Glenda Farrell, often cast as a wise-cracking gold digger, found a fitting role as clever reporter Torchy Blane in Smart Blonde, the first of a series of nine pictures from Warner Brothers (Farrell played the role in seven of them). In this initial outing, she is right on the scene when a fellow buying a …
Monogram Monday: Bowery Bombshell (1946)
This early entry in the Bowery Boys series offers another example of the blend of crime and comedy so often found in the films. This time, thanks to a photographer friend, Sach (Huntz Hall) ends up suspected of involvement in a bank robbery, one in fact committed by a gang led by Ace Deuce (Sheldon …
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Five to One (1963)
A small-time crook (John Thaw), his gal (Ingrid Hafner), and his pal plot to rob a bookie (Lee Montague) who doubles as a fence of a bundle they induce him to put together on the promise of loot from a different robbery. But unexpected actions on the part of their target complicate matters, and the …
A-Haunting We Will Go (1942)
A-Haunting We Will Go opens with our heroes, Laurel and Hardy, being warned to leave town after a night in jail. To accomplish that, the boys, who are down on their luck, take a job escorting a coffin to Dayton, Ohio. Yet unbeknownst to them, the coffin contains not a cadaver, but a notorious criminal, …
Alias John Law (1935)
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 …
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, …
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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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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