George Meeker Movies

In this romantic comedy, two college boys get expelled because they could not pay tuition. They decide to scare up some cash by auctioning off their services in Central Park. A pretty woman makes the highest bid. She hires the boys to drive her and her car to Ohio. The adventure culminates with one of the boys stealing the woman away from her groom on her wedding day. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

When a car crash ends the life of a fabulously wealthy patron of the arts, the decedent's $20,000,000 fortune is inherited by one Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) of Mandrake Falls, Vermont. Already a reasonably successful local businessman, Deeds doesn't really feel the need for anything extra in his life: he just wants enough time to practice his tuba and compose greeting-card doggerel. When Deeds is convinced to move to New York, hard-boiled newspaper reporter Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) is dispatched to get the inside scoop on "The Cinderella Man." Babe's stories of Deeds' eccentricities and no-nonsense dealings with phonies and poseurs provide excellent headline fodder; but she begins to regret her actions, having fallen in love with the big lug. Deeds ultimately sets up a foundation to dispense his fortune to the country's neediest souls, on the proviso that the recipients do their best to get back on their feet, a turn of events that leads his lawyer John Cedar (Douglas Dumbrille) to try to have him declared insane. By the end of the sanity hearing, the judge (H. B. Walker) declares: "Not only are you sane, but you're the sanest man who ever walked in this courtroom!" A joyously unadulterated hunk of Frank Capra-corn, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was adapted by Robert Riskin from Clarence Buddington Kelland's short story "Opera Hat." In addition to the pleasure of watching the country bumpkin outwit city slickers, the movie is a film buff's dream, boasting one of the best character-actor casts ever assembled for a single film. Nominated for four Academy Awards, the film won Frank Capra his second Oscar (out of three) as Best Director. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Admidst a sea of melodramatic and unbelievable courtroom dramas, Career Woman is distinguished by its comparative realism. Law school graduate Carroll Aiken (Claire Trevor) is idealistic; her colleague Barry Conant (Michael Whalen) is cynical and mercenary. Despite their ethical differences, they team up to defend downtrodden Gracie Clay (Isabel Jewell) on a charge of murdering her sadistic father. The grandstanding Conant reprimands the jury for their prejudices against the poor, but this strategy fails miserably. Carroll is forced to apologize to the court, then goes on to win the case through the simple expedient of sticking to the facts. Career Woman well be the best "lady lawyer" film of the 1930s, with characters acting like human beings instead of Hollywood stereotypes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This drama about corporate treachery was based on the best-selling novel by Alice Tisdale Hobart. Stephen Chase (Pat O'Brien) is a salesman and inventor with an American oil company who is sent to China to reach that nation's untapped market. While Stephen is often told that his company looks after their own and he's selflessly devoted to his job, it becomes evident with time that they're treating him with disrespect. After his fiancée leaves him, Stephen marries a woman he's only just met, Hester (Josephine Hutchinson), because he's already arranged to bring a wife to China. Stephen has designed a new kerosene lamp for the Chinese market, but his rival Swaley (William B. Davidson) is given credit for the product. When Stephen is transferred to another part of China, he accepts even though his wife is expecting a baby; the physical toll of the journey causes Hester to lose the child. Stephen and Hester become close to another American couple, Don and Alice Wellman (John Eldredge and Jean Muir), but when Stephen is ordered to fire Don, he unhesitatingly agrees. After communist forces nationalize the oil firm's holdings, Stephen risks his life to protect $15,000 in company funds. But when he is released from the hospital, Stephen learns that instead of being rewarded, he's been demoted -- and another man was promoted in his place. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Carnival barker Spencer Tracy befriends elderly concessionaire Henry B. Walthall, who owns a picturesque but stodgy display depicting Dante's Inferno. Walthall is more interested in the spiritual aspects of Man's fascination with Hell, but Tracy uses hoopla and exaggeration to get the suckers into the Inferno. His interest isn't altruistic; Tracy is enamored of Walthall's niece, Claire Trevor. Through his publicity savvy, Tracy builds the Inferno into a major attraction, complete with full orchestra and scantily clad "devil girls". He also buys up the rest of the carnival, using cold-blooded tactics that result in the suicide of a fellow concessionaire. Within five years, Tracy is a millionaire tycoon of the Entertainment industry. While loved by his wife (Trevor) and son (Scotty Beckett), Tracy conducts his business ruthlessly, bribing a city official to look the other way regarding structural defects in his Inferno display. When this duplicity results in a disastrous accident at the exhibit, the bribed official kills himself. Tracy is exonerated thanks to legal chicanery, but his wife is fed up; she walks out on him, taking their son along. Injured in the accident, Inferno creator H. B. Walthall warns Tracy of the pitfalls of success, using an illustrated edition of Dante to make his point. For nearly ten minutes, the movie audience is treated to a lavish depiction of Hell, magnificently photographed by Rudolph Mate. When the plot resumes, Tracy is on hand for his latest venture, a sumptuous gambling ship. Thanks to the drunken negligence of the crew, the ship catches fire, and it is only upon learning that his son has sneaked aboard that Tracy realizes the consequences of his greed. Tracy labors heroically to rescue the passengers--and, incidentally, to atone for his past sins. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this Samuel Goldwyn production directed by King Vidor, the studio's intent was to make Russian-born Anna Sten a star, but it didn't succeed. Sten plays Manya Nowak, a Polish farm girl attracted to Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper), a novelist with writer's block who has retreated to a Connecticut farmhouse to find his muse. Barrett's wife Dora (Helen Vinson) misses the city and returns there, while Tony decides to use Manya as a character in his next novel. They become friends, and Tony learns that her straightlaced father Jan (Sigfried Rumann) has betrothed Manya to Fredrik Sobieski (Ralph Bellamy), whom she does not love. Manya and Tony spend a chaste night together when a blizzard shuts them in. Her father drags her home and demands that she marry Fredrik immediately. Many arguments and disagreements ensue. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

This tuneful melodrama is set upon a college campus and follows the attempts of a pretty young woman who slyly helps her wealthy, free-wheeling freshman boy friend learn about responsibility. She contacts his father and together they convince the boy that his inheritance has been lost. Now he must work his way through college. Sure enough, her ploy succeeds and romance ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

After six box-office smashes in a row, the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey came a-cropper with 1935's The Rainmakers. The boys are cast respectively as Billy and Roscoe, professional rainmakers summoned to the drought-stricken farming community of Lima. Everyone in town hopes that Roscoe's magnetic rain-making contraption will bring about a cloudburst -- everyone, that is, except town banker Simon Parker (Berton Churchill), who wants the drought to continue so he can buy up all the land at dirt-cheap prices. When Parker fixes it so that the boys' first public demonstration of their machine will be completely unattended, Billy and Roscoe decide that they need to stage a spectacular publicity stunt to stir up interest. They arrange for a second demonstration to coincide with the planned collision of two dynamite-loaded railroad engines. As the crowd gathers, however, the engineers panic and quit, leaving our heroes to run the engines themselves -- and the result is a tiresome, protracted chase sequence, rendered doubly dull by some of the least-convincing back-projection work in movie history. The traditional duet between Bert Wheeler and his perennial leading lady Dorothy Lee, "Isn't Love the Grandest Thing," is the highlight of The Rainmakers, thanks to a clever gag involving a "tree of truth"; this routine would later find its way into the 1942 Abbott & Costello comedy Pardon My Sarong. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In director Edwin L. Marin's film Paris Interlude, a beautiful French woman named Julie Bell (Madge Evans) unexpectedly falls in love with Sam Colt (Otto Kruger, a vulgar American news journalist. Based on (All Good Americans), a play by Laura and .J. Perelman , Sam spends most of his time in Paris drinking beer and consorting with his fellow American colleagues. Meanwhile, rookie reporter Pat Wells (Robert Young) also has eyes for Julie (Evans), and tries to persuade her to marry him after hearing that Sam (Kruger) was likely killed in his trip to China. After much debate, Julie finally agrees. Unfortunately for Pat, it turns out that Sam had not been killed after all. On the night of Julie and Pat's wedding party, Sam drunkenly approaches Julie and proposes, though he collapses before he could hear her answer. Julie remains undecided until Sam himself, in a rare moment of personal honor, tells her she belongs with the younger journalist. (Paris Interlude) also includes actors Ted Healy and Una Merkel. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

Nathaniel West's novel Miss Lonelyhearts inspired two films of the early 1930s: Advice to the Lovelorn (33) and Hi, Nellie! Paul Muni stars in the latter film as a big-city newspaper editor who gets in trouble for printing unsubstantiated information about a murder case. Muni is demoted and forced to write the paper's advice column, signing himself "Nellie." As he recklessly dispenses frivolous advice, Muni keeps tabs on the person he'd accused of murder. Using his "Nellie" connections, Muni gets the goods on the killer--and nearly gets rubbed out by a gangster mob. Warner Bros. must have been crazy about Hi, Nellie!, since the studio remade the film three times: Love is on the Air (37), You Can't Escape Forever (42), and House Across the Street (49). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A weak-willed gambler's compulsion destroys his life in this dramatic character study. In the beginning, he is seen working as a cashier at a small-time Ohio track and then moving into a boardinghouse. There he falls in love with his disapproving landlady's daughter, who ignores her mother's advice and marries him. On their wedding day, he vows to never gamble again, and they move to Chicago where he begins working in a fleabag hotel. Later he is offered the chance to helm a dog track in California. They move and it doesn't take long before he is back to his old tricks. The wife is secretly distraught, but she tries to look the other way until her husband's sleazy ex-girl friend shows up and starts making trouble. Things go from bad to worse when he and the tart win big at a casino and the angry wife uses the cash to leave him. She tells him she has gone home to Ohio and will not take him back until he cleans up his act. He really tries, but it is to no avail and after more struggles, wins, and terrible losses, the story ends on a dark note. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Female executive Doris (Genevieve Tobin) is hardly "uncertain" in the business world, but she's not so secure in her home life. In fact, it looks as though Doris will lose her husband Bruce (Paul Cavanaugh) to the scheming Myra. To avoid this, she hires Elliot (Edward Everett Horton) as a "cardboard lover" to arouse Bruce's dormant passions. Things don't quite work out as planned, but Myra doesn't exactly win out either. The flawless comic acting of Edward Everett Horton helps take the audience's mind off the cliches inherent in this by-the-numbers marital farce. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide