Nick Copeland Movies

Lyle Talbot stars as "Three Star" Halsey, a hotshot West Coast aviator with a reputation for recklessness. Time and time again, Halsey promises his stewardess sweetheart Judy Wagner (Ann Dvorak) that he'll stop taking risks, and time and again he breaks his word. After several misadventures, Halsey becomes a hero when he prevents a top-secret explosive formula from falling into the hands of the villains -- and as a bonus, solves four airborne murders. Much of the aerial photography in Murder in the Clouds would be reused in such future Warners programmers as Fly-Away Baby and Fugitive in the Sky. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Actually this film should have been titled "Here Comes Jimmy Cagney Again, so Duck!". James Cagney is a bantam-cock sailor who runs up against chief petty officer Pat O'Brien. Seems that Cagney and O'Brien had come to blows early in the film when O'Brien stole Cagney's date at a dance hall. O'Brien resents both Cagney and Cagney's attentions towards O'Brien's sister (Gloria Stuart). The animosity intensifies when O'Brien court-martials Cagney for going AWOL. But all passions are spent when Cagney heroically rescues his shipmates from a raging fire. Here Comes the Navy proved to Jimmy Cagney's fans that he could still deliver the goods even with the tighter movie censorship imposed in 1934. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Flamboyant, egomaniacal theatrical impresario Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) transforms chorus girl Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard) into leading lady Lily Garland, the toast of Broadway. Once she's ascended to stardom, Mildred/Lily cannot abide Jaffe's obsessive control of her life and career. When he hires a private detective (Edgar Kennedy) to keep tabs on her, it's the last straw. Lily whisks herself off to Hollywood, where she quickly becomes a top movie star. Months pass: without his "creation" to star in his productions, Jaffe goes bankrupt. With his faithful stooges O'Malley (Roscoe Karns) and Webb (Walter Connolly) in tow, Jaffe boards the Twentieth Century Limited, one step ahead of his creditors. By an incredible coincidence, Lily is also on the Twentieth Century, accompanied by her stuffy fiance George Smith (Ralph Forbes). With near-maniacal glee, Jaffe undertakes the herculean task of signing Lily to star in his upcoming spectacular staging of "The Passion Play". Now the laughs, which have been erupting at safe intervals for the past 45 minutes, really begin to cascade, with Oscar, Lily, and a wide variety of eccentrics chasing each other around the Twentieth Century as it speeds its way from Chicago to New York. Based on the Broadway play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Twentieth Century is "screwball comedy" at its screwiest. Director Howard Hawks once claimed that he was the first to treat his romantic leads like comedians: whether he was or not, it is true than Barrymore and Lombard deliver two of the funniest performances of the 1930s. Nearly 50 years after the release of Twentieth Century, the property was revived as a Broadway musical, On the 20th Century, starring Kevin Kline and Madeline Kahn. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Harold Lloyd's second talkie finds The Bespectacled One playing a shoe clerk in Honolulu. Harboring dreams of becoming an executive, Lloyd passes himself off as a millionaire to heiress Barbara Kent. As the plot merrily rolls along, Harold stows away on a ship bound for the mainland, and ends up at the top of a dizzying skyscraper. In a reversal of his dilemma in 1923's Safety Last, Lloyd must find the safest way to climb down the building--with the dubious assistance of bumbling black janitor Willie Best (here derogatorily billed as "Sleep 'N' Eat"). Attempting to extend his silent-film technique into the talkie era, Harold Lloyd is successful about half the time. The climactic building-climbing sequence, though amusing, pales in comparison to Lloyd's earlier excursions into "high and dizzy" humor. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide