Author Archive: Retro

If the big-time studios could score in the “screwball comedy” genre, then small-time Monogram Pictures could join the club with A Bride for Henry. Warren Hull, fresh from a contract dispute with Warner Bros., played Henry, with fellow Warners refugee Anne Nagel as his bride. Henry Mollison, a newcomer from England, is the third spoke of the romantic triangle which motivates the story. The film slaps a new coat of paint on the old gag about a honeymoon continually being interrupted by a handsome ex-suitor. A Bride for Henry delivered plenty of laughs to a 1937 audience unaccustomed to seeing a comedy emerge from the action- and mystery-oriented Monogram studios.

The tenants of an old boarding house are terrorized by an evil slumlord. One day a strange man arrives at the house and begins to help them with their problems.

In a vacant corner lot off Broadway (by about a yard) is a place called the Lowlands by the tiny community that lives there. Bugs and insects are neighbors and hang out at the Honey Shop of old Mr. Bumble the bee and his daughter Honey. Hoppity the grasshopper arrives to be with Honey, his sweetie. This bugs the crooked C. Bagley Beetle, so do his bunglers Smack the Mosquito and Swat the Fly. The Beetle wants Honey and the Lowlands for himself. But the Human Ones, with their littering and carelessness, pose a threat of destruction to every Lowland home of bug and beetle alike. Despite the doomsaying of Mr. Creeper, the snail, Hoppity finds hope of a new home behind the house of two Human Ones: Mary, who cares for a beautiful garden; and Dick, a struggling songwriter who puts his own hope on a Broadway hit to save his home.

Mutineers complicate a captain’s efforts to rescue a woman stranded in the tropics with a shipload of wild animals.

A man from an isolated swamp village returns home after receiving an education.

Police lieutenant Sam Carson investigates a political murder after the victim is dumped at the door of police headquarters.

Cub reporter Daniel Greely gets a job on a big city newspaper. A string of robberies occur and the owner of the paper blames the police for not rounding up the crooks. Daniel discovers that a coded message in the newspaper’s editor’s box tips the crooks about each robbery.

Ted Riley is sent to investigate Diamond Island, where shady Maj. Gray is trying to create a new brand of secret gas using a captured chemist’s research.