Edward Gargan Movies

Though the title character is loosely based on that of the notorious killer/robber Ma Barker, she has been sanitized and prettified to meet the perceived conservative values of Hollywood movie audiences. Unlike Barker, who was bad to the bone, Ma Webster is simply a matriarch who would do anything for her three crazy sons, even assisting them with thieving and kidnapping. Their exploits land the nefarious family on the FBI's "most wanted" list and cause the agency to send out their very best man to find them. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Rachel Crothers' thoughtful stage play Susan and God was tastefully adapted for the screen by Anita Loos. Joan Crawford stars as Susan, whose unquestioning devotion to various religious organizations causes a great deal of strain between herself and her family. When Susan embraces a "New Thought" theological movement, she decides to apply the tenets of this new philosophy to patch up the unhappy marriages within her own social circles. She succeeds only in making things worse, and in further harming her own relationship with husband Barrie (Fredric March) and daughter Blossom (Rita Quigley). But it is the unadorned, unpretentious religious faith of little Blossom that ultimately brings Susan and Barrie together again. When Susan and God was first released in 1940, Joan Crawford's performance was occasionally compared unfavorably to that of Gertrude Lawrence, who created the role of Susan on Broadway; it was suggested by some that Crawford patterned her portrayal exactly on Lawrence's, right down to the line delivery. Modern audiences, denied the opportunity to see Lawrence's interpretation, are less inclined to downgrade Crawford's work, which rates among her best. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this light and lovely romantic musical, a Hungarian woman (Deanna Durbin) attends a fair in Austria and buys a card from a gypsy fortune teller. It says that she will meet someone important and is destined for a happy marriage. Afterward she gets a job as a baker's assistant. She then meets a handsome army drummer (Bob Cummings) who secretly dreams of becoming a famous composer and conductor. Unfortunately the military forbids the young corporal to create his own music. But then Ilonka (Durbin) secretly sends one of the drummer's waltzes to the Austrian Emperor with his weekly order of pastries. Her act paves the way toward the tuneful and joyous fulfillment of the gypsy's prediction. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Fiercely independent authoress June Cameron (Loretta Young) has no time for men in her life. Chauvinistic medical college professor Timothy Sterling (Ray Milland) has no use for women. So guess who is mistaken for June's husband, and guess who is forced by circumstances to pretend that she's married? The Doctor Takes a Wife maintains its exhausting comic pace until about five minutes before the end, when the scriptwriters are forced to take a breather to tie up all the loose plot ends. The "fantasy" closing gag went over so well that Columbia Pictures utilized variations of it in several subsequent screwball comedies. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This comedy is the sequel of Brother Rat. The film begins with the three original protagonists after their graduation from the Virginia Military Institute. One of them has just applied for a job as the academy's baseball coach and the others come to assist him. Mayhem ensues; especially after the two well-meaning friends steal the would-be coach's baby and put it aboard a plane headed for Peru. The babe finally comes back and the ensuing publicity gets the coach his dream job. Meanwhile, the other two finally get the girls of their dreams. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Unrelated to Monogram's series of "Bowery Boys" B pictures, Republic's Bowery Boy stars Dennis O'Keefe as a crusading slum doctor. Actually, O'Keefe doesn't play the title character: that honor goes to Jimmy Lydon, a tough street kid who tries to block the plans made by O'Keefe and nurse Louise Campbell to build a health clinic. But when mobster Roger Pryor sells tainted meat that results in an outbreak of botulism, Lydon becomes O'Keefe's biggest booster. Also in the cast is Jimmy Lydon's younger brother Ormund, who plays...Jimmy Lydon's younger brother. Bowery Boy served as the directorial debut of former film editor William Morgan. