Author Archive: Retro

Musical retelling of the “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” Arabian Nights tale.

Jeffrey Clavering is hired in London by The Great Eastern Oil Corporation to go to Paris to prevent unscrupulous industrialist Nikolai Kamarov from gaining control of their oil fields and turning them over to a foreign power.

The story of Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, two All-American football players at the U.S. Army Military Academy at West Point.

Nora Moran, a young woman with a difficult and tragic past, is sentenced to die for a murder that she did not commit. She could easily reveal the truth and save her own life, if only it would not damage the lives, careers and reputations of those whom she loves.

A radio columnist is threatened by gangsters and later murdered during a broadcast. A detective sets out to find the killers.

Frankie Kelly is the soda jerk and embryo scientist in Midvales only drugstore. Two murders and an attempted killing suddenly swing Midvale into national prominence. Frankie and his pal, Jefferson, become involved when a wounded gangster starts to tell them where $300,000 in stolen loot is hidden, but he is murdered before he can give them all of the information. The search is on.

A cocky young pilot, at the urging of his girlfriend, takes a nice, “safe” job at the bank where her father is president.

Proof positive that Reliable Pictures’ Skull and Crown was filmed several years before its 1938 New York premiere is the presence in the cast of former silent-screen leading man James Murray, who died in 1936. The star of the show is Rin-Tin-Tin Jr., who among other things helps to break up a gang of smugglers. Another silent veteran, Jack Mower, plays the chief crook, but despite his bulk and muscle he’s no match for our “Rinty”. Nominal human hero Regis Toomey benefits greatly from the dog’s deductive skills, winning the hand of heroine Molly Day as a result. Allegedly based on a story by James Oliver Curwood, Skull and Crown is cheap and tacky even by Reliable’s unexacting standards. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Twenty-four hours elapse on the stoop of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement as a microcosm of the American melting pot interacts with each other during a summer heatwave.