Author Archive: Retro

Casino operator Johnny Lamb hires down-on-her-luck socialite Lucille Sutton as his casino hostess, in order to help her and to improve casino income. But Lamb’s pals fear he may follow Lucille onto the straight-and-narrow path, which would not be good for business. So they hire Gert Malloy and Dictionary McKinney, a pair of con-artists, to manipulate Johnny back off the path of righteousness.

A man finds excitement and adventure while searching the South Seas for a woman’s missing fiance.

In the tradition of such big-budget “docudramas” as House on 92nd Street and Call Northside 777, the modestly budgeted C-Man adopts a quasi-documentary approach to its subject matter. The “C” stands for Customs, and indeed the leading character, Cliff Holden (Dean Jagger), is a detective for the U.S. Customs Department. Against a backdrop of genuine New York locations (with a few rather obvious back-projected shots thrown in), Holden puts the heat on a homicidal jewelry smuggler. John Carradine steals the show as an alcoholic doctor, reduced to fronting for the smugglers. The rest of the cast is populated with such Broadway regulars as Edith Atwater and Walter Brooke. Though it obviously cost next to nothing to produce, C-Man is far more atmospheric and suspenseful than many a major-studio effort.

A small group of men and a tank stave off a German attack in a Bedouin desert during World War II.

Family pressures lead a man to forsake his true love, who has a difficult time forgetting about him.

Simple Russian villagers find their happy lives interrupted when the Nazis ignore former treaties and begin a brutal occupation of Russia. Lots of songs written by Ira Gershwin and Aaron Copland. Produced by William Cameron Menzies. Dir. Lewis Milestone

Small child deals with the separation of his parents and their joint custody of him, which forces him to bounce back and forth from Indiana to New York. Dir. Charles Lamont.

A honeymoon air service is almost out of business when one of its customers is involved in espionage with foreign agents attempting to steal vital air defense secrets.

Businessman Edmund Gilbert Edmund Gwenn and his daughter Lilian Wendy Barrie are a well-to-do father and daughter caught in the down-draft of the British economic depression — he’s a financier without finance, and they’re both struggling to put on a big front as their resources disappear. When Paul Martin (Robert Donat), a once-wealthy young man trying to survive as an employee of the gas-works, shows up to turn off their utilities, it seems like the end — but Paul takes a fancy to Lilian and decides to leave their gas and power on. And Mr. Gilbert suddenly takes a fancy to Paul when the younger man discovers that an escaping thief who bumped into him on the underground has left $100,000 on Paul’s person. Now Edmund wants the young man as his partner in a new venture, to attract other investors, and matters become more comically complicated still as the byzantine world of romance and [...]