Author Archive: Retro

Robert Gordon (Leon Janney), a sheltered 18-year-old youth reared in a Catholic school, believes he has a vocation for the priesthood. He is taken to live with his father in his palatial Florida home. There he falls in love with his step-sister, Patricia Morrow (Eleanor Hunt), ten years his senior. He runs away and joins the R.A.F. Shot down in battle, he is rescued and taken to a monastery where he renounces the world to study for the priesthood.

Academy Award-winner Ken Darby serves as musical director of this biopic detailing the remarkable life of beloved melody maker Stephen Foster, whose songs “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races”, among others, were still being sung by Americans from coast to coast over 150 years after his death at age 37. As a young boy, Foster’s remarkable gift for song was strongly discouraged by his father. Though young Foster would grow up to become a bookkeeper, his passion for music ultimately led him to gain recognition as a professional songwriter. In the years that followed, his songs “Swanee River” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” became instant classics. And though Foster would die in relative obscurity, his wealth of creativity would ensure his immortality though an impressive collection of unforgettable melodies.

A woman (Maude Eburne) must continually save her brother (Donald Meek) and his ungrateful children from financial ruin.

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.

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