George "Gabby" Hayes Movies

The Man From Utah
After helping prevent a bank robbery, young drifter John Weston (John Wayne) is assigned by Marshal Higgins (George "Gabby" Hayes to look into a series of suspicious deaths among champion rodeo riders. Weston falls for lovely Marjorie Carter (Polly Ann Young) along the way but she gets jealous when he suddenly shifts his attention to fiery Dolores (Anita Campillo, whose name is misspelled "Compillo" in the onscreen credits). The Mexican charmer, however, is in league with Spike Barton (Edward Peil, Sr.), the brain behind the murders, and Weston's interest is purely business. Like most of John Wayne's "Lone Star" Westerns, The Man from Utah was filmed along California's Kern River. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Sagebrush Trail
So unknown was John Wayne in 1934 that the Variety review of the "B"-western Sagebrush Trail fails to list Wayne in the cast! The second of the Duke's films for Lone Star Productions, this one casts him as an accused killer in search of the real culprit. On the lam from the law, Wayne teams up with gunslinger Lane Chandler, never suspecting that Chandler is the man he is looking for. The relationship between Wayne and Chandler, at first friendly and then adversarial, is handled with more depth than was normal in a quickie western. Also in the cast of Sagebrush Trail is stuntman Yakima Canutt, here cast as Wayne's Indian companion "Yak." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When silent star Colleen Moore nervously faced a microphone for her first "sound" test, the results were so positive that virtually every member of the First National executive board shouted unanimously, "Thank God! She can talk!" In the long run, however, it probably wouldn't have mattered if she could have talked or not, since most of her early talkies -- including Smiling Irish Eyes -- were produced by her then-husband John McCormick, who was disinclined to fire his own wife! In her first musical appearance, Moore plays Kathleen O'Connor, an Irish lass in love with would-be songwriter Rory O'More (James Hall). Upon achieving success on Broadway, O'More forgets all about Kathleen and begins dallying with such sophisticated tootsies as Frankie West (Betty Francisco) and Goldie DeVeer (Julanne Johnston). Heading to America herself to be reunited with O'More, Kathleen finds nothing but disappointment and heartache -- not to mention ample opportunities to sing. Adding to the ethnic mix of Smiling Irish Eyes is the presence of two stereotypical Jews, played by William Strauss and Otto Lederer; also on hand is future cowboy sidekick George "Gabby" Hayes, plus teeth and minus beard, as a New York cabbie. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

William Powell stars in this drama as William Foster, a gifted defense attorney with a gift for making cases go his way. Foster's winning record in the courtroom has earned him a colorful clientele, including several notorious criminals, but he doubts his abilities when his girlfriend Irene Manners (Kay Francis) is charged with manslaughter after a violent incident which occurred while she was drinking. Wanting to protect Irene, Foster tries to pull a few strings, but the results find Foster facing a five year sentence for jury tampering. While Foster certainly doesn't want to be separated from the woman he loves, he also knows that in prison he'll have to face several former clients whose defense didn't pan out. For The Defense was based in part on the true story of William Fallon, a well-known attorney of the day. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

An early Bob Steele sound oater from low-budget company Tiffany, Nevada Buckaroo featured the bantam-weight star as the Nevada Kid, a stage robber arrested when he attempts to steal a kiss from Joan (Dorothy Dix), one of his victims. Nevada's sidekick, Cherokee (George "Gabby" Hayes), steals a petition to have Rattlesnake Gulch elected county seat and alters the document into a request for Nevada's pardon. Believing the document to be real, Nevada decides to go straight, offering to prove himself by guarding the stagecoach. Naturally, the stage is then robbed by Nevada's old gang and the driver killed. Only Joan believes in Nevada's innocence and helps him escape. Tracking down the gang, Nevada returns the stolen money to the express company and is proclaimed a hero. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Leathery western hero Harry Carey is once more suspected of being an outlaw in The Night Rider. The title character is a mysterious figure who has been conducting raids on the local ranchers. Naturally, the townsfolk assume that strong, silent stranger Carey is the elusive Night Rider. Instead, Carey turns out to be an undercover law officer, dedicated to bringing the Rider to justice. A pre-"Gabby" George Hayes turns up as the ostensible comedy relief, who, like Carey, isn't all that he seems. Ironically, leading lady Elinor Fair was at one time the wife of William Boyd, who as Hopalong Cassidy teamed up with Gabby Hayes for a series of popular "B"-westerns in the 1930s and 1940s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Weather-beaten Harry Carey stars as an old-time Westerner who ends up in jail on a trumped-up charge. Carey busts out of the calaboose to prove his innocence and unmask the genuine culprit, Albert J. Smith. It turns out that Smith is in league with a mysterious frontier Fu Manchu, who's been operating a lucrative alien-smuggling racket. Our hero likewise reveals the identity of the mystery villain, who spends most of the picture as a mere shadow on the wall. Based on a novel by Murray Lenister, Border Devils evidently underwent a great deal of rewriting from script to screen, if its pressbook (containing an entirely different synopsis) is any indication. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

