Harold E. Tarshis Movies

In this entry in the "Dead End Kids" series (later they would reappear as "The Bowery Boys") the lads encounter a terribly ill young boy while they stay in a rural boarding house. The lad tries hard to keep up with the lads as they sneak into a train yard and begin playing amongst the box cars. Unfortuantely, when a railroad detective shows up, the sick boy is killed while trying to get away. The guilt-stricken kids attempt to tell the dead boy's mother, but she is too kind to hear them. Instead she takes the kids into her home. Tommy, the lead boy, manages to get a job as a gas jockey, but things go wrong when he entangles himself with racketeers. Eventually he is caught and taken to court where the mother of the dead child speaks movingly on Tommy's behalf. Just after he is acquitted, word of Pearl Harbor reaches them and the Dead End Kids decide to join the army. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Unlike Shirley Temple, Jane Withers was permitted to "grow up" in her 20th Century-Fox vehicles. Since Withers was 13 going on 14 in 1940, it was only natural that she should star in a film titled High School. Fresh from her family's Texas cattle ranch, rambunctious Jane Wallace (Wither) is sent to a fancy-schmantsy San Antonio high school, where her unbridled behavior earns her the scorn of her more reserved classmates. The limit comes when she inadvertently causes football hero Slats Roberts (Joe Brown Jr.) to miss his opportunity to play in the Big Game. Ultimately, Jane learns to comport herself in a proper fashion, graduating with the highest honors and with popularity to spare. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Jones family goes to Tinseltown in this entry in the series. They go so Father can attend an American Legion meeting. While there, the daughter has a terrible screen test. Later the family visits a movie studio and chaos ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Fast Company was another attempt by MGM to match the success of its "Thin Man" films. Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice star as Joel and Garda Sloane, the funloving rare-book dealers created by Harry Kurnitz. Try as they might, the Sloanes can't help getting involved in crime and murder. This time around, the couple searches for a con artist who has been ripping off the insurance companies by staging robberies of phony first editions. When murder rears its ugly head, Joel and Garda have four suspects to choose from, at least three of whom look incredibly guilty. Without providing any clues as to the outcome, it can be noted that the supporting cast includes such past masters of skullduggery as Louis Calhern, Douglass Dumbrille, George Zucco and Dwight Frye. Fast Company was the first of three "Joel and Garda Sloane" efforts, each one starring different actors in the leading roles. To avoid confusion with a later MGM film with the same title, Fast Company was rechristened Rare Book Murder for television. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Hoot Gibson's final film for his old Alma Mater, Universal, this early sound Western was played solely for laughs. Ranch hand Gibson is in love with a radio songstress (Kathryn Crawford) and bets his colleagues that he can make her marry him. All dressed up and on his way to propose, the Concentratin' Kid learns that the ranch has been rustled and the songbird kidnapped and caged. The kidnapper (James Mason) needs the girl to help decorate his home! "The Hooter" left his longtime employer after fifteen years of filling Carl Laemmle's coffers. His bitterness was understandable, but Gibson was no longer in the bloom of youth and following a series of very low-budget oaters produced by poverty row company Allied between 1931 and 1933, he spent the remainder of his career in supporting roles. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

One of the more used plots in silent westerns was the one about the son searching for the villain who killed his father. In The Lariat Kid, a thoroughly average oater on all fronts, Hoot Gibson played the son, a lawman just like his murdered father. Ann Christy was the inevitable girl, and the brutish looking C.E. Anderson took the role of the killer, holed up in the notorious bandit's lair of Hell's Gulch. A lot of good western professionals took credit for this already then-stale plot, including former director Jacques Jaccard, who co-wrote the screenplay from an "original" story by Buckleigh Fritz Oxford. Leading lady Ann Christy is best remembered (if remembered at all) as Harold Lloyd's girlfriend in Speedy (1928), the comedian's final silent. Christy was later seriously injured in a car accident, which forced her to retire in the early 1930s. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Never one to take his metier too serious, Universal cowboy hero Hoot Gibson came dangerously close to outright burlesque in the aptly titled Smilin' Guns. As "Dirty Neck" Jack Purvin, Gibson is his old uncouth self but when he sees a newspaper photograph of Eastern socialite Helen Van Smythe, soon to arrive at the nearby dude ranch, Gibson hightails it to San Francisco in order to learn how to become a gentleman. Returning to the ranch, the new but not necessarily improved Gibson shreds his dandified image in order to save Helen from a lecherous but decidedly fake count and her mother (Virginia Pearson) from a jewel thief (Robert Graves). The count was played by none other than Leo White, whose mustache-twirling continental noblemen/revolutionists had graced several Charles Chaplin comedies in the 1910s. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

The audience got two Universal stars for the price of one with this rousing Western: Hoot Gibson and Fred Gilman. The two popular celluloid cowboys played brothers, one a lawman Gibson, the other a rancher Gilman fighting a gang of horse thieves hired by greedy neighbor Captain C.E. Anderson. Arriving from the East, Gibson goes undercover as a ranch hand, deliberately earning a reputation as a coward. Under this convenient guise, the lawman manages to bring the villain and his men to justice, helped in no small way by brother Gilman, Anderson's innocent niece (Dorothy Gulliver) and a local judge (Andrew Waldron). A vivacious WAMPAS Baby Star of 1928, Dorothy Gulliver gave up her screen career in the early 1940s only to make a spectacular comeback as a bored hausfrau picking up young lovers in John Cassavetes' fascinating Faces (1968). ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide