The end of prohibition spells the end of business as usual for Chicago gangster Bugs Ahearn (Edward G. Robinson in this delightful spoof of mob melodramas from Warner Bros. Paying off their latest moll, Edith (Shirley Grey, Bugs and chief lieutenant Al Daniels (Russell Hopton) grab their...
In this crime drama, a prizefighter goes on the lam after he engages in fisticuffs with a reporter and believes that he has killed him. He ends up at a crippled children's home. The film is also called The Kid's Last Fight. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. - Jimmy Dolan Loretta Young - Peggy Guy Kibbee - Phlaxer Lyle Talbot - Doc Woods Shirley Grey - Goldie George Meeker - Magee Fifi D'Orsay - Budgie Arthur de Kuh - Louie Primaro David Durand - George Farina - Sam Arthur Hohl - Malvin Harold Huber ...
The second of Paul Muni's biographical films for Warner Bros., the Oscar-winning The Life of Emile Zola is by far the best, even allowing for the dramatic license taken with the material. When first we meet French novelist and essayist Zola, he is starving in a Parisian garret with his painter friend, Paul Cezanne. Each time Zola attempts to write "the truth," he is stymied by governmental censors. Still, he is able to achieve both fame and fortune with the publication of "Nana," an ...
William Wyler's dark and poisonous melodrama, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel, features Bette Davis in one of her nastiest roles. The story begins in the shimmering moonlight on a tropical Malayan rubber plantation. Shots ring out and a wounded man, Geoffrey Hammond (David Newell) staggers from a bungalow as Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) coldly follows him, pumping the remaining bullets into his body. She later tells her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall) that she shot Geoffrey, a ...
Film star Lylah Clare is dead, but her legend lives on. Movie-producer Barney Sheean (Ernest Borgnine) hires Elsa Brinkmann (Kim Novak), the living image of the late Lylah, to star in a film based on Ms. Clare's life. Barney hires director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch), Lylah's former husband, to transform the talentless Elsa into a facsimile of the deceased screen queen. Elsa not only learns to imitate Lylah but, at crucial junctures, becomes the dead woman. While restaging the accident that ...
According to encyclopedic film historian Roger Dooley, The Law in Her Hands is the only film of the 1930s to concern itself with a pair of female legal partners. The firm of Mary Wentworth (Margaret Lindsay) and Dorothy Davis (Glenda Farrell) specializes in defending criminals -- and ethics are hardly a consideration. Mary is the more idealistic of the two, insisting that she is furthering the cause of justice by championing the underdog. She is shown the error of her ways by district ...
Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are Cliff and Laurie Henderson, a married couple on a vacation with their young daughter (Tammy Marihugh), taking their first sea voyage aboard the aging ocean liner Claridon. All is well for them, but not for the ship below decks, where a fire has broken out. The engine room crew, led by Chief Engineer Steven Pringle (Jack Kruschen) and 2nd Engineer Walsh (Edmond O'Brien) extinguish the blaze, but the ship's captain (George Sanders) refuses their request to ...
Loosely based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Paradise Revisited, mgm's The Last Time I Saw Paris is a star-studded soap opera, luxuriously lensed by director Richard Brooks. In his last film as an MGM contractee, Van Johnson plays reporter Charles Wills, who while covering the VE Day celebrations...
The Last Ride was also the last production to emanate from Warner Bros.' B-picture division. The plot involves the illicit wartime market in stolen tires (rubber was, of course, a priority), with Richard Travis and Charles Lang as Pat and Mike Harrigan, brothers on the opposite sides of the law. Borrowing a few elements from the 1936 Warners film Bullets or Ballots, police detective Pat Harrigan is dishonorably discharged from the force, but it's merely a ploy to bring the black-market tire ...
After his Oscar win for All the King's Men, Broderick Crawford found himself working out his Columbia contract in a string of rapidly deteriorating films. The Last Posse was a middling western, the sort that the studio sent out as bottom-of-bill attractions for their prestige pictures. The posse of the title, headed by sheriff Crawford, is a group of ostensibly honest townsfolk. When they catch up with the desperadoes who robbed a wealthy cattle baron, some of the posse members are overcome ...
