Author Archive: Retro

A businessman who has devoted his whole life to obtaining money and power finds that he can’t buy the one thing he craves: love.

A state prison is threatened by approaching floods, an epidemic of typhoid fever breaks out among the inmates, the prison’s only doctor falls sick, there are only three nurses to administer vaccines and take care of stricken patients–and a group of prisoners is planning to use the chaos as a cover for a mass escape.

Rich playboy Drogo Gaines is in imminent danger of marrying a gold digger, and escapes by feigning insanity. The joke’s on him when he wakes up in an asylum full of comical lunatics. There he befriends Colonel Carraway, and together they escape, catching a ride with a beautiful blonde who proves to be Penguin Moore, carnival owner. The adventures of Drogo and the Colonel with Moore’s Carnival are replete with Hal Roach slapstick.

A plane crash over the Pacific leaves seven survivors stranded in a life raft in this war-time disaster movie. One of the passengers is a captured Japanese official en route to stand trial for war crimes. Two of the survivors spent time in a Japanese prison camp. Both pilots survived as did a pretty nurse. The rescue sequences are comprised of documentary footage of an actual rescue by the Air-Sea Rescue Service. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A college economics professor’s “radical” ideas about capitalism get him fired. When he decides to put those ideas into practice, he finds that they actually do generate him huge amounts of money. Soon a local banker and others who scoffed at his ideas see the amount of money he’s making and try to cheat him out of his system.

Two newly married carnival performers head to New York to make it big on Broadway, but after they get there the wife finds that a wealthy playboy has designs on her.

Jerry Cummings, a mining engineer, has pledged a large diamond on a short-term note to a pair of crooked loan sharks, Crone and Jan Jaffin, and heads for Mexico. His daughter Betsy, posing as a jewel thief called Mary Layton, is working to keep the crooks from absconding with the jewel, and her efforts are hindered greatly by an artist, Jimmy Baxter, who thinks she is a crook and Crone and Jaffin the good guys.

On a small tropical island in the South Pacific, David Bowman (Alan Baxter), a young American planter, finds himself pitted against a ruthless Japanese agent, Matsuru (Ernst Deutsch). He learns through Toni Chase (Gertrude Michael)an American girl who runs a dance-resort on the island that Matsuru has established a powerful-and-hidden short-wave radio station near his home, and American ships have been attacked in that part of the Pacific with deadly effect.

Postal inspectors track down money stolen from a railroad car.