Cowboy Everett Tarkington John Clark (Bob Steele) looking forward to a long-awaited reunion with his mother stands in for a wounded pal, Marshal Lamar Blyth (Jack Rockwell), and sets out to round up the Kootney Kid (Earl Dwire) and his gang. The project becomes personal when he learns that the Kid is pretending to be …
Month: January 2023
Monogram Monday: Law Men (1944)
U.S. Marshals Nevada Jack McKenzie (Johnny Mack Brown) and Sandy Hopkins (Raymond Hatton) are sent to investigate a series of bank robberies and stage holdups, arriving just as the latest crime occurs. As is common with this series, they both go undercover: Nevada follows the escaping crooks and tries to get in with the gang, …
Weekly Reader — January 1 – 7, 2023
The year 2023 is off to a pretty good start on the reading front, as I finished 6 books through January 7: The Lone Rider (I Must Ride Alone), by Jackson Gregory — First published in 1940, though I read the Popular Library paperback whose cover is shown above. This is a reasonably effective western …
Sunday Fun: Still Life Painter
Night Life of the Gods (1935)
What should have been a lighthearted screwball romp (based on the Thorne Smith novel The Night Life of the Gods), as a mad scientist (Alan Mowbray) brings the ancient gods to life, unfortunately falls flat, with just a few chuckles amid an overall meandering plot that offers oddities instead of laughs. Despite the poor writing …
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Funny Friday: The Living Desert
The Spider (1931)
An efficient but unmemorable little mystery, The Spider stars Edmund Lowe as magician Chatrand (just a year before his similar role in Chandu the Magician, also from Fox), who becomes involved in solving a murder that occurred during the midst of one of his performances, There are both expected and unexpected developments during the film’s …
To Hell and Back (1955)
A war picture made memorable chiefly through the casting as himself of Audie Murphy, America’s most-decorated soldier of World War 2, To Hell and Back, based on Murphy’s autobiography, delivers the goods. Though in part perhaps standard for the era — e.g., in the quirks of the assorted members of Murphy’s platoon — the film …
Charlie Chan at the Opera (Twentieth Century Fox, 1936)
“Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff in…” says the title card of this movie, easily one of the strongest entries in the long-running Charlie Chan mystery series, thanks to setting, cast, and resolution. Karloff plays an amnesiac opera singer who escapes from a lunatic asylum after recovering his memory that someone — presumably his then-wife — …
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Monogram Monday: King of the Zombies (1941)
The comic contribution of Mantan Moreland is the highlight of this otherwise rather lackluster Monogram horror movie. In it, a plane driven off course in a storm makes a crash landing on a small Caribbean island. There, the fliers — Mac (Dick Purcell), Bill (John Archer), and Bill’s valet, Jeff (Mantan Moreland) — find shelter …
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