Author Archive: Retro

A father begins conning his buddies so he can get enough money to provide the kind of dowry that will attract a nobleman to his daughter in this drama based on Balzac’s play Mercadet Le Falseur.

Foreign correspondent helps start a musical uprising in a country that has banned music.

Wealthy businessman disowns his carousing son until he decides to work for the family business, but junior has other plans, like falling in love with a small town minister’s daughter, who goes to work incognito as a secretary to her prospective father-in-law in order to bring the family back together. Dir. John Emerson.

An auto racer calls it quits when he and his friend have a brush with death.

Crazy-man Tod Slaughter plays a mild-mannered moneylender who moonlights as the serial killer known as “The Spinebreaker” for his unique way of taking care of his victims. Dir. George King

Magazine reporter and a girl are assignd to observe a mysterious tribe in Mexican jungle and fnd themselves sentenced to death.

Young jockey Darro rescues a crippled horse from the glue factory, and must beat the fastest horse in the country to clear his brother of an accusation that he threw a race. Dir. Irving Pichel.

Samuel Fuller was originally set to direct this turgid racial melodrama but jumped ship, replaced by Terence Young. Lee Marvin stars as Sheriff Bascomb, the entire law enforcement department in a small Southern town, who is trying to keep a lid on local Ku Klux Klan activity. But racial tensions first simmer and then explode when Nancy Poteet (Linda Evans) is raped and the town’s mayor Hardy (David Huddleston), who is also the head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, blames an innocent black man for the crime. Also involved in the proceedings is local landowner Breck Stancill (Richard Burton), who must have modeled his Southern accent on the soupy delivery of James Mason in Mandingo.