Jonathan Hale Movies

Thunder Afloat is set during the first world war. Wallace Beery plays an veteran tugboat captain who harbors a grudge against younger ex-pal Chester Morris. When Morris joins the navy as an officer, he runs across Beery, who resparks the feud. Both men bury the hatchet and work shoulder to shoulder when German U-boats threaten innocent shippers. Though the action takes place in 1918, the film was intensely topical in 1939 given the renewal of maritime hostilities in Europe and the Far East. Thunder Afloat made money by the bushel basket, as did most of Wallace Beery's formula vehicles. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

There's That Woman Again was the second and last entry in Columbia's own spin on MGM's "Thin Man" series. Virginia Bruce and Melvyn Douglas star as Sally and Bill Reardon, husband-and-wife private eyes (Bruce took over from Joan Blondell, who costarred with Douglas in 1938's There's Always a Woman). This time around, the Reardons investigate a series of jewel robberies which lead to a brace of murders. At times the comedy threatens to overwhelm the mystery angle, but rest assured that Bill Reardon will have collared the guilty party (or, in this case, guilty parties) a few minutes before closing. In emulation of MGM's "Thin Man" art direction, the leading characters in There's That Woman Again live in a lavishly furnished apartment roughly the size of Rhode Island. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this exciting action film, a young Indy driver endeavors to emulate his famous father, and restore his dad's good reputation after he was killed in a racing in an accident caused by ruthless racketeers who made it look as if the veteran driver was drunk. The young son is assisted by trucker and racing aficionado Blake who helps him defeat the crooks that are trying to kill him too. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Fifteen thousand dollars may have been a fortune back in 1938, but to high-powered literary agent Lynn Conway (Virginia Bruce), it's next to nothing. Unfortunately, Lynn is married to chauvinistic Massachusetts shipbuilder David Conway (Robert Montgomery), who stubbornly insists that she quit her job and live on his measly 15-thou-per-year income alone. David also demands that Lynn move from her posh New York apartment to a tiny cottage in provincial New Bedford. Lynn's ex-partner Harry Borden (Warren William), who's always carried a torch for her, tries to convince her to leave David and return to Manhattan. But love conquers all, and Lynn ultimately realizes that a woman's place is in the home -- especially when there's a baby on the way. One suspects that Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem will not be entertained by The First Hundred Years. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Sidney Howard/Paul de Kruf Broadway play Yellow Jack was transferred to the screen by MGM in 1938. The film is set at the turn of the century, when yellow fever was the Number One killer in Latin America. Army doctors Lewis Stone, Charles Coburn and Stanley Ridges gather in Cuba to attempt to find the cause and cure of the dreaded disease. Five US soldiers--Robert Montgomery, Buddy Ebsen, Alan Curtis, Sam Levene and William Henry--volunteer to expose themselves to yellow fever as a means to test the experimental vaccines. In a very well handled close-up setpiece, the audience discovers long before the medical staff that the humble mosquito is the disease carrier. The "Let me be the first to die" brand of heroics is sometimes hard to take, but otherwise Yellow Jack is inspiring entertainment in the grand old Hollywood tradition. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Louis Hayward plays an arrogant Cambridge student who emigrates to America and enrolls at the West Point. Hayward's superior attitude earns him the enmity of his fellow students and the derisive nickname "the Duke". Those viewers familiar with college pictures will know as early as the opening titles that Hayward is down deep a swell guy. He proves this by helping impoverished plebe Richard Carlson pay his college costs and winning a crucial hockey game against a Canadian team. While Hayward and his student companions all look a bit long in tooth to be West Pointers, 20-year-old leading lady Joan Fontaine fits right in to the predictable proceedings. Like most of producer Edward Small's films, Duke of West Point was a perennial attraction on TV's "Late Late Shows" in the 1950s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in this inspired comedy about a madcap heiress with a pet leopard who meets an absent-minded paleontologist and unwittingly makes a fiasco of both their lives. David Huxley (Grant) is the stuffy paleontologist who needs to finish an exhibit on dinosaurs and thus land a $1 million grant for his museum. At a golf outing with his potential benefactors, Huxley is spotted by Susan Vance (Hepburn) who decides that she must have the reserved scientist at all costs. She uses her pet leopard, Baby, to trick him into driving to her Connecticut home, where a dog wanders into Huxley's room and steals the vital last bone that he needs to complete his project. The real trouble begins when another leopard escapes from the local zoo and Baby is mistaken for it, leading Huxley and Susan into a series of harebrained and increasingly more insane schemes to save the cat from the authorities. Inevitably, the two end up in the local jail, where things get even more out of hand: Susan pretends to be the gun moll to David's diabolical, supposedly wanted criminal. Naturally, the mismatched pair falls in love through all the lunacy. Director Howard Hawks delivers a funny, fast-paced, and offbeat story, enlivened by animated performances from the two leads, in what has become a definitive screwball comedy. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Brash and vigorous director William Wellman always had a place in his filmography for movies glorifying the early years of aviation -- from the start of his career (Wings), until the end (Lafayette Escadrille). But, perhaps, never has his devotion to aviation been made more vivid than in his 1938 drama Men With Wings. Wellman, in this film, attempts to dramatize the history of aviation from the early days of the Wright Brothers until the 1930s, when airline transportation first became viable. The story centers upon two contrasting aviation types: the barnstormer, Pat Falconer (Fred MacMurray), and the methodical scientist of flight, Scott Barnes (Ray Milland). Through these two archetypes, Wellman follows Pat and Scott from childhood to adulthood. Pat marries childhood sweetheart Peggy Ransom (Louise Campbell) and they have a child. Scott, who had always loved Peggy, remains in the background, not wanting to break up his solid friendship with Pat. But Pat is clearly doomed by his recklessness and breakneck individuality. After fighting in the skies during World War I, he refuses to sit back and do the methodical work of flight research like Scott. Always searching for another war to fight, Falconer leaves Scott and Peggy behind, taking off for China to help the Chinese fight Japanese invaders. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

A master blend of high comedy and tense emotional drama, A Letter of Introduction reteams Adolphe Menjou, Andrea Leeds, and Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, who'd previously costarred in the negligible Goldwyn Follies. Menjou plays John Mannering, a Barrymoresque actor who years earlier had divorced his wife and severed his relationship with his daughter Kay (Andrea Leeds). Now a grown woman, Kay aspires to an acting career, fully determined to make it on her own without her father's help. She goes so far as to change her last name to Martin, and to keep her actual relationship to Mannering a secret from the public. This set-up leads to a dizzying series of complications, including the breakup of Mannering's romance with a tootsie named Lydia Hoyt (Anne Sheridan), who falsely assumes that Kay is Mannering's mistress, and Kay's own romantic travails with vaudeville hoofer Barry Paige (George Murphy). Meanwhile, Kay's ventriloquist friend Bergen and his dummy McCarthy rise to superstardom on radio. It is, in fact, Bergen and Charlie who are instrumental in reuniting the estranged Mannering and Kay, paving the way for the film's tear-stained conclusion. Unavailable for many years, A Letter of Introduction re-emerged on the Public Domain circuit in 1975. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When Columbia Pictures secured the movie rights to Chic Young's popular comic strip Blondie, the studio executives probably never imagined that the ensuing "Blondie" series would last for 12 years and 28 episodes! Part of the series' charm was Columbia's wisdom in casting the ideal actors for the leading roles. Penny Singleton dyed her hair blonde to step into the role of Blondie Bumstead (after Shirley Deane bowed out due to prior committments); Arthur Lake landed the role of a lifetime as sensible Blondie's bumbling hubby Dagwood (in the original strip, of course, it was Dagwood who was sensible and Blondie who was scatterbrained); and 5-year-old Larry Simms did a masterful job as the Bumstead's son Baby Dumpling (aka Alexander), literally growing up before our eyes over the next dozen years. Not as farcical as later entries, the initial Blondie film is a gentle, even-keeled situation comedy, aiming for chuckles rather than bellylaughs. It doesn't take long for poor Dagwood to get into trouble with his apoplectic boss J. C. Dithers (wonderfully played by Jonathan Hale), who fires our hero halfway through the second reel. Ruminating over his troubles in a hotel lobby, Dagwood strikes up a friendship with affable C. P. Hazlip (Gene Lockhart), never realizing that this is the same Hazlip whose account the Dithers Construction Company has been trying to land for the past several weeks! But before a happy ending can be realized, Blondie and Dagwood undergo a series of misunderstandings, culminating with Blondie tearfully storming out of the house (which has already been stripped of its furniture by the finance company!) Blondie was an immediate hit with filmgoers and fans of the strip alike, convincing Columbia that it had a winning property on its hands and spawning sequel after sequel after sequel. Available for years only in its TV version, which obliterated the opening credits in favor of a jazzier "sitcom" opening and tacked on a few minutes of "coming attractions", Blondie has recently been restored to its original form on videotape and cable TV. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Saint, Leslie Charteris' charming but deadly criminal-turned-sleuth, made his first film appearance in RKO Radio's The Saint of New York. Faithful to Charteris' original concept, this first movie Saint is a cold-blooded murderer, redeemed by the fact that all of his victims are notorious gangsters who'd otherwise elude the clutches of the law. Hired by a coterie of businessmen, Simon Templar (Louis Hayward), aka the Saint, methodically rids New York of its worst criminals, though "The Big Fellow", aka Hutch Rellin (Sig Rumann), continues to elude him. He is aided by Rellin's enigmatic mistress Fay Edwards (Kay Sutton), who pays for her actions with her life. The film's most memorable moment finds Templar disguising himself as a nun to dispose of a particularly nasty villain. The success of The Saint of New York prompted RKO to negotiate with Charteris for a series of "Saint" films, with George Sanders and Hugh Sinclair taking over from Louis Hayward as the title character. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Edward Arnold once again plays a self-made businessman who inadvertently engineers his own downfall in John Meade's Woman. Starting with a second-rate tree-cutting business, Meade rapidly becomes a powerful lumber tycoon, using underhanded methods to rise to the top and crushing anyone who gets in his way. He falls in love with Chicago socialite Caroline Haig (Gail Patrick), but she doesn't feel the same way; nevertheless, for business reasons she agrees to marry him. Feeling slighted, Meade jilts Caroline in favor of down-to-earth Teddy Connor (Francine Larrimore), whom he's picked up off the streets. Pretending to be in love with Teddy but secretly laughing at her behind her back, Meade gets his comeuppance when she leads a populist revolt against his attempts to corner the wheat market. Based on the exploits of several real-life "robber barons," John Meade's Women contains several scenes which eerily anticipate Orson Welles' Citizen Kane by nearly four years. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide