Author Archive: Retro

When millionaire bachelor John Hubbard takes a run-out powder at his own wedding, Hubbard’s vengeful fiancee Polly Ann Young has the luckless fellow committed to an insane asylum. Hubbard escapes with certified looney Adolphe Menjou; together they join a carnival run by Carole Landis. Hubbard and Menjou not only save Landis from bankruptcy, but also convince Hubbard’s allegedly normal uncle Charles Butterworth (who races fire engines as a hobby) to arrange for the carnival to be set up right next to the family mansion. Directors Hal Roach, Hal Roach Jr. and Gordon M. Douglas deliberately blur the thin line between sanity and insanity throughout Road Show. Just who’s crazier: the delusional Menjou, who takes photographs with an invisible camera, or lovestruck Indian George E. Stone, who spends his free time chasing after carnival employee Patsy Kelly? And are the freewheeling carney folk any goofier than the flibbertigibbet society folk? The Charioteers, a black singing group [...]

When her mother dies in childbirth, a young girl is taken in by her rich uncle and falls in love with the boy next door. Dir. Hamilton MacFadden.

check star against bib

An impoverished family of acrobats is befriended by a squirrel who helps them attain a fortune. Dir. Irving Pichel.

An Austrian mountain-climber ends up as a prisoner-of-war, escapes and befriends Tibet’s 14th Dalai Lama.

Escaped convict returns home to visit his former girlfriend who is now married and has a family. Written by Robert Hamer. Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer.

Two pilot friends, Harlan and Delaney, enlist in the airplane border patrol and are sent across the Mexican border disguised as smugglers to break up a gang.

Yeoman loves an outlaw’s daughter. He does not know that in reality she is a kidnapped heiress.