Robert Elliott Movies

We first lay eyes on Jimmy Cagney in Lady Killer while he's working as a movie theater usher. This job lasts just long enough for Jimmy to be swindled in a "badger game" orchestrated by hard-boiled Mae Clarke and a gang of crooks headed by Douglass Dumbrille. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Cagney joins the mob, and soon is calling the shots. But though he's got larceny in his soul, Cagney draws the line at murder, and when gang member Raymond Hatton is bumped off, Cagney and Clarke board the Super Chief and head to California. With the cops laying for Cagney in LA, he's suspicious of everyone. A shifty-looking mug (William B. Davidson) takes after Cagney on the street; catching up to the winded Cagney, the mug explains that he's a movie director, and that Cagney is a perfect "type" for an upcoming prison picture. After several months as a bit player, Cagney befriends good-natured movie-star Margaret Lindsay, who encourages Cagney to seek out bigger parts. The enterprising Cagney engineers a phony fan-mail campaign encouraging the studio to give him starring roles. Though now a slick, pomaded romantic lead in pictures, Cagney is still Cagney; when a snooty critic pans Lindsay's most recent performance, Cagney forces the reviewer to literally eat his words! It must needs be that Cagney's old gang shows up in Hollywood, planning to use Cagney's influence to gain entree into movie stars' mansions, then steal their valuables. Cagney says ixnay to this, so the mob schemes to take him for a ride. Tipped off by Clarke, Cagney is able to rout the crooks, save the day, and claim Lindsay for his bride. Lady Killer is vintage Cagney, throwing virtually every one of his star-making attributes (including one cute reference to his legendary "grapefruit scene" in 1931's Public Enemy) into one entertaining 76-minute stew. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A young woman believes that her mother's gambling house is a hotel. When a gambler angry about being cheated there convinces her to join her mother's business, it really does turn into a hotel. ~ Steve Huey, All Movie Guide

Upon her release from prison, Joyce Greeley (Edwina Booth) is promptly and mysteriously murdered. Fledgling crime reporter John Martin (Regis Toomey) wants to find out why and also wants to discern the role of Joyce's lawyer Judson (Earl Foxe) in this whole sordid mess. Martin befriends the dead woman's sister Ellen (Betty Bronson) then extracts an important piece of evidence from deaf-mute Dummy Black (Mischa Auer in his pre-comedy days). Things come to a head when the villain is trapped in his own web of deceit -- and by his own accomplice. Former boxing great Jim Jeffries and silent comedy star Snub Pollard appear as themselves in a nightclub sequence. This Midnight Patrol is sometimes confused with the 1933 Laurel and Hardy two-reeler of the same title. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this western, a Pony Express rider believes himself to be a Native American. The trouble begins when an Anglo outlaw begins stealing the fastest horses from the organization. The outlaw then blames the local Indians for the thefts. The gallant young rider learns of the scheme and rounds up the real culprits. Along the way he learns that he is really a white man who had been abducted and raised by the Indians. He is pretty happy because now he is free to marry the white woman he loves. The racist attitudes in this film are a reflection of its time, 1932, and of the whims of the powerful Hays Office, which censored all Hollywood films. As Hays considered miscegenation (the so-called mixing of races) immoral, the hero had to become a white man to marry a white woman. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This first of three film adaptations of Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon plays at times like the road-company version of the more famous 1941 John Huston/Humphrey Bogart adaptation. Ricardo Cortez stars as a slick, rogueish edition of Sam Spade, using his office as a trysting place for his various amours. Bebe Daniels plays the Brigid O'Shaughnessy character, here rechristened Ruth Wonderly. Ruth hires Spade and his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) to locate her missing sister. Archer is killed while on duty, confirming Spade's suspicion that Ruth's lost-sister story was a subterfuge. In fact, Ruth is one of several disreputable types in search of a valuable falcon statuette encrusted with jewels. Others mixed up in the quest for the "black bird" are portly Casper Gutman (Dudley Digges), Gutman's neurotic gunsel Wilmer (Dwight Frye, better known as Renfield from Dracula) and effeminate Joel Cairo (Otto Matiesen). It is giving nothing away at this stage of the game to note that, after all the various intrigues concerning the falcon have come and gone, Spade turns Ruth over to the cops as the murderer of Archer. As would be the case with the 1941 version, the 1931 Maltese Falcon does not use Hammett's original ending, in which Spade callously resumes his affair with Archer's widow (Thelma Todd). Instead, we are offered a jailhouse coda, where a suddenly compassionate Spade asks the matron to treat the incarcerated Ruth gently during her 20-year stay. When Maltese Falcon was due for a reissue in 1936, it was denied a Production Code approval on the basis of one single line: Archer's widow, spotting Ruth Wonderly in Spade's bedroom, exclaims "Who's that dame in my kimono?" In between the 1931 and 1941 versions of Maltese Falcon, there would be a heavily disguised reworking of the Hammett novel, Satan Met a Lady (1936), starring Warren William and Bette Davis. To avoid confusion with the 1941 remake, the 1931 Maltese Falcon has been retitled Dangerous Female for television. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Warner Bros.' Captain Thunder contains some of the darndest Mexican accents you've ever heard in your life. The star is Hungarian-born Victor Varconi, portraying a legendary south of the border outlaw who tries to force Canadian senorita Fay Wray to marry a rival rustler whom she despises. She pleads with the bandito so pathetically that he is moved to grant her a single wish. Without hesitation she chooses her poor but true love. The bandit king, being a somewhat honorable fellow grants the wish and without a twitch, guns down the wicked cattle thief. Fortunately the film was played for comedy, a wise decision since it probably would have garnered laughs as a straight drama anyway. No fewer than four writers worked on Captain Thunder, and that folks is never a good sign. The true "bandit" in this film was Jack Warner, who picked the pockets of those filmgoers who thought they were going to see a thrilling melodrama (or at least a film with a semblance of coherent plot). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A sophisticated, expensively-dressed group of people gather in a spooky old mansion to watch the first performance of a play. The highlight of the production is a realistic on-stage murder, wherein the victim is shot point-blank, right through the heart, as the clock strikes 12. The audience applauds enthusiastically as the "victim" falls dead, but the applause subsides and gives way to screams of terror when it turns out that the murder is for real! With everyone in the mansion under suspicion -- including, naturally, the butler -- the cops are baffled, and even more so when the primary suspect ends up as victim number two. "This isn't a murder case, it's an epidemic!" moans one of the detectives. Intricately plotted, and with a genuinely surprising solution, Murder at Midnight is far and away superior to your average low-budget mystery. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The names have all been changed, but this hard-hitting gangster tale is based on an actual newspaper headline story involving the brutal slaying of corrupt crime reporter Alfred "Jake" Lingle, who had been suspected of betraying his boss Al Capone. Naive Southern boy Breckinridge Lee comes to the big city for fame and fortune. He starts out honest, but is unable to the resist hefty payoffs offered by crime lord Louis Blanco to suppress certain stories. Time passes and Lee does a great job for Blanco. Lee's girl friend tries to get him to go straight, but he has become too accustomed to the money and besides is too deeply mired in corruption to ever escape. In the end, he loses his life when a story about Blanco's latest shenanigans escapes his watchful eye and gets printed. Believing Lee was behind the double-cross, Blanco orders him executed and tragedy ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

