Willie Best Movies

Laurel & Hardy's second starring vehicle for 20th Century-Fox is arguably their weakest feature film, with the laughs few and far between. Broke as usual, the duo is given 24 hours to get out of town by the local constabulary. In dire need of travelling expenses, they take a job accompanying a coffin to Dayton, Ohio. Unbeknownst to our heroes, the coffin contains a live gangster: one Darby Mason (James Bush), who wants to get to Dayton to claim an inheritance without risking arrest by the Feds. Chugging towards their destination by train, Stan and Ollie lose their money to a pair of slick con artists but are bailed out by another passenger, Dante the Magician (played by "himself", aka Harry A. Janssen), who takes a liking to the boys and hires him as assistants for his magic act. It so happens that one of Dante's illusions involves a coffin -- and you guessed it, this coffin gets mixed up with the one bearing Darby Mason. Aside from a few slapstick contributions to Dante's stage act, Laurel & Hardy barely have any purpose in this picture at all: to paraphrase L&H buff Randy Skretvedt, the two comedians have been reduced to supporting players in their own film. A-Haunting We Will Go seemed much funnier when it was cut from 67 to 9 minutes and released to the 8-millimeter home movie market back in the mid-1960s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Through a miscarriage of justice, John Ingram (Edward G. Robinson) is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sentenced to a long stretch on a chain gang in the deep South. In time, Ingram flees to Oklahoma, where he makes a living fighting oil fires under an assumed name. Several years later, he has a successful business, a loving wife (Ruth Hussey), and a child. But he still lives in fear that his secret will be revealed, and one day he's visited by William Ramey (Gene Lockhart). Ramey admits that he committed the crime for which Ingram was convicted; he proposes that they meet with the authorities together, and Ramey will sign a confession that will clear Ingram's name. But Ramey instead double-crosses Ingram, putting him back on the chain gang while Ramey lays claim to his business. Before long, Ingram learns that his wife and child are nearly broke thanks to Ramey's gutting of his once-thriving business, and he decides that he must once again escape if he is to protect the safety of his family. Blackmail marked one of Edward G. Robinson's first "good guy" roles after making his name in a series of gangster epics; a year later, he would be starring in prestigious biopics, such as Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet and A Dispatch From Reuters. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This is the celebrated Blondie episode that costars Rita Hayworth, who in 1940 was still just another Columbia contract actress. Hayworth plays an old flame of Dagwood Bumstead's (Arthur Lake), who moves into the Bumstead household when wife Blondie (Penny Singleton) advertises for a boarder. Blondie (Penny Singleton) tries to be civil when she meets Rita, but her true feelings are manifested in a superimposed montage of explosions and gunshots. Innocently caught in a compromising position with Hayworth at a local movie house, Dagwood is shown the door by the heartbroken Blondie. All misunderstandings are swept away by fadeout time in this fifth installment in Columbia's Blondie series. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Long before Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock joined forces in Speed (1994), there was the strikingly similar Warner Bros. B-picture Busses Roar. A gang of Axis spies decide to use a California passenger bus to secretly transport a demolition bomb to a coastal oil field. The bomb is set to go off upon arrival, wiping out the passengers along with the oil deposits. Among those passengers is Army sergeant Ryan, who senses that something's amiss and then races against time to save himself and the others from being blown to smithereens. Another of the hapless commuters is played by Eleanor Parker, making an excellent impression in her first feature film appearance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Cinderella Swings It was the last in a series of RKO programmers based on the popular radio series Scattergood Baines (its original title, Scattergood Swings It, was changed in the light of the poor reception afforded the earlier series entries). Guy Kibbee stars as small-town busybody Baines, who in this outing tries to make a big star out of local songstress Betty Palmer (Gloria Warren). One of his strategies is to spotlight the girl in a USO benefit show, which takes up most of the film's 70-minute running time. The supporting cast include juvenile actors Butch and Buddy (Bill Lenhart and Kenneth Brown), who'd previously bedevilled W. C. Fields and Abbott &Costello over at Universal, and future 3 Stooges straight woman Christine McIntyre. Cinderella Swings It was packaged by Pyramid Productions, the same concern responsible for RKO's radio-inspired "Lum and Abner" series. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

According to this exuberant Paramount musical, famed pre-Civil War minstrel performer Daniel Decatur Emmett looked and sounded exactly like Bing Crosby! Very loosely based on the real Emmett's life and career, the film is essentially an excuse for an unending stream of Southern-fried ballads and boisterous blackface production numbers. The best scenes involve Emmet's creation of the minstrel tradition, helped along by Billy De Wolfe as the original "Mr. Bones." As Emmet's sweetheart Millie Cook, Dorothy Lamour has less to do than fourth-billed Marjorie Reynolds as Jean Mason, the physically challenged girl whom Emmet ultimately marries. In the midst of several old-time musical numbers, Bing Crosby introduces one of his lasting hits, "Sunday, Monday and Always". ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Harold Lloyd's second talkie finds The Bespectacled One playing a shoe clerk in Honolulu. Harboring dreams of becoming an executive, Lloyd passes himself off as a millionaire to heiress Barbara Kent. As the plot merrily rolls along, Harold stows away on a ship bound for the mainland, and ends up at the top of a dizzying skyscraper. In a reversal of his dilemma in 1923's Safety Last, Lloyd must find the safest way to climb down the building--with the dubious assistance of bumbling black janitor Willie Best (here derogatorily billed as "Sleep 'N' Eat"). Attempting to extend his silent-film technique into the talkie era, Harold Lloyd is successful about half the time. The climactic building-climbing sequence, though amusing, pales in comparison to Lloyd's earlier excursions into "high and dizzy" humor. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Having successful moved his top comedians Laurel & Hardy from short subjects to features, producer Hal Roach endeavored to do the same with the Our Gang Kids in 1936's General Spanky. Set in the South during the Civil War, the story focuses on Spanky (George "Spanky" McFarland), an orphaned shoeshine boy who works his way down the Mississippi by riverboat. After messing up the activities of crooked gambler Simmons (Irving Pichel), Spanky is forced to jump ship, along with his newfound buddy, fugitive slave child Buckwheat (Billy Thomas). The kids find shelter in the home of handsome Marshall Valiant (Phillips Holmes), who just before marching off to war instructs Spanky and Buckwheat to protect Marshall's sweetheart Louella Blanchard (Rosina Lawrence) in his absence. Taking his responsibilities seriously, Spanky forms a "home guard" consisting of Alfalfa (Carl Switzer), Porky (Eugene Lee) and several other local kids. In this capacity, they manage to fend off a clumsy Northern regiment commandeered by Spanky's old nemesis Simmons, thereby earning the lasting friendship of a kindly Yankee general (Ralph Morgan). The Civil War setting is not entirely appropriate to the antics of Our Gang, and as a result General Spanky is more peculiar than funny. The film's lukewarm box-office performance might have spelled the end of "Our Gang" had not Hal Roach's distributor, MGM, demanded that the series continue in short-subject form. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Goddbye Broadway is wrapped up by two stage & screen veterans, Alice Brady and Charles Winninger. The stars play vaudevillians Molly and Pat Malloy, who are suckered into investing $4000 in a ramschackle New England hotel. After a variety of predictable but amusing complications, the Malloys turn the tables on the sharpsters (Jed Prouty and Frank Jenks) who unloaded the property on them. Radio fans will enjoy seeing comedian Tommy Riggs, whose squeaky-voiced "Betty Lou" alter ego was a major airwaves attraction throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Directed by Leo McCarey's brother Raymond, Goodbye Broadway is based on James Gleason's 1927 stage comedy The Shannons of Broadway, previously filmed in 1929. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In a manner of speaking, Humphrey Bogart had George Raft to thank for his ascendancy to stardom: after all, if Raft hadn't turned down both High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Bogart might have continued playing second-billed gangsters to the end of his days. Adapted from W. R. Burnett's novel by Burnett and John Huston, High Sierra opens with gangster Roy Earle (Bogart) being paroled after a lengthy prison term. Though he enjoys the fresh air and sunshine of the outside world, Earle has no intention of giving up his criminal ways. In fact, his parole has been arranged by Big Mac (Donald MacBride), so that Earle can mastermind a big-time heist at a fancy California resort hotel. After a few unkind words with a crooked cop, Kranmer (Barton MacLane), in Big Mac's employ, Earle heads toward a fishing resort, where he is to commiserate with his inexperienced, hot-headed cohorts Babe (Alan Curtis) and Red (Arthur Kennedy). En route, he befriends a farm family, heading to LA in search of work. He falls in love with the family's club-footed daughter Velma (Joan Leslie)--though she never really gives him any encouragement--and makes a silent promise to finance an operation on her foot once he's gotten his share of the loot. At the mountain cabin rendezvous, Earle meets Marie (Ida Lupino), Babe's tough-but-vulnerable girlfriend. He angrily orders her to scram, but she stubbornly remains. Earle also finds himself the owner of a "jinxed" dog, whose previous masters have all met with early demises (a none-too-subtle foretaste of things to come). Marie is strongly attracted to Earle, but he refuses to have anything to do with her, reserving his affections for Velma. He arranges an operation for the girl with mob doctor Banton (Henry Hull), never suspecting that the self-serving Velma is planning all along to marry someone else. The robbery goes off without a hitch, save for the fact that "inside man" Mendoza (Cornel Wilde) panics and nearly gives the game away. While escaping, Babe and Red are killed in a car accident, but Earle and Marie escape. Having been disillusioned by Velma's indifference and by the fact that the untrustworthy Kranmer has taken over the late Big Mac's operation, Earle at last realizes that the only person he can truly depend upon is the faithful Marie. With the police hot on his trail, Earle tells Marie to look after herself, then heads alone into the High Sierras--where, in Greek Tragedy fashion, he "busts out" of life. As in Petrified Forest, Humphrey Bogart plays a burnt-out anachronism from an earlier era in crime in High Sierra; in the latter film, however, Bogart has an innate nobility that allows the audience to empathize with him throughout. It is nothing short of amazing that, despite his superb performance in this 1940 film, he still had to wait until The Maltese Falcon for top billing in an "A picture." High Sierra was remade in 1949 as Colorado Territory and in 1955 as I Died a Thousand Times. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This curious mixture of comedy, romance and melodrama teams up comic actor Eddie Bracken and glamour girl Veronica Lake, two of Paramount's most popular stars of the mid-1940s. He plays Ogden Spencer Trulow III, a wealthy kleptomaniac; she plays Sally Martin, who may or may not provide the "cure" for the lovesick Trulow. As it turns out, Sally is a professional thief, part of a gang planning to rip off the Romanoff necklace. Trulow tries to prevent this, and in so doing divest himself of his own kleptomania. Sally's cohorts aren't at all interested in Trulow's problems, and accordingly spend half the film trying to bump him off. Buried somewhere in the glossy silliness of Hold That Blonde is a pre-WW1 play by Paul Armstrong; some of the sight gags in the film are even older than the Armstrong original. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This soapy drama stars Hedy Lamarr as a would be model who meets a research doctor en route to the US from Europe. They meet when Dr. Spencer Tracy prevents her from taking a suicidal plunge from the upper decks of the ocean liner. It seems that Lamarr had been involved with married man Kent Taylor. When he reneged on his promise to divorce his wife Mona Barrie, she decided to end it all. Finding her extraordinarily beautiful, the doctor suggests she join him in his research. The two end up at a slum clinic and it doesn't take long for the doctor to fall completely in love with her. He convinces her to marry him and soon after the wedding, he exchanges life in the clinic for an upscale practice uptown. Servicing the rich is lucrative and soon he has provided his high maintenance wife with a luxurious life. Unfortunately for him, she appreciates his work and sacrifices not a whit, and as soon as she can attempts to respark a romance with Taylor whom she has never stopped loving. Fortunately for the doctor, Lamarr eventually comes to her senses and marital bliss ensues. This film had a troubled history with all of it due to Louis B. Mayer's obsession with making Lamarr the brightest star in the MGM galaxy. Originally the film was directed by Joseph von Sternberg, but he grew frustrated and tired by Mayer's constant interference and quit the film as did the next director, Frank Borzage. As a result an enormous amount of footage was discarded. Finally reliable W.S. Van Dyke was placed on the production and it was completed. Unfortunately, despite all that effort, the film bombed at the box office. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide