Author Archive: Retro

Crooked bankers who murder the bank director when he discovers their schemes. (Silent film with subtitles)

Guard becomes a warden and attempts to reform the prison.

Released convict fixes his brother’s family problems and tracks down the man who framed him.

The hunt is on for a mystery ship in the Pacific that is said to be destined to destry the Suez Canal.

British comedy about an bomb that explodes and transforms the borders of England and France.

Policeman is killed by black-marketeers selling rubber, a scarce item in the WWII era, and his private eye son takes up the investigation.

Six members of a RAF bomber crew, shot down over Holland, use the Dutch Underground to escape the Nazis. Written and Produced by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. Edited by David Lean. Dir. Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell

A master blend of high comedy and tense emotional drama, A Letter of Introduction reteams Adolphe Menjou, Andrea Leeds, and Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, who’d previously costarred in the negligible Goldwyn Follies. Menjou plays John Mannering, a Barrymoresque actor who years earlier had divorced his wife and severed his relationship with his daughter Kay (Andrea Leeds). Now a grown woman, Kay aspires to an acting career, fully determined to make it on her own without her father’s help. She goes so far as to change her last name to Martin, and to keep her actual relationship to Mannering a secret from the public. This set-up leads to a dizzying series of complications, including the breakup of Mannering’s romance with a tootsie named Lydia Hoyt (Anne Sheridan), who falsely assumes that Kay is Mannering’s mistress, and Kay’s own romantic travails with vaudeville hoofer Barry Paige (George Murphy). Meanwhile, Kay’s ventriloquist friend Bergen and his dummy [...]

Artist Carradine is also an incurable strangler; killing his models once he completes their portraits, but one of them suspects his true nature… Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer.