Bob Kortman Movies

This early epic is set in 16th-century Mexico amidst a carefully researched and painstakingly detailed recreation of an East coast Aztec village. The people there are peaceful and when a Spanish child washes up half-drowned upon the shore, they adopt him. Years pass and as he was raised by the leader, he becomes the new leader. One day a war-like tribe attacks the village and captures the young man. They hold him captive in preparation for sacrifice to the gods. While incarcerated he falls in love with the rival chief's daughter. When she learns that he is to die, she sneaks to the coastal village to warn them. A terrifying battle ensues as they struggle to get their leader back, but in the end they succeed and peace is restored. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

William S. Hart plays (what else?) a "good badman" in his first production for Paramount release, The Narrow Trail. While holding up a stagecoach, Hart falls hopelessly in love with a gorgeous, stylishly clothed lady passenger. He follows her to San Francisco, where he discovers to his chagrin that she's little better than a trollop. After venting his spleen on everyone in sight, Hart learns that girl has been victimized by a nasty relative. He rescues her from a life of vice, and together they head off to a better life in the West. Narrow Trail has assumed legendary status in recent years due to an effusive critique of the film's barroom brawl sequence, written by Jean Cocteau. Alas, the "naked bodies slippery with blood" so eloquently described by Cocteau are nowhere to be found in the film. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

College student Joe Sullivan (Joe Moore) and his sweetheart Eileen Morgan (Eileen Sedgwick) are separated when she returns to the family ranch to care of an ailing father. Joe, meanwhile, is dismissed for disobedience and is shipped off to a dude ranch in order to acquire a bit of discipline. The ranch is suddenly suffering a series of cattle rustlings, and Joe is fingered as the culprit. With Eileen's help, however, he manages to unmask the real villain, crooked ranch foreman Max Schultz (Bob Kortman). The youngest of the three acting Moore brothers, Joe Moore, was at one time the brother-in-law of Mary Pickford. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

On the whole, John Gilbert's starring vehicles at Fox were not as beneficial to him professionally as his films at MGM. Arabian Love was an exception, but Gilbert was required to emulate another popular star to make the film "click". Essentially a Valentino picture without Valentino, the film casts Gilbert as a young American who, after killing the man who disgraced his sister, joins a band of Arab thieves. Several convenient coincidences later, Gilbert falls in love with the widow Barbara Bedford of the man he has killed. Though Arabian Love proved an enormous step forward in the career John Gilbert, the painfully self-conscious star steered clear of imitations in his later work. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Maverick Hollywood producer Phil Goldstone and director Alvin J. Neitz fashioned this minor silent Western starring Franklyn Farnum as a milquetoast Easterner who on a trip to the Wild West is mistaken for a U.S. marshall. Does Farnum rise to the occasion? Of course he does -- and gets the girl as well. She was played by Florence Gilbert, the wife of yet another independent producer-director, Ashton Dearholt. Character actor George F. Marion, later to portray Greta Garbo's drunken sod of a father in Anna Christie, plays a comic undertaker in this film. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