At the height of his activity as Hollywood's foremost producer of 2-reel comedies, Hal Roach developed the urge to direct a feature film and thus went down the street to MGM to helm the rip-roaring adventure yarn Men of the North. Gilbert Roland stars as Louis LaBey, a French-Canadian trapper who falls in love with Nedra (Barbara Leonard), daughter of a wealthy gold-mine owner. Hampering Louis' romance is the fact that he is suspected of a series of daring daylight robberies, wherein gold messengers are robbed of their cargo. It turns out that he is guilty, but through an 11th-hour plot twist it is proven that Louis was actually only stealing from himself! Men of the North was also filmed in Spanish, German, French and Italian-language versions, with Gilbert Roland repeating his role in the Spanish adaptation, and John Reinhardt, Andre Luguet and Franco Corsaro respectively starring in the other versions. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Norma Shearer earned an Academy Award for playing the not so gay divorcée in this pre-Code offering based, loosely, on Ex-Wife, a 1929 Ursula Parrott novel. Shearer is Jerry, a socialite who marries handsome Ted (Chester Morris) after a whirlwind courtship. But Ted is not exactly the faithful type and after three years of what she in her naïveté considered marital bliss, Jerry learns of his affair with Janice (Mary Doran). "It meant nothing," Ted assures her but Jerry is devastated and decides to investigate adultery for herself by sleeping with Ted's best friend, Don (Robert Montgomery). When she discovers that the old double-standard still applies, Jerry announces that henceforth Ted, and only Ted, is no longer welcome in her bed. After a string of lovers who mean little or nothing to her, Jerry falls for an old flame, Paul (Conrad Nagel), but when she understands the effect their affair has on Paul's poor disfigured wife, Dorothy (Helen Johnson, aka Judith Wood), Jerry returns to Ted, who still loves her despite it all. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

In this early talkie, a vicious crime lord (played by Lew Ayres in a rare villainous role) decides that he has had enough and much to the shock of his colleagues decides to give the business to his second in command (James Cagney in hi second film role) and retire to Florida after marrying his moll. Unfortunately, he has no idea that she and Cagney are lovers. Part of the reason the don wants to leave is to keep his young brother, who idolizes him, from learning the awful truth about his avocation. Soon after moving down to Florida, former rivals kidnap the brother and kill him, causing the reformed gangster to come back for deadly revenge. This was an innovative film and featured a lot of elements that would become standards in the gangster genre including tommy guns carried in violin cases, terrible shoot-outs, and lots of rum-running rivalry. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Thunderbolt was Josef von Sternberg's first American talking picture. George Bancroft, a von Sternberg regular (despite frequents clashes between the two men), plays a death row inmate who may be on the eve of eternity, but who has still one more murder on his mind. He plans to kill the young lover (Richard Arlen) of his former girl friend (Fay Wray); fortuitously the lover is incarcerated in the same prison where Bancroft awaits the chair. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide