Author Archive: Retro

Mine owner forces his employees to work under unsafe conditions and disaster strikes.

Lupino puts up his own money to finance his ward’s newspaper and Gray thinks he’s embezzling money. Dir. Robert North Bradbury.

In this tearjerker, a morally disparate father and son attempt to reconcile their differences. The father is a major construction magnate who has dreamed of his son taking over the lucrative family business. The father’s heart is devastated when the son decides to become a missionary after graduating with an engineering degree and a great rift is formed between them, one that does not heal until a terrible tragedy ensues.

Remarque’s engrossing romantic wartime melodrama. Hopkins, as Ravic, is a German citizen who helped Jewish people escape from the murderous anti-Semitic Fatherland. He spent time in a concentration camp & has a horrible scar as a reminder. He lives without papers in Paris, under a false name, aware always that the minute the gendarmes near him he could be sent away or imprisoned as an illegal alien. He dreams of the day he can revenge himself on the Gestapo officer who sent him away, who tortured his friends & who tortured & raped his only love, Sybil.

Filmmaker G.W. Pabst’s adaptation of Bertoldt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera (Die Dreisgoschenoper) is every bit as good as the stage original, and sometimes even better. Filmed in both German and French versions with different casts (a planned English-language version was abandoned), Threepenny is most readily available today in its German incarnation. Rudolf Forster stars as robber captain MacHeath — aka Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife — who falls in love with Polly (Carola Neher), daughter of beggar king Peachum (Fritz Rasp). Despising MacHeath, Peachum plots the thief’s downfall with his best friend, corrupt police official Tiger Brown (Reinhold Schunzel). The satirical “happy ending” of the original — MacHeath, en route to the gallows, suddenly and without motivation promoted to knighthood! — is altered somewhat by Pabst and his scenarists to accommodate a swipe against Depression-era bankers. Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife, brilliantly repeats her stage role as Pirate Jenny. Stylistically, Threepenny Opera is [...]

A deadly feud between sheepherders and cattle ranchers is quelled by romance in this lively western that begins when a cattleman adopts the daughter of the shepherd he is responsible for killing. Both his sons fall for the girl, but only one survives to win her hand.

After taking over a failing Miami hotel with her workaholic fiancé, Elliot, Tracy thinks Liza has seduced her better half-to-be. She then tries to have an affair of her own, and arranges for hookers to become bellhops. Meanwhile, her rich daddy hires an inept arsonist to blow up the place.

While charting unexplored African territories an adventurer discovers a white jungle princess living as a goddess among the natives. Dir. S.K. Seeley (Steve Sekeley)

Intriguing British melodrama At the Villa Rose was released in the U.S. by Monogram and given the more prosaic title House of Mystery. A gang of clever thieves kill a wealthy woman in hopes of stealing her gems. But the thieves aren’t clever enough to ascertain the location of those gems, so they consult a phony spiritualist (Ruth Maitland). Then they decide to dispose of the mystic by framing her for the murder. Inspector Hanaud (Kenneth Kent) is called in on the case, meticulously piecing the puzzle together and determining the identities of the real culprits. House of Mystery was based on a story by A.E.W. Mason, better known for such British-empire tomes as The Four Feathers.