Author Archive: Retro

A concert pianist leaves London to dive for pearls on Thursday Island in the South Seas.

Larceny on the Air is a Republic B-plus picture “drawn from today’s headlines.” In this instance, the news event pounced upon was the mid-1930s Federal crackdown on patent-medicine quacks. Robert Livingston stars as a doctor who takes to the radio airwaves to campaign against cure-all charlatans. Livingston’s mission is compromised when he falls in love with Grace Bradley, daughter of the medicine-racket ringleader. Somehow Larceny on the Air found the time to accommodate a musical number, “Sittin’ on the Moon” (from the 1936 Republic picture of the same name).

A police lieutenant and a female reporter investigate a series of murders comitted by a hooded killer in an old dark house.

The relatives of a rich old woman unsuccessfully try to have her declared insane, so they can divide up her money. To show them that there are no hard feelings, she invites them to her estate for the weekend so she can decide to whom she actually will leave her money when she dies. Soon, however, family members begin disappearing.

An elderly detective sets out to find who murdered a stage actor.

Novelist and amateur sleuth, Paul Temple, meets a newspaper woman called “Steve.” Together they investigate a gang of diamond robbers.

Patrolman Jim Trent (Jack La Rue) hears the screams of a woman and rushes to her aid in an upstairs apartment. Inside, he is hit on the head and whiskey poured on his uniform. Gangster Louis Cantor (Mathew Betz) and his henchmen have used this ruse to get him off his beat in order to rob a warehouse. The Police Commissioner (DeWitt Jennings), knowing Trent is innocent, suggests he be dismissed from the force and get a job with the gang. At Cantor’s swank gambling establishment Trent finds his girlfriend, Molly Malone (Ada Ince), who has been searching for him. With the evidence he has gathered, Trent

Tragedy follows from a sea captain’s (Trevor Bardette) disregard for an ancient Tahitian taboo.

A secretary suspects that her employer’s three elderly sisters are plotting to kill him after he announces he’ll no longer finance their philanthropic endeavors.