Author Archive: Retro

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.

Queen Elizabeth is running this show. The men in her court should be thinking about how to add to the glory of the Elizabethan Age and how to foil those pesky Spanish who got far too much influence in England when her older sister Mary was on the throne after their father Henry VIII was succeeded by their sickly half brother. Elizabeth thinks Michael Ingolby can do great things. Michael is mostly thinking about one of Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting, Cynthia. Soon his mind is on survival when Elizabeth sends him on a voyage to Spain.

Fu Manchu inoculates ten women with poison, to kill ten world leaders.

Greedy diamond hunters mistakenly believe that Costello has memorized a lost map to a hidden diamond fortune in Africa. A classic! Dir. Charles T. Barton.