This tale of the high seas -- based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams -- is as much character study as it is adventure. It involves the rivalry between the two Shore brothers, Mark (Lon Chaney) and Joel (Malcolm McGregor). Mark is the captain of a whaling ship and he looks down on Joel, who has never gone to sea. But when Mark's ship arrives in port sans its captain, Joel takes over the command. His new bride, Priscilla (Billie Dove), insists on coming along and they head for the South Seas, where Mark was last seen. Because he's so green, the crew ridicule Joel, but he eventually proves he is a capable and manly seaman. He finds Mark not far from where he was lost, but after seeing how well his younger brother has done he becomes jealous. He starts a mutiny when Joel refuses to change his course to search for some treasure. But brotherly love wins out when Joel's life is threatened, and Mark sacrifices his own life to save him. This picture was released only a few months before Lon Chaney achieved superstardom with his role as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Buck Jones stars as Buck Laramie, an itinerant cowpoke who wanders into a wide-open frontier town. Heroine Ellen Wade (Georgia Hale) has been unsuccessful in driving liquor and gambling out of the community, but with Buck's help she finally manages to make some headway. This does not rest well with the town mayor, who's secretly in cahoots with a bootlegging gang. When the sheriff is "mysteriously" killed, Buck takes the lawman's place, trailing the villains to their hideaway (which turns out to be a mine shaft owned by the unsuspecting Ellen) and beating them to a pulp. Hills of Peril represents one of the few appearances of Georgia Hale after she was discovered by Charlie Chaplin for The Gold Rush (1925). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Gary Cooper, as a lanky Wyoming ranch and foreman, places his gun on a poker table after being insulted by one of the gamblers and intones, "If you want to call me that . . . smile." That much quoted line's origin is in this early sound version of the Owen Wister novel, The Virginian, directed by Victor Fleming. When the Virginian meets his old friend Steve (Richard Arlen), he gives him a job on his crew at the Box H Ranch near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Newly arrived in town is the new schoolmarm, Molly Wood (Mary Brian), and both men take notice. Afterwards, in a saloon, The Virginian encounters the evil Trampas (Walter Huston), and the two get into an argument over a dancer. The Virginian calls Trampas' bluff but, although Trampas backs down, he seethes inside. Afterwards, following a christening party, The Virginian walks Molly back home, and a friendship grows between the two that burgeons into love. But when Steve joins up with Trampas and his gang of rustlers and is captured by a posse, The Virginian is forced to supervise Steve's lynching. After that, Molly spurns The Virginian. However, when The Virginian is wounded, Molly forgets all that, and nurses him back to health. They decide to finally marry, but Trampas interferes with their plans --Trampas wants The Virginian to leave town, and he is out gunning for him. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Cimarron was the first Western to win the Oscar for Best Picture--and, until Dances with Wolves in 1990, the only one. The film begins on April 22, 1889, the opening day of the great Oklahoma Land Rush on the Cherokee Strip. Boisterous Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) is cheated out of his land claim by the devious Dixie Lee (Estelle Taylor). Instead of becoming a homesteader, Cravat establishes a muckraking newspaper, and with pistols in hand he becomes a widely respected (and widely feared) peacekeeper. He also displays a compassionate streak by coming to the defense of Dixie Lee, who is about to be arrested for prostitution. Cravat's insistence on sticking his nose into everyone's affairs drives a wedge between him and his young wife Sabra (Irene Dunne), but she stands by him--until he deserts her and her children, ever in pursuit of new adventures. Sabra takes over the newspaper herself, and with the moral support of her best friend, Mrs. Wyatt (Edna May Oliver), she creates a powerful publishing empire. Cimarron makes the mistake of placing most of the action early in the film, so that everything that follows the spectacular opening land-rush sequence may feel anti-climactic. While it's always enjoyable to watch Irene Dunne persevering through the years, it's rather wearing to sit through the overblown performance of Richard Dix, who seems to think that he can't make a point unless it's at the top of his lungs. Cimarron creaks badly when seen today, but it still outclasses the plodding 1960 remake. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Never one to hide his talent under a bushel basket, director Rouben Mamoulien proudly proclaimed that, while there were ten killings in his 1931 gangster drama City Streets, the audience never sees any of them. This was not the only innovation in this fascinating early talkie, in which straight-arrow movie hero Gary Cooper is cast as a racketeer known only as The Kid. He has chosen a life of crime out of love for Nan (Sylvia Sidney), the daughter of mob henchman Pop Cooley (Guy Kibbee). Eventually railroaded into prison by her crooked cohorts, Nan implores The Kid to give up the rackets, but he refuses. Things go downhill very rapidly after that, culminating with The Kid and Nan being taken "for a ride" by rival thugs. Cast in a role originally intended for Clara Bow, Sylvia Sidney does a magnificent job and was soon typecast as a downtrodden Depression victim, born with two strikes against her. Conversely, Gary Cooper never again played anything quite like "The Kid." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Two-reel comedy favorites Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their feature-film debut (excluding their guest appearances in Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Rogue Song) in the prison comedy Pardon Us. A spoof of MGM's The Big House, the story begins when erstwhile bootleggers Laurel and Hardy sell a bottle of beer to a Prohibition agent. Shipped off to the pen, our heroes are escorted to the cell occupied by "The Tiger" (Walter Long), the toughest con in the joint. The Tiger immediately becomes the boys' best friend when he mistakes Laurel's loose-tooth "buzz" as an act of defiance! Swept up in one of The Tiger's escape attempts, Laurel and Hardy disguise themselves in blackface and lose themselves among the cotton-pickers in the Deep South, but Stan's buzzing tooth gives the game away when the warden's (Wilfred Lucas) car breaks down near the cotton fields. Carted back to jail, Stan and Ollie become heroes when they inadvertently foul up The Tiger's next prison break. Pardon Us was previewed in late 1930 in a 70-minute version titled The Rap, which included several sequences (including an elaborate prison fire) which never made it to the final, 56-minute release version. More recently, the film has been reissued to TV in the 65-minute print prepared for Great Britain; the "new" footage includes a handful of previously discarded gag punchlines and several outtakes. In its 56-minute state, Pardon Us is not bad for a first feature-length attempt, even though the best Laurel & Hardy features were still to come. Highlights include an "Our Gang"-style schoolroom routine with perennial Laurel & Hardy foil James Finlayson as the teacher (incidentally, June Marlowe, who played Miss Crabtree in the real Our Gang comedies, shows up as the warden's daughter), a pleasant song-and-dance number in blackface, and a hilarious dentist-office routine "borrowed" from the team's 1928 silent comedy Leave 'Em Laughing. Pardon Us was simultaneously filmed in several foreign languages -- one of which, the Spanish-language De Bote en Bote, has popped up from time to time on American cable television. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Adapted from a play by Eva Kay Flint and Martha Madison, Subway Express takes place entirely on a single subway car. When a murder is committed, the passengers are ordered to stay put while police inspector Killian (Jack Holt) investigates. From all appearances, it would seem that the victim was shot, but the coroner declares that the wound was administered after the man was dead. Piecing the clues together, Killian concludes that the killer used an electrical shock to dispatch the victim -- and after administering a psychological third degree, he extracts a confession from the guilty party. The supporting cast is comprised of the usual stereotypes, including the inevitable dumb flatfoot played by the inevitable Fred Kelsey. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide