Leona Roberts Movies

The cattle rustlers in Border Cafe, a modern-day western from the RKO B-unit, are Eastern gangsters headed by none other than that old reprobate J. Carrol Naish. After having landed in jail for drunken driving for the umpteenth time, young Bostonian Keith Whitney (John Beal callously leaves his fiancé (Marjorie Lord) behind and takes off on a whim for Verde, Texas, where he inhales huge amounts of scotch and plays the honky tonk. In the mistaken belief that his son is operating a cattle ranch, Senator Whitney (George Irving) announces his arrival in Verde but Keith is rescued in the nick of time by Tex Stevens (Harry Carey), a leathery cattle baron who has taken a liking to the youngster. Things get dicey when New York gangster Rocky Alton (Naish) arrives to extract protection fees but Keith, who has taken to the wide open spaces like the proverbial fish to water, saves the day for all and sundry. Dumped on the B-Movie market with little fanfare in June of 1937, Border Café marked the screen debut of Marjorie Lord, mother of screen actress Anne Archer. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

This drama chronicles the different paths taken by former partners in law. One of them, an avaricious attorney who will stop at nothing to find success, becomes a lawyer for the mob. His dreams are soon realized, but their achievement cost him his marriage, family and partner. Meanwhile his ex-associate becomes assistant DA. The two lawyers must then go head-to-head in court. Despite his best efforts, the honest lawyer cannot win a case against his former partner until the dishonest lawyer comes clean and provides him with the much needed incriminating evidence to destroy the gangsters. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The blue grass of Kentucky was seen in three-strip Technicolor for the first time in this rambling racetrack drama. Sally Goodwin (Loretta Young) falls in love with Jack Dillon (Richard Greene), but the arrangement is complicated by a decades-old feud. Sally's uncle Peter (Walter Brennan, who won his second Academy Award for this appearance) has hated Jack's family ever since sides were chosen up in the Civil War. Jack secretly trains Peter's horse for the Kentucky Derby, causing the old man to nearly withdraw from the event out of pique. All is forgiven when the horse wins, but Brennan dies of the excitement, and his eulogy is read by a member of the family with whom he'd been feuding for nearly 70 years. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lucille Ball landed her first starring comedy role in the mile-a-minute farce The Affairs of Annabel. Lucy of course plays the title character, a screwball movie actress who indulges in one wacky publicity stunt after another at the behest of her press agent Morgan (Jack Oakie). To promote an upcoming prison picture, Annabel gets herself arrested-and has quite a time extricating herself from behind bars. The limit comes when she gathers research for her next film by hiring on as a housemaid, culminating in a fake kidnapping that turns out to be the real thing. Matching Ball and Oakie laugh for laugh is Fritz Feld as a bombastic foreign director. Cowritten by future Desilu Studios executive Bert Grant, The Affairs of Annabel was popular enough to inspire an equally hilarious sequel, Annabel Takes a Tour. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Clarence Brown directed this heart-tugging piece of Americana, set during the Civil War era. Walter Huston plays a stern family patriarch, a preacher who thrusts his family into poverty in order to set an example for his parishioners. As a result, his son (James Stewart) grows up to resent him. He looks to travel East and go to medical school, but his father's iron-fisted vow of poverty holds him back from education. Defying the father, his mother (Beulah Bondi) sells off part of her dowry to finance her son's education. The young man travels East and becomes so embroiled in his studies he neglects to stay in contact with his family, returning only when he receives news of his father's death. After father's passing, he goes off to war as a doctor, leaving his mother abandoned back home. Having heard nothing from her son since his departure for the Civil War, mother thinks he may have died and contacts President Lincoln (John Carradine) to investigate his whereabouts. Surprisingly, Lincoln responds to the mother's pleas and seeks to find out about the status of her son. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

RKO Radio's ace short-subjects director Leslie Goodwins graduated to features with the economically produced Crime Ring. Allan Lane plays a hotshot newspaperman who takes on a phony spiritualist ring. The crooked soothsayers are in league with a band of stock swindlers, coercing the gullible into parting company with their life savings on the advice of the "dear departed." Teaming with unemployed actress Frances Mercer, Lane poses as a potential sucker to draw out the bad guys. Lane and Mercer prove to be too clever for their own good, however, and it's problematic as to whether or not they'll survive until the closing credits. Crime Ring was partially remade in 1950 as Bunco Squad. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Gone With the Wind boils down to a story about a spoiled Southern girl's hopeless love for a married man. Producer David O. Selznick managed to expand this concept, and Margaret Mitchell's best-selling novel, into nearly four hours' worth of screen time, on a then-astronomical 3.7-million-dollar budget, creating what would become one of the most beloved movies of all time. Gone With the Wind opens in April of 1861, at the palatial Southern estate of Tara, where Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) hears that her casual beau Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) plans to marry "mealy mouthed" Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland). Despite warnings from her father (Thomas Mitchell) and her faithful servant Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), Scarlett intends to throw herself at Ashley at an upcoming barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Alone with Ashley, she goes into a fit of histrionics, all of which is witnessed by roguish Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), the black sheep of a wealthy Charleston family, who is instantly fascinated by the feisty, thoroughly self-centered Scarlett: "We're bad lots, both of us." The movie's famous action continues from the burning of Atlanta (actually the destruction of a huge wall left over from King Kong) through the now-classic closing line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Holding its own against stiff competition (many consider 1939 to be the greatest year of the classical Hollywood studios), Gone With the Wind won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar). The film grossed nearly 192 million dollars, assuring that, just as he predicted, Selznick's epitaph would be "The Man Who Made Gone With the Wind." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Thanks to a practical joker, hotshot radio newscaster Steve (Kent Taylor) announces that prominent financier Pomeroy (Morgan Conway) has been convicted of murder. When it turns out that Pomeroy has been acquitted, Steve, his radio station and the newspaper that owns it are slapped with libel suits. It's up to Steve and his reporter friends Maggie (Linda Hayes) and Smiley (Richard Lane) to figure a way out of the mess. Putting their heads together, the threesome tries to solve the murder case themselves, leading to the usual surprise denoument. Fans of the Charlie Chan films will get a kick out of watching "Number One Son" Keye Luke doing a series of celebrity impersonations! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This musical presents a romantic and sanitized biography of distinguished American songwriter Stephen Foster. The story begins with the romance between Foster (Don Ameche) and a pretty southern belle and sets up a home in Kentucky--actually the real Foster married a girl from Pittsburgh. His songwriting career takes off when he sells a song to the famous minstrel E.P. Christy (Al Jolson). His career takes off until the Civil War erupts. Accused of siding with the Confederates, Foster and his family flee to the North. There, he begins to literally drink himself to death. The Oscar-nominated soundtrack feature some of Foster's most loved standards including the title song, "Camptown Races," "Oh, Susanna" and "My Old Kentucky Home." ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This 1939 film version of John Steinbeck's classic novel was a surprising choice for comedy producer Hal Roach; in fact, Roach had no intention of filming the property until forced to do so as a result of a lawsuit brought by director Lewis Milestone. Burgess Meredith stars as itinerant farm worker George, who travels in with his cousin and best friend Lennie (Lon Chaney, Jr.). George dreams of saving enough money for a farm of his own, a dream shared by the retarded giant Lennie, who merely wants to "tend the rabbits." Unfortunately, George has never been able to stay at a job very long, thanks to the trouble often caused by Lennie's feeble-mindedness. Still, George is fiercely loyal to Lennie and would never think of deserting him. Hired by rancher Oscar O'Shea, George and Lennie run afoul of the boss' belligerent son Curley (Bob Steele); his bored wife Mae (Betty Field) starts flirting with poor Lennie, who, not knowing his own strength, accidentally strangles the girl, leading to even more tragic consequences. Despite being endlessly parodied in Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons ("Which way did he, go George? Which way did he go?") Of Mice and Men retains its raw dramatic power. On its initial release, however, it proved a bit too powerful for many filmgoers, and it lost money. The highly acclaimed American composer Aaron Copland wrote the musical score. The 1981 TV remake of Of Mice and Men starring Robert Blake and Randy Quaid, was a virtual scene-for-scene remake of the 1939 version. The 1993 theatrical remake, starring Gary Sinise (who also directed) and John Malkovich, is perhaps closer to the source than its predecessors, but only time will tell if it attains the classic status of the Lewis Milestone version. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When Darryl F. Zanuck's arrangement to loan Shirley Temple to MGM as star of The Wizard of Oz fell through, Zanuck hastily assembled a lavish Technicolor vehicle for his diminutive star which, he hoped, would match Wizard in popularity and appeal. The result was The Blue Bird, adapted from the allegorical stage play by Maurice Maeterlinck (previously filmed by director Maurice Tourneur in 1918). In emulation of The Wizard of Oz, The Blue Bird was bookended with black-and-white sequences, reserving Technicolor for the fantasy "body" of the film; similarly, Gale Sondergaard, who had been the first choice to play the Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard, was cast as Blue Bird's nominal villainess. Set in mid-Europe sometime in the late 18th century, the story concerns Mytyl (Temple and Tyltyl (John Russell), the children of a woodchopper (Russell Hicks) who has been called to fight in a faraway war. Heartbroken, the kids decide to run away from home in search of the Bluebird of Happiness, which will ostensibly solve all their problems. Falling asleep, Mytyl and Tyltyl dream that the good fairy Berylune (Jessie Berylune) is leading them on that search, accompanied by their household pets Tylo (a dog) and Tylette (a cat), who have assumed human form (and as such are repectively played by Eddie Collins and the aforementioned Gale Sondergaard). Before arriving at the far-from-unexpected realization that the elusive Bluebird of Happiness is no further than their own backyard, the two kiddies undergo a variety of astonishing experiences, including a raging forest fire (a triumph of 20th Century-Fox special-effects master Fred Sersen) and an oddly unsettling visit to "The Land of the Unborn". Rather heavy going for its intended family audience, The Blue Bird proved to be Shirley Temple's biggest flop, and a subsequent 1976 US-Soviet version starring Elizabeth Taylor fared no better at the box office. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this crime drama, a young man becomes a criminal lawyer after witnessing the police shooting of his father, a thief. Most of his clients are criminals and he soon finds himself involved with a mob boss. Together they build a new crime syndicate. Unfortunately, the attorney's partner is secretly an FBI spy. When the agent is shot, his partner, the lawyer saves his life. He then reconsiders his life and rats on his gangster client to the cops. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide