Author Archive: Retro

Romantic farce about a selfish, tempermental movie star who quits her current film to plot a publicity stunt involving a boxer.

Joe E. Brown was an ideal choice for the character of Alexander Botts, the brash, arrogant “natural born salesman” created for The Saturday Evening Post by William Hazlett Upton. As a representative for the Earthworm Tractor company, Botts tries to convince old-fashioned lumberman Guy Kibbee to buy his newfangled products. Several disastrous slapstick sequences later (including an hilarious setpiece in which Botts unwittingly tows away Kibbee’s entire house!), Botts closes the deal, winning the hand of Kibbee’s daughter June Travis in the process. Despite the character’s unremitting cockiness, Joe E. Brown manages to make Alexander Botts immensely likeable. Earthworm Tractors was the next-to-last film on Joe E. Brown’s Warner Bros. contract, and (with rare exceptions like 1938’s The Gladiator) his last truly worthwhile vehicle of the thirties.

Two Chinese gangsters kidnap and raise a white girl who grows up to be a wicked dragon lady that will stop at nothing to acquire a valuable jewelled dagger. Dir. Stuart Paton

Arthur Kipps is an incredible one dimensional boob and nitwit. Theme that a fool and his money are soon parted.

A café waitress becomes a small-time gangster’s mistress; a novelist decides to rescue her from the gangster’s clutches.

After a holiday in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power, plane designer Reginald J. Mitchell becomes convinced that Britain’s survival may depend on his new designs for the “Spitfire” fighter plane. Produced by Leslie Howard who, ironically, died before the release of this film when his plane was shot down by the Germans! Dir. Leslie Howard.

The lads take aeronautical mechanics courses to become Air Corps pilots.

A half-mad lighthouse keeper during World War II unknowingly plays host to a French concentration camp refugee and a British spy.