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Marx Bros.' Go West was on the drawing boards as early as 1936, when MGM executive Irving Thalberg commissioned Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby to come up with a script in which the Marx boys get involved with a rodeo. The project was shelved in favor of A Day at the Races, then revived in late 1939, two years after Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West proved the commercial viability of comedy-Westerns. By this time, Kalmar and Ruby were no longer involved, and the script became virtually the sole responsibility of Irving Brecher, who'd previously penned the disappointing Marx vehicle At the Circus. If Go West is an improvement over Circus, it is probably because the Marxes were permitted to try out their material on tour before a variety of live audiences. Set in 1870, the story begins as S. Quentin Quayle (Groucho Marx) tries to raise enough money for a train ticket to the West. He spots a couple of likely pigeons, prospectors Rusty (Harpo Marx) and Joe (Chico Marx), and attempts to sucker them out of the required 500 dollars. In what turns out to be the film's funniest scene, Rusty and Joe turn the tables on Quayle, divesting him of everything he owns -- including his trousers. The plot then rears its ugly head as villains Beecher (Walter Woolf King) and Baxter (Robert H. Barrat) scheme to wrest a lucrative railroad contract from hero Terry Turner (John Carroll). Rusty and Joe make things easy for the bad guys by stupidly signing over a valuable gold mine deed which they were supposed to deliver to heroine Eve Wilson (Diana Lewis). With the help of Quayle, Rusty and Joe try to recover the deed, only to be sidetracked by a bevy of dance-hall girls. After several middling complications, the film boils down to a race between heroes and villains to register their bids and win the railroad contract. This requires Quayle, Rusty, and Joe to keep a locomotive in commission by chopping up the passenger cars for fuel, one of several Keatonesque sight gags packed into the film's hilarious finale. The opening and closing scenes of Go West are so good that one is willing to forgive and forget the dull romantic subplot and the misfire gags in the midsection. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

There are three key characters in Anatole Litvak's filmization of Aben Kandel's novel City for Conquest, as opposed to the six or more in the book -- but the real star, to a large extent, is New York City and its entire population. For purposes of the movie, however, the dramatic arc is linked to James Cagney, as honest, unpretentious truck driver Danny Kenny, whose life is involved with two other people -- his kid brother, Ed (Arthur Kennedy), a gifted musician trying to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of New York's Lower East Side, and Peggy Nash (Ann Sheridan), the neighborhood girl from the Lower East Side whom he's loved, one way or another, since he was a kid. Danny is happy doing what he does, driving a truck, but when Ed's scholarship is cut in half, he reluctantly takes an offer of a boxing match to raise the cash he needs, going into the ring under the fighting name "Young Samson." At about the same time, Peggy -- who loves to dance -- has her head turned by Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn), an ambitious but sleazy aspiring professional dancer. Eventually Peggy goes into partnership with Murray and is ultimately driven by her own ambition to leave Danny after she accepts his marriage proposal. By now, he's getting up in the boxing world, and in his bitterness over losing Peggy he accepts a bout for the world's welterweight championship. He's not overmatched as a boxer, but the money involved in this fight is just too big for it to be honest, and Danny is left all but blinded when his opponent's handlers slip resin dust onto his gloves. Danny is left seemingly a shell of a man, though he's content with his lot in life as far as it goes. He doesn't want any special attention or favors from anyone; the only thing he would like, though he's too proud to admit it, would be for Peggy to come back. But by now her dancing career with Murray has fallen apart, and she's too tortured by guilt, over the sequence of events she helped start, to come near Danny. It falls to Ed, who has never given up composing, to express the inexpressibles that each of these characters feels through his music. His first major classical work is a symphony ostensibly about New York City, which he conducts in its premiere at Carnegie Hall; but it's also about Danny and his life, and his dreams. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Charlie Chan in Panama was the first entry in the "Chan" series to capitalize on WW2. Sidney Toler stars as the wily oriental sleuth, who on this occasion must weed out an elusive enemy saboteur named Ryner, who plans to destroy the Panama Canal. Any one of the supporting characters might be the never-seen Ryner: Could it be illegal alien Kathi Lenesch (Jean Rogers), overly effusive Englishman Cliveden Compton (Lionel Atwill), straight-arrow Richard Cabot (Kane Richmond), slimy nightclub owner Montero (Jack LaRue), moonfaced middle-easterner Achmed (Frank Puglia), timid schoolmarm Jennie Finch (Mary Nash), or none of the above? Also on hand is Victor Sen Yung as Charlie's Number 2 son Jimmy, who is somewhat stupider than usual (if such a thing is possible). In an early scene, Charlie Chan neatly sums up his relationship with the bumbling Jimmy: "Man without relatives is man without problems." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Kenneth Roberts' fact-based novel Northwest Passage would seem too raw and explicit a book to be considered for an MGM film adaptation-much less one in Technicolor. Amazingly, MGM retained many of the grim episodes from the Roberts' novel, though - thanks to the Hays Code - most are discussed rather than shown. The film is set in 1759, when the headstrong and gifted young artist Langdon Towne (Robert Young) is expelled from Harvard much to the chagrin of his parents and his fiancee, Elizabeth Browne (Ruth Hussey). Towne and his tough-as-nails sidekick, Hunk Marriner (Walter Brennan) get soused one night in a pub and - while intoxicated - viciously insult Elizabeth's father, Rev. Browne (Louis Hector). The two men are nearly arraigned for the incident, but escape just in time and ultimately wind up at the camp of famed Indian hunter Major Robert Rogers (Spencer Tracy). Rogers then invites Towne to join his troupe as a cartographer, and suggests that Marriner tag along. Together, the hundreds of Indian fighters under Rogers's aegis team up and chart their way through the wilderness, headed straight for St. Francis, the base of the French-supported Abenaki tribe, notorious for bloodily wiping out British-controlled colonies, after which they will forge the titular 'northwest passage' to the Pacific. Along the route, the boys counter such obstacles as traitorous Native American guides and exploding gunpowder. Metro Goldwyn-Mayer originally slated this production for Tracy, Wallace Beery, Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone, but only Tracy signed on; the studio reeled in Brennan and Young as last-minute additions, to support Tracy's lead. Northwest Passage marked Vidor's first Technicolor film. William V. Skall and Sidney Wagner received Oscar nominations for their outstanding cinematographic work on the film. Nineteen years after its premiere, Northwest Passage later became an NBC TV series between 1959-60, starring Keith Larsen in the Tracy role, Buddy "Jed Clampett" Ebsen in the Brennan role, and Don Burnett in the Young role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Famous filmmaker Jacques Tourneur (known for his compelling film noir and scary horror movies) makes his directorial debut in this crime drama that centers on a gang's getaway driver who is captured and imprisoned. There he undergoes rehabilitation and decides to go straight. The head gangster's moll also opts for reform while her boyfriend decides to stay a crook. The good couple ends up earning an early parole; they make the most of their second chance and prove that prison rehabilitation works. The film is noted for its realism. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

To dim-bulb accountants find themselves working for a bookie in this comedy. Their jobs and their lives are placed in jeopardy when they accidently fumble $50,000 worth of the bookie's cash over to the secretary who wastes no time in spending $44,000 of it in less than 8 hours. The bookkeepers are given 36 hours to get all of the money back by their infuriated boss. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This film should have been a press agent's dream: Hollywood's two greatest "big mouths," Joe E. Brown and Martha Raye, together in the same picture. Brown and Raye play a show business couple who inherit a near-bankrupt college. They decide to build up the school's scraggly football team in hopes of improving alumni funding; somewhere along the line it is agreed to grant one thousand dollars for every touchdown scored, hence the title. Slapstick opportunities abound, and with the two stars at the helm, the film should have been far funnier than it is. But thanks to uninspired direction and a threadbare budget, $1000 a Touchdown was a disappointment for fans of both Martha Raye and Joe E. Brown. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide