Lester Vail Movies

In this comedy, a conservative family becomes alarmed when they begin believing their daughter is pregnant. They frantically begin searching for the father. The search is narrowed down to three possibilities: her ex-fiancee, her current one, or her legal guardian. Meanwhile, a drunken son marries the family maid, who is also pregnant. The daughter then admits her pregnancy is false--she only did it to cover for the maid. The son, now sober annuls the marriage and the maid marries the ice man, her real love. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Based on a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, I Take This Woman stars Carole Lombard as the spoiled daughter of a wealthy rancher. Lombard impulsively marries cowhand Gary Cooper, a poverty-stricken employee of her father. Cooper insists that they live on his income in a tiny shack; Lombard gives this new life a try, but eventually balks and walks. Cooper joins a travelling rodeo, and is badly hurt during a performance in New York--where Lombard is in the audience. Having eaten several slices of Humble Pie, Lombard rushes to her ex-husband's side, and all is well. I Take This Woman bears no relation to the 1940 Spencer Tracy/Hedy Lamarr soap opera of the same name. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Joan Crawford and William Bakewell play the spoiled-rotten grown children of stockbroker William Holden. When Wall Street lays its famous egg in 1929, Crawford and Bakewell find that they can no longer pursue their flamboyant lifestyle (for example, they'll have to put a moratorium on the sort of "lingerie parties" with which this film opens). Crawford gets a newspaper job, while Bakewell ties up with vicious bootlegger Clark Gable. When Gable is implicated in the murder of seven gangsters (a transparent reenactment of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre), Crawford's fellow reporter Cliff Edwards gets proof of Gable's complicity. Bakewell is ordered to kill Edwards; Crawford, not knowing of her brother's actions, takes Edwards' place, wooing Gable in hopes of getting a scoop. When Gable finds out that Crawford's working undercover (so to speak), he prepares to rub her out, but her life is saved by Bakewell at the cost of his own. Compared to the rest of the stick-figure leading men in Dance Fools Dance, Clark Gable stood out like a testosterone-soaked thumb, and it wouldn't be long before he'd be promoted from villains to heroes. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Hoping to benefit from the popularity of the 1927 silent version of P.C. Wren's Beau Geste, RKO Radio reunited the earlier film's star Ralph Forbes and director Herbert Brenon for 1931's Beau Ideal, again adapted from a Wren novel. Something of a sequel to Beau Geste, the story concerns the efforts by Foreign Legionnaire Otis Madison (Lester Vail) to locate his childhood chum John Geste (Forbes). The two men are reunited in the Arabian desert, where Geste is doing penance in a stockade reserved for discredited Legionnaires. With Otis's help, Geste redeems himself by squashing a native uprising fomented by a duplicitous Emir (George Regas). Ultimately, our hero returns to England and the arms of heroine Loretta Young -- but not before a close call with a slinky seductress (Leni Stengel), appropriately nicknamed "The Angel of Death." Beau Ideal was a flop to the tune of $330,000, and as a result the exploits of the Geste family would not again be dramatized for the screen until the 1939 remake of Beau Geste. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi