Author Archive: Retro

H.B. Warner

Thornton Wilder’s story depicting several years in the life of a turn-of-the-century New England family. Produced by Sol Lesser. Pulitzer Prize winning stage hit brought to the screen.

A rope bridge over a gorge in the Peruvian Andes snaps, sending five people plunging to their deaths. A priest sets out to find out more about the life of each of the victims.

Ranch foreman is treated like a son by the kind owner, a fact which galls the old man’s real, no-account son. From the novel by Luke Short. Dir. Richard Thorpe

In Paris, a down and out medical student Johann Radek (Franchot Tone) is paid by Bill Kirby (Robert Hutton) to murder his wealthy aunt. A knife grinder (Burgess Meredith) is suspected, but Radek keeps taunting the police until they realize that he is the killer. The police and Maigret (Charles Laughton) are led on chases through the streets and over the rooftops of Paris and finally up the girders of the Eiffel Tower.

Much-imitated plot concerning a foppish British nobleman who’s alter ego courageously rescues victims of the French Revolution from the guillotine. Based on the novel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. Produced by Alexander Korda. Dir. Harold Young

Edward Eggleston’s best-selling novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster was brought to the screen in 1935 by Monogram Pictures, which specialized in such bucolic entertainments. Norman Foster plays the title character, an ex-Union soldier named Ralph. After the Civil War, Ralph takes a schoolteacher job in a small Indiana community where resentment against “Damn Yankees” still runs high. Before long, he gets mixed up in local politics, hoping to purge the town of the crooked politicians who’ve been squandering land-grant money on themselves. He is also forced to confront town bully Bud (Fred Kohler Jr.) over the affections of pretty heroine Hannah (Charlotte Henry) and to face down a hooded band of night riders. The film deftly blends small-town charm with vivid melodrama, most notably in a spelling-bee sequence which segues into a near-riot. The Hoosier Schoolmaster was one of the last productions from the “old” Monogram outfit before its absorption by Republic Pictures.