The final film pairing Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey (their career curtailed by Bob’s illness and death the following year) sees the boys as carnies tricked into helping jewel robbers with a shipboard heist, though their misguided flight ends up landing them right at the home of the rightful owner of the stolen jewels. Complicating …
The Flying Deuces (RKO, 1939)
Laurel & Hardy are vacationing in France, and Ollie has become enamored of an innkeeper’s daughter, who — unknown to him — is already married to an officer in the French Foreign Legion. Disappointed in his romance, Ollie resolves to end it all, taking Stan along with him, but instead decides to join the Legion …
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Tarzan and the Slave Girl (RKO, 1950)
Tarzan (Lex Barker) works to resolve a situation in which members of a tribe suffering from plague are kidnapping women from neighboring tribes to sacrifice in the hope of averting the sickness. There’s a new Jane in this one, Vanessa Brown; this would be her only outing in the role. Barker is lithe and fit …
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Murder on a Bridle Path (RKO, 1936)
Helen Broderick takes over as Stuart Palmer’s sleuth, Hildegarde Withers, here helping Inspector Piper (James Gleason) — with some good-natured rivalry, too — solve the murder of a woman who met her doom while taking an early-morning ride. Suspects abound, including an ex-husband, jailed for non-support but sprung the night before the killing, the ex-husband’s …
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Carefree (RKO, 1938)
RKO tried something different with stars Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with Carefree, the team’s penultimate movie for the studio. Here, Fred plays Tony, a psychiatrist induced by friend Stephen (Ralph Bellamy) to try to convince Stephen’s fiancée, Amanda (Ginger Rogers) to go through with their planned wedding. She has already called it off more …
Gunga Din (RKO, 1939)
A rollicking film, full of friendly hijinks and malevolent enemies, Gunga Din leans heavily on the appeal of the three sergeants at the center of the action — played by Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. — with their good-natured pranks and mutual loyalty and love, but the whole is given depth and …
The Nitwits (RKO, 1935)
A young Betty Grable replaces Dorothy Lee as the love interest for Bert in this 1935 Wheeler-Woolsey mystery-comedy. In this one, the boys get mixed up in the murder of a music executive who was trying to put the moves on his secretary (Grable). There are plenty of other suspects, of course, and mutual misunderstandings …
She’s Got Everything (RKO, 1937)
When heiress Carol Rogers (Ann Sothern) learns upon her father’s demise that she has inherited nothing but debts, she resolves to get a job to pay them off. Through the machinations of “horse broker” Waldo Eddington (Victor Moore), acting on behalf of the creditors, she ends up secretary for coffee magnate — and eligible bachelor …
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The Big Steal (RKO, 1949)
In The Big Steal, Joan Graham (Jane Greer) is after her fiancé, Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles), who skipped to Mexico with $2,000, ends up involved with Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum) who is seeking the fugitive as well, for a much bigger sum stolen in a payroll heist. Halliday in turn is being pursued by his …