Author Archive: Retro

Beautiful diva is involved in a plan to smuggle precious jewels plots to trick her partners.

This movie is kind of like “Lord of the Flies”. A family of children (no mother or father present) desire to have guardians (Mom and Dad), so they kidnap a man and woman to be just that. Not every one of the children (in fact most of them are not) aware of the secret!

Jewel thief checks into a hotel to find the jewels he stashed there years earlier.

Cantankerous old screwball visits his son in Pilgrim Hill.

Based on the Thackeray novel concerning a vampish orphan girl who uses men and breaks up families.

Thrown out of the Riviera, a family of grifters meets a lonely, vulnerable rich old woman and insinuate themselves into her life while they sponge off her.

Renfrew of the Royal Mounted rides again in the Criterion/Monogram “northern” Danger Ahead. There’s not a whole lot of plot to speak of, as Renfrew (James Newill) gets involved with a crooked banker (John Dilson) and his raffish henchman (Dick Rich). One of the film’s plusses is the presence of comedienne Dorothea Kent as the heroine. Refusing to take herself or the plotline seriously, Kent is a breath of fresh air in the otherwise formula-bound proceedings. Also good for laughs is Al Shaw, formerly of the Shaw & Lee vaudeville team, as a wisecracking janitor.

Newsman investigates a phony spiritualist who is hynotizing a woman in order to fleece her banker father. Written and Produced by Willis Kent. Dir. Dorothy Davenport (Dorothy Reid), Melville Shyer

A Londoner with the urge to get in front of the footlights, boards in a hotel with a number of theatrical personalities, and when an acrobat is killed, he gets the blame. Dir. James Cruze.