Hal Price Movies

Made in the final years of director John S. Robertson's career, Night Ride is a crime drama starring Joseph Schildkraut as Joe Rooker, a reporter who finds himself pulled away from his wedding reception to cover a bank robbery. When he figures out that the robber is gang leader Tony Garotta (Edward G. Robinson), Rooker makes a case proving so and files his story. In retaliation, Garotta kidnaps him and another reporter with plans of permanently disposing of them and falsely tells the newlywed that he has bombed his house and killed his new wife, Ruth (Barbara Kent). If the police can't get there in time to save him, Rooker will die, never knowing that his wife was alive the whole time. ~ Matthew Tobey, 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

Ten cents a dance, that's what they pay her -- "her" being downtrodden taxi dancer Barbara (Barbara Stanwyck). The only thing Barbara sells is her time, or at least that's the story she gives her jellyfish husband Eddie (Monroe Owsley). But when wealthy Carlton (Ricardo Cortez) starts making goo-goo eyes at Barbara, Eddie accuses his wife of infidelity. This, in Eddie's mind, provides him with an adequate excuse to steal money from Carlton, which action leads to the no-good husband's downfall. Barbara's fate is more merciful: she ends up with Carlton, with whom she has fallen in love. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

One of four films directed by Stephen Roberts in 1932, just four years before the filmmaker passed away prematurely, Lady and Gent stars George Bancroft as aging prizefighter Stag Bailey. After Stag loses his last match to hotshot up-and-comer Buzz Kinney (a 25-year-old John Wayne in an early role), his manager Pin Streaver (James Gleason) is killed during a hold-up. Whether they like it or not, Stag and his speakeasy-owning lady friend Puff (Wynne Gibson) find themselves responsible for Pin's parentless son Ted. As Ted grows up and the three of them form a strong familiar bond, Stag and Puff attempt to disuade Ted from following in the boxing footsteps of his adopted father. Also known as The Challenger, Lady and Gent was nominated for the 1932 Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide

Also known as The Hidden Corpse, Strangers of the Evening is an effective blend of horror and humor. There's dirty work at the city morgue, where the body of Frank Daniels (Lucien Littlefield) suddenly disappears. Later on, at Daniels' funeral, the wrong man is buried. It's all the handiwork of crooked undertaker Chandler (Warner Richmond), who is part of a complex political cover-up. Things get really hairy when Daniels shows up very much alive, much to the astonishment of his daughter Ruth (Miriam Seeger). Top-billed ZaSu Pitts plays the Daniels family maid, who has a vested interest in the macabre goings-on. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The fast-paced world of polo provides the backdrop for this sports drama that centers upon John Steele, a US Army captain obsessed with polo. The trouble begins when he tries to get revenge upon the polo player who took liberties with his daughter Mickey. The vengeful captain causes Charles, the polo player, to have a fatal accident on the playing field. Investigators are not fooled by the "accident" and justice eventually prevails, but not before the whole mess goes to trial. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

A pre-Hopalong Cassidy William Boyd is the robust star of this logging camp melodrama which also featured a very young Ginger Rogers -- who performs Bernard Grossman and Harold Lewis' "How Could I Love You" -- and Hollywood veteran Hobart Bosworth. The latter plays Jim Gannon, a lumberjack boss whose son Buck (Boyd) is neglecting his duties in favor of romancing riverboat entertainer Honey (Rogers). Father and son come to blows but their animosity ends after Buck rescues Jim from a runaway logging train. Feeling left out, Honey plans to leave with the carnival boat but decides to stick around after violence erupts at the hands of villainous lumberjack Hack Logan (Fred Kohler). Carnival Boat was filmed on location at Big Pine, CA. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

In this rough-and-tumble action comedy, Chuck Connors (Wallace Beery) and Steve Brodie (George Raft) are friendly rivals on New York's Bowery in the 1890s. Connors owns a fancy tavern and looks after a streetwise kid named Swipes McGurk (Jackie Cooper), while Brodie is a daredevil willing to do nearly anything to get the better of Connors. When both men fall in love with Lucy Calhoun (Fay Wray), who has fallen on hard times, Brodie takes her under his wing and helps get her back on her feet. Connors is furious that his rival has won her heart, so he goads Brodie into doing something spectacular to prove his love for her -- jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, for example. Reckless but not stupid, Brodie has no intention of making the jump and plans to use a dummy instead, but when Connors and his henchmen show up to make sure that Brodie doesn't back down, the dare is turned into a wager, and Brodie emerges the new owner of Connors' bar after successfully making the jump. In real life, George Raft and Wallace Beery were not nearly so friendly as their characters: Raft persuaded director Raoul Walsh to hire a number of his underworld cronies as extras, which irritated Beery no end. When the two actors had a fight scene, Beery refused to hold back, and the staged fistfight quickly turned into a for-real battle royale. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In the first of his 16 Westerns for Monogram, John Wayne plays Singin' Sandy Saunders, a drifter who witnesses what he at first believes to be a stage robbery. In reality, the "road agent" is a girl, Fay Denton (Cecilia Parker), and she is "stealing" her own money in order to prevent a phony stage holdup further down the road. As Fay's father, Charlie "Dad" Denton (George Hayes), explains, the culprit behind a rash of pretend stage holdups committed by two bumbling drivers (Al St. John and Heinie Conklin) is James Kincaid (Forrest Taylor), who is also forcing the local farmers off their lands by demanding an outrageous price for his water. When Sandy appears on the horizon, Kincaid engages a notorious gunman, Slip Morgan (Earl Dwire), but Sandy disarms the bandit for good by shooting him through both wrists. Much to Fay's disgust, Kincaid quickly hires the newcomer, now known as "the most notorious outlaw since Billy the Kid," and Saunders suggests that they dynamite Dad Denton's well, the only other available source of water in the area. It is all a ruse, of course, and Sandy soon reveals himself to be a government agent in disguise. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

A large urban hospital provides the setting for this drama. The staff there has seen it all and this is reflected in their hard-bitten demeanor, their cynicism, and the cruel jokes they play. One of them, an excellent surgeon gains a new outlook on life after he gets involved with investigating the death of a mobster, fatally shot in his hotel suite during a card game. The police call him to the scene to look at the corpse. There he discovers a lipstick-stained cigarette butt. He begins to search for the woman who smoked it. Later that day, the woman, severely beaten, shows up in the hospital emergency room. The surgeon miraculously saves her, and then falls for her. As she lays healing, she is seen by a mobster who had come to pay his respects to the cop who killed two members of his rival gang. The mobster later sends one of his thugs to make sure that the woman stays eternally quiet. The thug's attempt to kill her is thwarted by a young intern who is wounded in the ensuing scuffle. The gangster then gets himself admitted into the hospital where he plans to kill the woman himself. This proves to be a fatal mistake as the vengeful intern "accidently" injects the gangster with a deadly poison and then claims that the mobster was D.O.A. The woman is now safe. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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

Frank Capra's seminal screwball comedy, which won all five major Academy Awards for 1934, is still as breezy and beguiling today. Claudette Colbert plays Ellie Andrews, a spoiled heiress who has married fortune-hunting aviator King Westley (Jameson Thomas), despite her father (Walter Connolly)'s objections. To keep Ellie from marrying this lothario, her father has been holding her prisoner aboard his yacht. But Ellie bolts from the yacht, swims ashore in her clothes, and eventually slips onto a Greyhound bus bound for New York. Aboard the bus is newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable), who has recently been fired for drinking on the job. Peter gets the last seat on the bus -- but when he gets up to argue with the bus driver, Ellie takes his seat. Since it is the last seat on the bus, they have to share it. When Ellie has her purse stolen and she refuses to report it, Peter begins to suspect something. The next morning, they both miss the bus after a leisurely breakfast, and Peter reveals that he knows her identity. She makes a deal with him: if he helps her get to New York, he can write a scoop about her for his paper. Peter thinks she is a spoiled brat, however, and refuses a monetary bribe: "I'm not interested in your money or your problem. You, King Westley, your father -- you're all a lot of hooey to me!" But as they travel northward and engage in a series of misadventures, the gruff newspaperman and the spoiled rich girl, thrown together by circumstances, fall in love with each other. This movie set the pace for the "screwball" comedy, the witty and romantic clash of temperaments between a man and a woman mismatched in both personality and social position, a type of movie often associated with Katherine Hepburn in such classics as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and, with Spencer Tracy, Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957), among others. The only other movies to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay) were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Cited by film historian William K. Everson as one of the fastest-moving crime melodramas of the 1930s (if not the fastest) Fog Over Frisco still manages to leave viewers breathless. Top-billed Bette Davis plays giddy heiress Arlene Bradford, whose perverse fascination with gangsters gets her mixed up in a stolen-securities scheme. Arlene's more sensible sister Val (Margaret Lindsay) tries to keep her out of trouble, but this proves impossible. Entering into the fray are hotshot society reporter Tony (Donald Woods) and goofy photojournalist Izzy (Hugh Herbert), who like Val get in over their heads when they stumble upon the body of the murdered Arlene. The identity of the killer remains a well-concealed secret until Izzy, of all people, stumbles across a vital clue. Things really begin to accelerate when Val is kidnapped by Arlene's gangster cohorts (who, interestingly enough, are very reluctant to take her prisoner and do so only when there's no other option!), leading to a mile-a-minute rescue and hasty plot wrap-up. Among the many good guys, bad guys and red herrings are Alan Hale as an Irish cop, Robert H. Barrat as a butler who isn't a butler, and Henry O'Neill as a gosh-knows-what who may be the murderer. Though physical action is at a minimum, Fog Over Frisco is kept constantly on the move by director William Dieterle, using every cinematic trick and optical effect (wipe dissolves, iris-outs, swish-pans etc.) at his disposal. The film was less effectively remade as Spy Ship in 1942. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide