Author Archive: Retro

British destroyer and her men, in crucial moments during WWII, Noel Coward wrote story and the stirring film score.

Self-centered woman lets nothing stand in her way as she climbs the ladder of social success. Color.

On the sidewalks of the London theater district the buskers (street performers) earn enough coins for a cheap room. Charles, who recites dramatic monologues, sees that a young pickpocket, Libby, also has a talent for dancing and adds her to his act. Harley, the theater patron who never knew Libby took his gold cigarette case, is impressed by Libby’s dancing and invites her to bring Charles and the other buskers in his group to an after-the-play party. Libby comes alone. A theatrical career is launched.

A bumbling teacher turns out to be the double of a German general. He is flown into Germany to impersonate the general and cause chaos and hilarity in a Hitler Youth college.

A native girl falls for a visitor to her island, but she’s chosen to be sacrificed to the volcano god.

Stuffy father tries to fix up his playboy son with a poor, honest young woman, but she falls for dad instead. Dir. George Archainbaud.

Fatherless American boy living in 1880s Brooklyn discovers he’s the heir to a British dukedom. Dir. William Beaudine.

Picking up where Victoria the Great (1937) left off, this sequel to the 1937 film has Anna Neagle return to the role of Queen Victoria in another colorful account of the revered British monarch’s reign. This film offers a stellar chronicle of Victoria’s relationship with Prince Albert (Anton Walbrook) as well as the political and military upheavals that characterized her time as Queen.

Samuel Fuller was originally set to direct this turgid racial melodrama but jumped ship, replaced by Terence Young. Lee Marvin stars as Sheriff Bascomb, the entire law enforcement department in a small Southern town, who is trying to keep a lid on local Ku Klux Klan activity. But racial tensions first simmer and then explode when Nancy Poteet (Linda Evans) is raped and the town’s mayor Hardy (David Huddleston), who is also the head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, blames an innocent black man for the crime. Also involved in the proceedings is local landowner Breck Stancill (Richard Burton), who must have modeled his Southern accent on the soupy delivery of James Mason in Mandingo.