Granville Owen Movies
- 1940
It's ironic that leading man Jack Holt, who in real life was deathly afraid of flying, should appear in so many aviation-oriented pictures. In The Great Plane Robbery, racketeer Joe Colson (Noel Madison) is released from jail three months before the expiration of his $500,000 life insurance policy. The plane on which Colson's flying home is hijacked by several of his old underworld cronies, who hope to collect on the policy by killing Joe-and, of necessity, everyone else on board. But insurance investigator Mike Henderson (Jack Holt), another passenger, isn't about to let that happen. The first half of the film is a mini-"Grand Hotel", giving way to three climactic reels of nonstop action and suspense. The heroine is played by Vicki Lester, who "borrowed" her screen name from the character played by Janet Gaynor in the original A Star is Born (1937). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Holt, Stanley Fields, (more)
- 1940
This is the first of two filmed adaptations of Al Capp's classic comic strip, in which the title hillbilly (Granville Owen) does his best to avoid the marital advances of girlfriend Daisy Mae (Martha O'Driscoll). ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Granville Owen
Best remembered today as the upwardly mobile errand boy in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), busy juvenile actor William Tracy starred in the title-role of this popular action serial that very same year. Released in fifteen chapters by Columbia Pictures, Terry of the Pirates told of how young Terry Lee goes in search of his father (J. Paul Jones, who has vanished in the Asian jungles. Dr. Lee, it turns out, was kidnapped by the jungle pirates of Fang (Dick Curtis), a local warlord attempting to solve the secret of the Temple of Mara. Attacked by Fang, his henchman Stanton (Jack Ingram) and an army of Tiger Men, Terry and his friends, Pat Ryan (Granville Owens, Normandie Drake (Joyce Bryant and the beautiful Dragon Lady (Sheila Darcy), manage not only to locate the missing Dr. Lee but also the hidden treasure of Mara. Based on the 1934 comic strip by Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates was turned into a television series in 1952, this time with John Baer as Terry and William Tracy as comic relief character Hot Shot Charlie. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
- 1937
Returning to his home spread in the Red River border area between Texas and Oklahoma, Tal Holladay (Dick Foran) is falsely accused of murdering a young family friend (Carlyle Moore, Jr.) in this frequently entertaining Western directed, incongruously, by dance director Bobby Connolly. Imprisoned, Holladay later makes his escape while breaking Karen Ordley's (Anne Nagel) wild stallion. Forming a vigilante of fellow (innocent) prisoners, Holladay quickly learns that his own father was murdered in an attempt to prevent the building of a dam and that Karen's foster-brother Hub Ordley (Willard Parker) is the brain behind the scheme. In an attempt to plead his case to the visiting Secretary of the Interior (Walter Young), Tal is once again arrested by Sheriff Gorman (Raphael Bennett) and is nearly lynched. He is saved in the nick of time by the vigilantes, and with the help of newly elected U.S. Marshal Chris Madden (Granville Owens), he manages to disarm the evil Hub Ordley and save his ancestral ranch. Rather violent for a B-Western, The Devil's Saddle Legion incorporated three songs -- "When Moonlight Is Riding the Range," "My Texas Home," and "God's Country" -- all performed by leading man Foran, a pleasant baritone. Warner Bros.' answer to Gene Autry, Foran looked good on a horse but was rather obviously doubled in several fight sequences. Although surrounded by the studio's sumptuous production values (sumptuous for a B-Western), the former Academy Award nominee (The Petrified Forest, 1936) was perhaps a bit too "operatic" for B-Western stardom, and his 1936-1937 Warner Bros. series was never a threat to the supremacy of Autry, Rogers, et al. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dick Foran, Anne Nagel, (more)
- 1937
Edmund Goulding directed this remake of his own 1929 The Trespasser, which starred Gloria Swanson. Here Bette Davis assumes the lead role of Mary Donnell, a young innocent married to a bootlegger. When her husband is killed, she decides to pursue a better life and gets a job as a secretary to attorney Lloyd Rogers (Ian Hunter). Lloyd falls in love with Mary but stoically keeps his feelings hidden from her. One of Lloyd's clients is the millionaire Merrick (Donald Crisp), whose playboy son Jack (Henry Fonda) falls in love with Mary. The two elope and take off on their honeymoon, but Merrick, who feels that Mary is not good enough for Jack, asks that the marriage be annulled. Jack reluctantly agrees and Mary goes back to her old job with Lloyd. But Mary finds that she is pregnant and has a baby boy. She swears Lloyd to secrecy concerning her child and Lloyd agrees. Meanwhile, Jack marries a woman of his own class, Flip (Anita Louise), but she is fatally injured in an automobile accident. Lloyd also falls ill and dies at Mary's feet --but not before confessing his love for Mary. When his will is read, it reveals that he has left Mary and her child a vast fortune. Lloyd's wife (Katherine Alexander) believes the baby boy is Lloyd's illegitimate child, and she tries to overturn the terms of the will. Jack hears about Mary's child, and she confesses that the child is actually his. Merrick then tries to have the baby taken away from Mary, contending that she is unfit to raise the baby. Unable to withstand Merrick's legal hammering, Mary offers the child to Jack and Flip. Mary, distraught after abandoning her baby, leaves on a European trip. While she is gone, Flip dies and Jack leaves for Europe to try to find her. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, (more)
- 1937
Gat Brady (John Litel) is a wealthy gangster, though he's never killed anyone, an he is devoted to his teenaged daughter Annabel (Mary Maguire). When he's arrested for tax evasion on the eve of a European trip, he has Annabel's governess Flo Allen (Ann Sheridan) continue on the trip with the girl anyway. Red Carroll (Ben Welden), who hates Gat, kidnaps Annabel, but is caught and sent to the same prison as Gat. A fight with Red results in Gat being sent to the maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island but, still bent on revenge, Red later arranges to have himself sent there, too. ~ Bill Warren, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ann Sheridan, Mary Maguire, (more)
- 1937
In their third crime-solving adventure, smart-aleck newspaper woman Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell) and slightly dense homicide dick Steve McBride (Barton MacLane) are about to get hitched when Torchy's reporter friends pull a practical joke on them. As a wedding present, the harebrained newsboys hire a stage actor, Harvey Hammond (Leland Hodgson), to simulate a murder victim. But when Torchy and Steve arrive at the scene of the supposed crime, Hammond has been killed for real. Suspects, of course, abound, including Hammond's fellow thespians Hugo Brand (Anderson Lawlor) and Grace Brown (Anne Nagel), whose romance the actor had tried to destroy. Even more suspicious to Torchy are Hammond's long-suffering wife (Virginia Brissac), and his socialite mistress (a surprisingly brunette Natalie Moorhead). With little help from Steve and his even dumber sergeant, Gahagan (Tom Kennedy), Torchy sets a trap for the killer. Produced by Warner Bros.'s busy B-unit, The Adventurous Blonde was acted at breakneck speed by a justly famous stock company, who, as always, nearly managed to make a hackneyed plot seem fresh and new. Torchy herself was ostensibly based on reporter Dorothy Kilgallen and had begun her crime-solving career in Smart Blonde (1937). Eight more Torchy films were made, but Farrell and MacLane were replaced by Lola Lane and Paul Kelly in Torchy in Panama (1938), the seventh entry, and by Jane Wyman and Allen Jenkins in the final, Torchy Plays With Dynamite (1939). By then, then series had more than run its course. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Glenda Farrell, Barton MacLane, (more)
