cruise, but her joy is short-lived in this tragic love story directed by Frank Capra. Stanwyck finds out her beau is already married (to an invalid, no less) and ends their relationship, keeping her pregnancy a secret to save his political career. But when a newspaper reporter (Ralph Bellamy) …

[4] Katharine Hepburn’s affection for director George Cukor began with this, her feature film debut. A Bill of Divorcement stars John Barrymore as a man returning home after five years in a mental asylum. During that time, his wife (Billie Burke) and daughter (Hepburn) have moved on with their lives and are planning their respective weddings. Imagine their surprise when Barrymore returns home and promises …

[7] In this early Frank Capra flick, romance blossoms and seeds of betrayal are sown during two days at a bank where a robbery leads to a public panic that threatens the bank’s existence. Walter Huston plays the bank’s owner, an optimist who lends to hard-working Americans who can’t get loans anywhere else. He’s the sort of boss who treats the security guard and the …

[7] A tropical island native woman falls in love with a visiting white man, even though she’s destined for marriage to an island prince. The two lovers flee and begin a new life together, but the native mob soon catch up with them and demand they be sacrificed in a volcano to appease their angry god. Joel McCrea (The Most Dangerous Game) and Dolores del …

[7] Boris Karloff (Frankenstein) headlines this matinee adventure flick about a group of British archaeologists who fight to keep the recently discovered sword and mask of Genghis Khan out of the hands of the evil Fu Manchu, who would harness the items into deadly weapons against humanity. Karloff plays the evil Fu Manchu with indelible glee, supported by an equally creepy performance by Myrna Loy …

[8] In a traveling circus sideshow, a scheming trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) marries a gullible, love-struck little person named Hans (Harry Earles) with plans of poisoning him and inheriting his fortunes. But there’s a code among sideshow freaks, and when Cleopatra’s dishonesty is discovered, the freaks set out to make her… ‘one of us’. Tod Browning’s (Dracula) Freaks was originally intended to horrify …

[7] Nancy Carroll stars as a young bank worker who loses her job and becomes the subject of gossip after she spends a night with a rich womanizer, played by Cary Grant. Even though Carroll never did anything improper, the town saw her arrive at a big party with one man (Edward Woods), and leave with another. Yet a third man (Randolph Scott) visits town …

[7] Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper co-star in director Frank Borzage’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Cooper plays an American ambulance driver who falls in love with Hayes’ British nurse in Italy during the first World War. They are secretly married and have to keep their relationship hidden from their superiors. Eventually, they are separated and their letters to each other are …

[7] Marlene Dietrich re-teams with director Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) to play a woman-on-the-run in Blonde Venus. After her husband falls ill from radium poisoning, Dietrich performs in a nightclub to make money for his treatment. But when Cary Grant shows up at the club offering a way to make more money faster, Dietrich takes him up on his offer. (Who wouldn’t prostitute …

[6] Devil and the Deep stars Tallulah Bankhead as the wife of a U.S. naval commander played by Charles Laughton (receiving ‘introducing’ credit here). Laughton’s character is mentally ill and insanely jealous of every man Bankhead ever comes into contact with, which includes Cary Grant early on in the film, and later with Gary Cooper. Thing is, Tallulah really did sleep with Cooper (God bless …

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