James Cagney stars as a popular prizefighter who loses his winnings through too much partying and too many women. Cagney's fans finance the boxer's regenerative stay at a New Mexico health resort. For the sake of pretty, poverty-stricken Marian Nixon, Cagney enters into a return bout. He splits his winnings with Nixon, then goes back to his old skirt-chasing pattern with fickle society girl Virginia Bruce. Having had his nose broken, Cagney fixes it up to please Bruce, and stops taking chances in the ring lest his beezer get smashed again. It doesn't take long for Cagney to plummet from popularity, but true-blue Nixon is there for him when he gets wise to himself. The beautifully staged fight scenes in Winner Take All, wherein James Cagney disdains the use of a double, were later excerpted in Cagney's last-ever film, 1985's Terrible Joe Moran. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

One of the most technically accomplished and sophisticated movie musicals of the 1930's, Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932) had a profound effect on the shape of the musical genre (especially the films of Vincente Minnelli), and remains a candidate for best movie musical ever made, some seven decades after its release. And that distinction is based entirely on its style and structure -- it doesn't even take into account a hit-laden score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, or a raft of delightful performances, several of them totally unexpected in their range and wit. The movie opens with an amazing double audio/visual montage sequence, in which the sleeping city of Paris awakens to a slowly rising chorus of sounds, street by street, house by house -- forming what the script describes as a "symphony" of sound -- which coalesces into a song. It is through the latter that we meet Maurice Courtelin (Maurice Chevalier), a young Parisian tailor who has just completed his first big job, an order of 15 suits for the Viscount de Varese (Charlie Ruggles), who has promised to pay him on delivery. He then discovers that the Viscount is little more than an upper-class ne'er-do-well who, among his other faults, has no money of his own -- being completely dependent on his crusty old uncle the Duke (Sir C. Aubrey Smith) -- and never pays his bills. In one of a half-dozen remarkable musical scenes, as Maurice's friend Emile (Bert Roach) ponders the matter of love in the new suit he has made for him, Maurice begins singing "Isn't It Romantic?", causing Emile to hum the tune as he strolls onto the street; the song is picked up by a taxi driver (Rolfe Sedan), and passed to his passenger (Tyler Brooke), a composer, who carries it aboard a train, humming it, where a group of soldiers hear it and end up singing it as they march across a field, where a young gypsy hears it and carries it to his camp on his violin, where the whole clan is soon singing. And the song is finally wafted across the surrounding fields to the estate of the Duke and the Viscount de Varese, where it is heard and sung by the Duke' niece, Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald). The two characters, Maurice and Jeanette, are linked for us in this way even before they meet, and the stage is set for the rest of the plot. For the Princess, living under her family's tradition-bound hand, romance is a source of unhappiness; there's no one at the chateau to interest her, and even if there were, she couldn't dare to be interested; already a widow from an arranged marriage at age 22 (her first husband was 75), she must marry someone of equal royal rank, and the only two known candidates in all of Europe are ages 85 and 12, respectively. Maurice journeys to the chateau with the clothes the Viscount ordered, hoping to confront him for payment, and is mistaken for one of the guests -- and he crosses paths with the Princess, and falls in love with her. Identified as the Count de Courtelin, he delights the rest of the guests with his joie de vivre and his way with a song, especially "Mimi" (which somehow managed to make it past the censors, despite some amazingly risque lyrics), getting the entire coterie of nobles singing it in his wake. But the Princess is resistant to his free and easy charm and flirtations, her staid upbringing and sense of station fighting her natural inclinations, while her other would-be suitor, the Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth), is suspicious of this new-found rival. Also present at the estate is the Duke's other niece, Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy), who has a nymphomaniac interest in men under the age of 40, of whom Maurice is the only one at the chateau not related to her -- thus, he must fend off her advances while trying to woo a woman who wants nothing to do with him. Rumor soon spreads that Maurice is, in fact, a full-blooded royal prince traveling in disguise. And if he is a prince of the rank they think he is, then suddenly the Princess's marital and romantic prospects seem a lot more encouraging, especially as she begins to melt to his charm. Maurice wants to tell her the truth, but will she feel the same way about him, knowing that he is a commoner, a tradesman ... a tailor? Director Rouben Mamoulian had already jump-started the musical genre with the backstage drama Applause (1929), to great critical and financial success. In contrast to that movie's deceptively naturalistic approach to its subject, Love Me Tonight was highly stylized -- Applause had no actual musical numbers in complete form, while Love Me Tonight was filled with incredibly elaborate and subtle musical set-pieces that grow naturally out of the plot (adapted from a play by Paul Armont and Leopold Marchand) and advanced the narrative. Some of the scenes here helped set the stage for works such as An American In Paris and Gigi (one scene near the end, when Maurice's identity is revealed, seems to have been the model for "The Gossips At Maxim's" from the latter film) and Funny Face. Such is Love Me Tonight's reputation, that in the summer of 2007, 75 years after its release and more than five years after it showed up on DVD, the movie chalked up sell-out audiences when it opened the Mamoulian retrospective at New York's Film Forum. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Filmed on glorious locations at the foot of California's Mount Whitney by ace cinematographer Archie Stout, this above-average Monogram B-Western starred wiry, little Bob Steele in an offbeat story of a cowboy searching for a lost tribe of Indians. Surviving in the seemingly impassable Hidden Valley, the tribe and its gold is threatened by villainous Kenneth McDonald and his gang. One of the gang members is heroine Gertrude Messenger's young brother, Jimmie (Ray Hallor), who is captured by the wild Indians and is about to be sacrificed to their god when rescued by Steele and the sheriff (Arthur Millett), who arrive, not with the cavalry, but in the Goodyear Blimp. The latter is piloted by Captain Verner L. Smith who, as George Turner and Michael H. Price so aptly put it, "plays himself with adequate conviction." The fantastic story was produced by Trem Carr and directed by Bob Steele's father, Robert N. Bradbury. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

As cheap as any other poverty-row talkie, Dragnet Patrol possesses a breezy charm that is hard to resist. Glenn Tryon stars as a rambunctious sailor who marries carnival cutie Vera Reynolds. For her sake, he hires himself out to shady business entrepreneur Walter Long, only to face extermination when Long's faithless wife Symona Boniface "comes on" to him. Finally getting his priorities straight, Tryon returns to his wife, but not before an understanding judge gives him a severe dressing-down in court. Effortlessly stealing the picture is 2-reel comedy perennial Vernon Dent as Tryon's sailor pal; the scene in which Dent returns home to his wife Marjorie Beebe, only to be forced to kick Beebe's current boyfriend out the back door, is priceless. Also worth noting is the performance of veteran screen heavy Walter Long, who turns out to be more honorable and up-front than the so-called hero. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Filmed in the desert near Lake Elsinore and Lake Hemet, CA, and in the San Jacinto Mountains, The Man From Hell's Edges was the fourth of six Bob Steele Westerns produced by Trem Carr for release by Sono Art-World Wide. Escaping from Hell's Edges, desert penitentiary Flash Manning (Steele) heads for the town of Raleigh where he saves the sheriff (Robert E. Homans) from being ambushed by Lobo (Julian Rivero), a Mexican gunman. The grateful sheriff deputizes Flash, who now uses the name "Bob Williams." Three months later, three of Flash's fellow inmates, the Drake brothers (Dick Dickinson, Buck Carey) and Joe Danti (Perry Murdock), arrive in Raleigh and Flash, whose identity has been revealed by a wanted poster, joins their gang. There is a confrontation with Lobo, who was responsible for the crime that put the Drake brothers and Danti behind bars in the first place, and Flash is revealed to be working for the secret service. The revelation comes as a welcome surprise for the sheriff's daughter (Nancy Drexel), who has fallen in love with him. The Man From Hell's Edges is the kind of lackadaisical B-Western where continuity is less important than action. The wanted poster, for example, mistakenly records Steele's character as "Flash Martin," while he is called Flash Manning throughout the film. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide