Lionel Stander Movies

Feeling stifled by her wealthy existence, flighty heiress Kay (Joan Crawford) falls in love with poor archaeologist Terry (Brian Aherne). The couple seems happiest when they're yelling at one another, indicating perhaps that screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz was none too fond of either character. Anyway, Terry decides that a marriage to Kay would be a big mistake, so he talks her into jilting him at the altar, thereby making a public declaration that their romance is through. But Kay "double-crosses" Terry by showing up at the wedding anyway, allowing the couple to live scrappily ever after. It's hard to tell if this is supposed to be a rip-off of It Happened One Night, but it sure plays that way in the first few reels. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions moved from MGM to Warners with Page Miss Glory--along with Cosmopolitan's biggest commodity, actress Marion Davies. The plotline has something to do with a composite photo prepared for a magazine contest: The combined facial attributes of Garbo, Dietrich, Harlow and Kay Francis make up this picture, which wins an award for photographer Pat O'Brien. When pressed to produce his fictional "Miss Glory," O'Brien scours the country in search of the girl whose face matches the composite. And that's where lowly chambermaid Marion Davies comes in. After a dizzying taste of fame and fortune, Davies renounces her new celebrity for the love of Dick Powell. The title song of Page Miss Glory was given a more entertaining showcase in the "art deco" Warner Bros. cartoon Miss Glory. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Harry Richman was a major stage and radio star of the 1930s, but his overbearing personality never clicked in films. After bombing out in 1930's Puttin' on the Ritz, he tried again six years later in The Music Goes 'Round, with marginally better results. Richman plays Harry Wallace, headliner of a Broadway revue which is just about to open. Tired of the rehearsal grind, he runs off to the South, where he happens upon a third-rate showboat troupe. Susanna Courtney (Rochelle Hudson), daughter of showboat manager Hector Courtney (Walter Connolly), mistakes Harry for an unemployed actor and hires him as a dollar-a-day bit player. Amused by the troupe's ineptitude in presenting a "serious" Civil War drama, Harry arranges for Susanna and her fellow thespians to appear in his Broadway revue as a comedy act. But when Susanna finds out she and her father are being made to look like fools in front of the sophisticated New York audience, she upbraids the roaring crowd, punches Harry in the mouth, and storms offstage. All works out okay in the end when Harry contritely begs Susanna's forgiveness. A remake of the 1928 Frank Capra film The Matinee Idol, The Music Goes 'Round is memorable today only for its catchy title song. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

One of the funniest, most sharply paced comedies of the 1930s, and perhaps the best of all of Harold Lloyd's talkies, The Milky Way was based on the Broadway play by Lynn Root and Harry Clork. Lloyd plays Burleigh Sullivan, a mild-mannered milkman who intercedes one night when his sister Mae (Helen Mack) is being accosted on the street by two obnoxious drunks -- they turn their wrath on him, his sister runs for help, and when she returns less than a minute later, both men are out cold on the pavement, with Burleigh standing over them. As one of them, Speed MacFarland (William Gargan), is the world's middleweight boxing champion, and the other, Spider Schultz (Lionel Stander), is his sparring partner, Burleigh makes the front page of every newspaper in New York. McFarland's manager, Gabby Sloan (Adolphe Menjou), has to figure out how to salvage the champ's career, but first he has to figure out exactly what happened, since both fighters were too drunk to remember anything about it. It turns out that Sullivan couldn't beat an egg, but he is good at one thing -- ducking. He can dodge any punch, and the two fighters knocked each other out in the process of trying to pummel him. What's more, on hearing this, they're so angry that Schultz accidentally knocks MacFarland out again, just ahead of the press' arrival, and the little milkman is given credit once more by the reporters for decking the champ. Burleigh loves the attention, even though he never claims to have hit anyone. Meanwhile, Sloan comes up with a way of salvaging his fighter's career, and convinces Burleigh to go along with it for a promised cash sum -- all Burleigh has to do is get in the ring in six fights, to build up his standing and reputation, and finish his "career" in a fight with MacFarland, who will win. In the meantime, complications arise when MacFarland falls in love with Burleigh's sister, while Burleigh himself meets and falls in love with Polly Pringle (Dorothy Wilson), a helpful neighbor. Gabby, Spider, and Speed also discover that turning tiny, wiry Burleigh Sullivan into something that even looks like a fighter is easier said than done -- all of his fights have to be fixed (and then some) behind his back to make his victories look remotely genuine. Finally, after starting to believe his own publicity, and then discovering that the fights were fixed, Burleigh goes through with the final match-up against MacFarland, the culmination of a comedy of errors involving horses, foals, and a wild chase to the arena. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

In the print ads for Soak the Rich, writers/producers/directors Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were shown singing "We're the boys who wrote the yarn/ And here's what it's about/ Class ideas don't mean a thing/ When love kicks 'em out." The film pokes broad fun at New Deal liberalism and 1930s campus unrest, which the authors evidently regarded as a passing fad ("the latest form of necking," observes one character) Millionaire college chairman Humphrey Craig (Walter Connolly) is saddled with fuzzy-headed daughter Belinda (Mary Taylor), who allows campus radicals to hold rallies in her living room. The main bone of contention is Belinda's romance with starry-eyed economics professor Buzz Jones (John Howard), whom Craig had fired after the publication of Jones' inflammatory book Soak the Rich. Belinda's enchantment with "pinkos" comes to an end when she's kidnapped by a comically menacing communist agitator (Lionel Stander) and when Buzz proposes marriage (in the Brave New World, she reasons, there is no room for matrimony). Her fed-up daddy solves matters with a shotgun wedding -- only it's the bride, not the groom, who's the reluctant participant. Novelist Alice Duer Miller, a longtime Hecht-MacArthur crony, plays a supporting role. Soak the Rich may sound like a "lost masterpiece," but it isn't; in fact, many critics regard it as one of the worst films of the 1930s. ~ Hal Erickson, 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

A Star is Born came into being when producer David O. Selznick decided to tell a "true behind-the-scenes" story of Hollywood. The truth, of course, was filtered a bit for box-office purposes, although Selznick and an army of screenwriters based much of their script on actual people and events. Janet Gaynor stars as Esther Blodgett, the small-town girl who dreams of Hollywood stardom, a role later played by both Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand in the 1954 and 1976 remakes. Jeered at by most of her family, Esther finds an ally in her crusty old grandma (May Robson), who admires the girl's "pioneer spirit" and bankrolls Esther's trip to Tinseltown. On arrival, Esther heads straight to Central Casting, where a world-weary receptionist (Peggy Wood), trying to let the girl down gently, tells her that her chances for stardom are about one in a thousand. "Maybe I'll be that one!" replies Esther defiantly. Months pass: through the intervention of her best friend, assistant director Danny McGuire (Andy Devine), Esther gets a waitressing job at an upscale Hollywood party. Her efforts to "audition" for the guests are met with quizzical stares, but she manages to impress Norman Maine (Fredric March), the alcoholic matinee idol later played by James Mason and Kris Kristofferson. Esther gets her first big break in Norman's next picture and a marriage proposal from the smitten Mr. Maine. It's a hit, but as Esther (now named Vicki)'s star ascends, Norman's popularity plummets due to a string of lousy pictures and an ongoing alcohol problem. The film won Academy Awards for director William Wellman and Robert Carson in the "original story" category and for W. Howard Greene's glistening Technicolor cinematography. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A female reporter is faced with a tough decision in this romantic comedy. She is engaged to another reporter. Though they want to marry soon, they are constantly kept apart by widely differing assignments. At last they settle on a wedding date, but then the woman finds a missing person that her lover has been seeking for ages. Now she must decide whether to tell him, or get the big scoop for herself. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Not a remake of the 1932 James Cagney vehicle of the same name, The Crowd Roars is set in the sweat-stained world of professional boxing. Handy with his fists, young Tommy McCoy (Robert Taylor) is virtually pushed into the ring by his alcoholic father Brian (Frank Morgan). During his climb to the championship, Tommy accidentally kills one of his opponents in the ring, and is thereafter tagged "Killer McCoy". He then falls in with crooked gambling czar Jim Cain (Edward Arnold), who uses various methods of persuasion to get Tommy to do his bidding. Though the film at first seems to holding the fickle fight fans responsible for the cesspool that professional boxing had become by 1938, the blame is ultimately laid squarely on the shoulders of men like Jim Cain. The Crowd Roars was remade by Mickey Rooney as Killer McCoy (1947). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Comedy, romance, and song hit the ice in this musical. Larry Hall (James Stewart) is a professional ice skater whose act with his friend Eddie Burgess (Lew Ayres) breaks up when Larry weds Mary McKay (Joan Crawford). Mary is also a skater, and she teams up with Larry to perform, but their on-stage (or, more accurately, on-ice) partnership proves short-lived when Mary is offered a contract to make movies in Hollywood. She quickly becomes a popular film star, but Larry does not have the same luck in California; in time, he decides to head to Canada, where he gets the idea of staging an elaborate ice revue. The producers of Ice Follies of 1939 worked with the Shipstad and Johnson Ice Follies troupe to stage the film's spectacular closing ice ballet, which was filmed in Technicolor (the remainder of the film was shot in black and white). ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide