Gaston Glass Movies

Based on the story The Wisdom of Eve by Mary Orr, All About Eve is an elegantly bitchy backstage story revolving around aspiring actress Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Tattered and forlorn, Eve shows up in the dressing room of Broadway mega-star Margo Channing (Bette Davis), weaving a melancholy life story to Margo and her friends. Taking pity on the girl, Margo takes Eve as her personal assistant. Before long, it becomes apparent that naïve Eve is a Machiavellian conniver who cold-bloodedly uses Margo, her director Bill Sampson (Gary Merill), Lloyd's wife Karen (Celeste Holm), and waspish critic Addison De Witt (George Sanders) to rise to the top of the theatrical heap. Also appearing in All About Eve is Marilyn Monroe, introduced by Addison De Witt as "a graduate of the Copacabana school of dramatic art." This is but one of the hundreds of unforgettable lines penned by writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the most famous of which is Margo Channing's lip-sneering admonition, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night." All About Eve received 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This French Underground melodrama stars George Sanders as a seemingly apolitical Parisian doctor who is actually a resistance leader. Sanders' nurse (Brenda Marshall) is likewise a French patriot--less so the nurse's husband (Philip Dorn), who has become disillusioned after two years in a POW camp. The husband changes his mind and joins the Resistance, though he and several other freedom fighters lose their lives to German bullets. Worth noting in Paris After Dark is the fact that several of the personnel involved were actual French refugees, including director Leonide Moguy and husband-and-wife supporting actors Marcel Dalio and Madeleine LeBeau. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Groucho Marx received co-writer credit (along with his old friend Norman Krasna) for King and the Chorus Girl, though very little Marxian wit is in evidence. What remains is a fun but forgettable comedy about a European monarch (Fernand Gravet) who woos and wins a down-to-earth American chorine (Joan Blondell) who works at the Folies Bergere. Edward Everett Horton and Jane Wyman (fifth-billed) provide comic relief as the respective best friends and severest critics of the leading players. The film had a topical edge in that it was released the year after Britain's King Edward renounced his throne for American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. Significantly, King and the Chorus Girl was released in England as Romance is Sacred, effectively downplaying the touchy "royal" angle. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Puritan Pictures, a poverty-row operation devoted in the main to Tim McCoy westerns, turned out a few diverting murder mysteries during its short life span. In Death in the Sky, Leon Ames plays a World War I ace whose combat experiences have driven him mad. Convinced that every other aviator on earth poses a personal threat to him, Ames contrives to kill anyone who pilots a plane. Only hero John Carroll and heroine Lona Andre stand in the way of Ames' murder spree. The matching of new footage with stock shots from such earlier air epics as Hell's Angels is not always convincing, but at least the film keeps on the move. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The 1936 comedy-mystery The Princess Comes Across might well have been inspired by a real-life incident during the silent-movie era, in which a crafty San Francisco stenographer hoodwinked the Hollywood elite into believing that she was a Spanish princess. Carole Lombard stars as an alluring Swedish beauty who travels under the name of Princess Olga. Everyone whom she meets en route to America on the steamship Mammoth bows and scrapes to the Princess, while Hollywood anxiously awaits her arrival to star her in a big-budget film. Only the ship's bandleader, King Mantell (Fred MacMurray), refuses to defer to Olga, sensing that she may not be all she claims. Mantell's instincts are right on target: the "Princess" is a brass-nickel phony, a Brooklyn girl named Wanda Nash who has cooked up her royal guise with drama coach Gertrude (Alison Skipworth) as a publicity stunt to crash into movies. Unfortunately, a weaselly blackmailer Darcy (Porter Hall) gloms onto Wanda's true identity and offers to keep quiet in exchange for a huge cash settlment. At the same time, Darcy is attempting to shake down several other passengers on the Mammoth, including King Mantell. Inevitably, Darcy is found murdered in the "Princess"'s stateroom, and Wanda finds herself one of several likely suspects, among them Mantell. A quintet of international detectives, travelling to a convention in America, sets out to solve the mystery, which becomes even more mysterious when one of the detectives also turns up dead. Taking matters in his own hands, Mantell vows to clear Wanda's name, and in the course of things he realizes that he's madly in love with her--but will Wanda give up her hoax, and her future showbiz career, for Mantell's sake? Among the many highlights in this engagingly daffy film is Fred MacMurray's rendition of the enchantingly forgettable song "My Concertina." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Maxwell Anderson's blank-verse play Mary of Scotland was adapted for the screen by Dudley Nichols and directed with a surprising paucity of verve by John Ford. Katharine Hepburn, in one of the "icy" roles that would later earn her the onus of "box office poison", stars as Mary Stuart, who serves as the Queen of Scotland until she is jealously put out of the way by her British cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (Florence Eldredge). Sold out by the Scots nobles, Mary is sentenced to the chopping block for treason. Elizabeth is willing to pardon Mary if only the latter will renounce all claims to the British throne, but Mary refuses, marching to her death with head held high (the Mary/Elizabeth confrontation scene was purely the product of Maxwell Anderson's imagination; in real life, the two women never met). RKO contractee Ginger Rogers dearly coveted the role of Queen Elizabeth, but the studio refused to allow her to play so secondary a role. To prove to the RKO executives that she would be ideal for the part, Ginger secretly arranged for a screen test, in which she was convincingly made up as Elizabeth (even to the point of cutting her hair into a high-foreheaded widow's peak). Contemporary reports indicate that Ginger's audition was brilliant; still, RKO would not consider casting her in the part, so the role of Elizabeth went to Florence Eldridge, the wife of Fredric March, who was cast in Mary of Scotland as Mary's fearless protector the Earl of Bothwell. On the whole, Mary of Scotland is a snoozefest, save for the scenes featuring Douglas Walton as Mary's cowardly husband Darnley. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

An airborne serial killer terrorizes a group of war veterans in this ultra-cheap but fairly engrossing whodunit produced by one of Hollywood's few women executives, Fanchon Royer. Assigned to investigate a series of flight disasters committed by a phantom aircraft bearing only the legend "X," veteran test pilot Jerry Blackwood (John Carroll) learns from Dr. Norris (John Elliott) that the killer in all likelihood is a veteran of the last war suffering from "battle neurosis." Jerry gathers a group of fellow veterans at the plant operated by aircraft manufacturer Henry Goering (Henry Hall), an assembly consisting of Baron Von Guttard (John Peters) of the German Luftwaffe, the French pilot René LaRue (Gaston Glass), the British Captain Saunders (Pat Somerset), and American Douglas Thompson (Wheeler Oakman), late of the famous Lafayette Escadrille. Also present is the mysterious Lieutenant Ives (Reed Howes) and Carl (Leon Kent), Goering's son, who seems to know a great deal about Von Guttard. The German, however, is the first to die during an airborne patrol, closely followed by LaRue. Saunders, meanwhile, seems to come completely unhinged and remains the obvious suspect when Dr. Norris is found murdered. The real "Pilot X," however, is someone completely different, as Jerry and Goering's ward, Helen Gage (Lona Andre), learn the hard way. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

"Suggested" by the notorious trial of gangster Lucky Luciano, this typical low-budget sexploitation-melodrama came complete with the promise to rip "the lid from a vicious phase of American life." In reality, the sordid little film, which was instantly banned by New York censors, depicted little more than a standard tale of illicit gambling augmented by shots of starlets in their underwear. Mae Miller (Martha Chapin), the bleach blond wife of an aging medical student (Robert Frazer), is arrested for shooting Lucky Wilder (Wheeler Oakman) during a raid on Wilder's gambling den. The events leading up to the killing are then told in flashback. At a society garden party, Mae befriended Molly Murdock (Gay Sheridan), who promptly lured the young innocent into Lucky Wilder's den of inequity. Mae eventually accrued 9,000 dollars in gambling debts was forced into prostitution by Wilder and Mrs. Murdock. Lucky's seduction of Mae's kid sister Carolyn (Janet Eastman) and the latter's death following a back alley abortion finally drove Mae to shoot and kill her tormentor. Produced by J.D. Kendis, a well-known procurer of exploitation-thrillers, Gambling With Souls was directed by Elmer Clifton, a former protegée of D.W. Griffith who had fallen on hard times. The film was not screened in New York City until May of 1937, when it was re-released under the title Vice Racket. Like most exploitation films of the 1930s, Gambling With Souls was cast with a combination of unknown starlets and down-on-their-luck silent screen players, all of whom either overacted hilariously or didn't act at all. Florence Dudley, however, provided a bit of intentional comedy relief as a rather zoftig call girl. Footage from Gambling With Souls later found its way into Teen Age (1944). ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

This big-budget 1936 RKO Studios picture lost money, perhaps due to a cool box-office reception to the idea of leading lady Katharine Hepburn in drag, and a rare-for-its-day screen kiss between two women. Edmund Gwenn plays the title character's father Henry, who is obsessed with gambling. His daughter Sylvia (Hepburn) has stolen some expensive lace which they hope to smuggle from France to England. To elude police, she cuts her hair short and disguises herself as a man. She and her father board a ship, and a drunken Henry confesses their scheme to Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant), a jewel smuggler. To divert attention away from him, Jimmy snitches on Henry to the customs officials, and Henry has to pay up or be arrested. Later, Sylvia confronts Jimmy on a train and punches him. Jimmy apologizes and cuts them in on a scheme to steal jewels from a wealthy family, using his friend Maudie (Dennie Moore), a maid in the house. But Sylvia, still disguised as a man, talks Maudie out of it, and she responds with a kiss. Maudie and Sylvia's father fall in love and Maudie, an aspiring actress, invests money in a show to open in a seaside resort. There they are invited to the mansion of a wealthy artist, Michael Fane (Brian Aherne), who is unsettled by Sylvia's obvious affections before finally discovering that she's a woman. Jimmy is attracted to Michael's roommate, the Russian-born Lily (Natalie Paley) -- and from there, the romantic entaglements between the aformentioned parties proceed like a Shakespearean comedy. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

Just before settling into bit roles and dialogue-director assignments, early-talkie leading man David Newell headed the cast of Just Like Heaven. Newell plays Tobey, a Paris street peddler in love with aspiring ballet dancer Mimi (Anita Louise). The two lost souls join a travelling dog circus, pledging undying devotion as the troupe hits the road. Several things happen in the course of the story to keep the young lovers apart, but none of them are of any great interest. This sentimental cheapie was clearly inspired by Fox's Seventh Heaven, but David Newell and Anita Louise were not Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, nor was director Roy William Neill (later a mainstay of Universal's Sherlock Holmes series) in the same league as Frank Borzage. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

She Got What She Wanted was director James Cruze's second "special" for Tiffany Pictures in 1930. Betty Compson, previously the female lead of Cruze's The Great Gabbo, stars as Mathyna, the foreign-born girlfriend of vaudeville hoofer Eddie (Lee Tracy). Tired of waiting for Eddie to pop the question, Mathyna marries Boris (Gaston Glass), an aspiring novelist. Soon she gets bored of her housewife status and begins spending time with boorish Dave (Alan Hale) and the ubiquitous Eddie. Leaving Boris in favor of Dave, Mathyna learns to regret her impulsiveness when her new husband gets mixed up with crooks. She ultimately returns to the faithful Boris, while Eddie philosophically soft-shoes out of her life. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide