Gloria Stuart Movies

Maybe It's Love is one of the many college football musicals which bred like minks in the early talkie era. A very young Joan Bennett tops the cast as Nan Sheffield, the daughter of a college president (George Irving). The nominal leading man is Tommy Nelson (James Hall), the black-sheep son of a wealthy alumnus (Anders Randolph). Though Nelson is an ace football player, President Sheffield refuses to enroll the boy because of his bad reputation, whereupon Tommy's father withdraws his financial backing and bars his son from ever setting foot on Sheffield's campus. Falling in love with Nan, Tommy signs up with the college under an assumed name, giving up his wastrel ways to lead the football team to victory. Joe E. Brown steals the show as Speed Hanson, a goofy gridiron star who emits a loud and long yell whenever scoring a touchdown (this was, in fact, the first film in which Brown's famous "Yeeeeowww" was heard -- but certainly not the last). The remaining footballers are played by the members of the real-life 1929 All-American team. Incidentally, screenwriter "Mark Canfield" was actually a pseudonymous Darryl F. Zanuck. To avoid confusion with a later, unrelated film of the same title, Maybe It's Love was rechristened Eleven Men and a Girl for television showings. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A star football player in college, Garry King (Richard Arlen) finds post-college life very different; he betrays the trust of his best friend Steve (Preston S. Foster), finally losing his job. Meanwhile, his younger brother Bob (John Darrow), also a football star, is on the same track to ruin; when Garry reforms himself, events give him the opportunity to help Bob as well. Many football players and coaches of the time appear as themselves. ~ Bill Warren, All Movie Guide

The air-mail pilots who fly from a small airport in the Rocky Mountains are determined but not paid well, and there are occasional fatal crashes. It's a tradition of long standing that when this happens, chief pilot Mike Miller (Ralph Bellamy) makes the next flight himself. Daredevil Duke Talbot (Pat O'Brien) is hired; he starts an affair with Irene Wilkins (Lilian Bond), wife of pilot Dizzy (Russell Hopton). A fierce snowstorm rages when Dizzy next takes off. He crashes and is killed, so Mike makes the next flight. He crashes in an inaccessible valley, but survives. Although Duke has now run off with Irene, when he hears about Mike's crash, he decides to fly to the rescue. ~ Bill Warren, 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

A mysterious stranger, his face swathed in bandages and his eyes obscured by dark spectacles, has taken a room at a cozy inn in the British village of Ipping. Never leaving his quarters, the stranger demands that the staff leave him completely alone. Working unmolested with his test tubes, the stranger does not notice when the landlady inadvertently walks into his room one morning. But she notices that her guest seemingly has no head! The stranger, one Jack Griffin, is a scientist, who'd left Ipping several months earlier while conducting a series of tests with a strange new drug called monocane. He returns to the laboratory of his mentor, Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers), where he reveals his secret to onetime partner Dr. Kemp (William Harrigan) and former fiancee Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart). Monocane is a formula for invisibility, and has rendered Griffin's entire body undetectable to the human eye. Alas, monocane has also had the side effect of driving Griffin insane. With megalomanic glee, Griffin takes Kemp into his confidence, explaining how he plans to prove his superiority over other humans by wreaking as much havoc as possible. At first, his pranks are harmless; then, without batting an eyelash, he turns to murder, beginning with the strangling of a comic-relief constable. When Kemp tries to turn Griffin over to the police, he himself is marked for death. Despite elaborate measures taken by the police, Griffin is able to murder Kemp, considerately taking the time to describe his homicidal methods to his helpless victim. After a reign of terror costing hundreds of lives, Griffin is cornered in a barn, his movements betrayed by his footsteps in the snow. Mortally wounded by police bullets, Griffin is taken to a hospital, where he regretfully tells Flora that he's paying the price for meddling into Things Men Should Not Know. As Griffin dies, his face becomes slowly visible: first the skull, then the nerve endings, then layer upon layer of raw flesh, until he is revealed to be Claude Rains, making his first American film appearance. So forceful was Rains' verbal performance as "The Invisible One" that he became an overnight movie star (after nearly twenty years on stage). Wittily scripted by R.C. Sherriff and an uncredited Philip Wylie, and brilliantly directed by James Whale, The Invisible Man is a near-untoppable combination of horror and humor. Also deserving of unqualified praise are the thorouhgly convincing special effects by John P. Fulton and John Mescall. With the exception of The Invisible Man Returns, none of the sequels came anywhere close to the quality of the 1933 original. Trivia alert: watch for Dwight "Renfield" Frye as a bespectacled reporter, Walter Brennan as the man whose bicycle was stolen, and John Carradine as the fellow in the phone booth who's "gawt a plan to ketch the h'invisible man." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this musical science fiction adventure a handsome Brazilian playboy finds himself in the enviable position of being the last man on Earth after a pandemic disease destroys the rest of his gender. The playboy is spared because he was marooned upon a lonely island when the rest of the world's men came down with the dreaded "masculitis." After living alone for five years, female sailors find him and bring him back to civilization where a gangster secretly conspires to auction him off. Fortunately, the police arrive before any damage is done and the playboy is taken before the leader of the international congress. She decides that he should be required to service every remaining woman in the world. Unfortunately, the playboy is still in love with his fiancee, the woman he had fought with and was in the process of leaving when his plane suddenly crashed upon the lonely isle. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Actually this film should have been titled "Here Comes Jimmy Cagney Again, so Duck!". James Cagney is a bantam-cock sailor who runs up against chief petty officer Pat O'Brien. Seems that Cagney and O'Brien had come to blows early in the film when O'Brien stole Cagney's date at a dance hall. O'Brien resents both Cagney and Cagney's attentions towards O'Brien's sister (Gloria Stuart). The animosity intensifies when O'Brien court-martials Cagney for going AWOL. But all passions are spent when Cagney heroically rescues his shipmates from a raging fire. Here Comes the Navy proved to Jimmy Cagney's fans that he could still deliver the goods even with the tighter movie censorship imposed in 1934. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lee Tracy once again plays a Winchellesque newspaper reporter in Universal's I'll Tell the World. More interested in his sex life than his career, news hawk Brown (Tracy) nonetheless agrees to cover the activities of a European archduke (Onslow Stevens) on behalf of his wire service. To circumvent rival reporter Briggs (Roger Pryor), Brown adopts a variety of disguises, and while travelling under an alias he makes the acquaintance of Jane (Gloria Stuart), a princess posing as an American tourist. The finale is a melange of romance, international intrigue, and journalistic double-crosses, culminating in Brown saving Jane's kingdom from revolution. The 1945 Universal minimusical I'll Tell the World is not a remake. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Apparently inspired by Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet, Beloved is a lush, lachrymose musical romance set in Vienna, South Carolina and New York City. John Boles stars as Austrian composer Carl Hausmann, whose musical career is very nearly cut short during the 1848 revolution. Carl is whisked off by his mother (Dorothy Peterson) to the American South, where he establishes a respectable reputation in the years just prior to the Civil War. Forced to relocate to New York with his new bride Lucy (Gloria Stuart), Carl languishes professionally for several years, then gives up composing to support his wife and child as a music teacher. Tragedy strikes once more during the Spanish American War, when the Hausmann's son is killed. Carl and Lucy invest all their love in their grandson Eric (Morgan Farley), a Gershwin type who grows up to become a jazz musician in the post-WWI era. As Eric grows richer and more successful, the Hausmanns continue to live in genteel poverty, with Carl all the while struggling to finish the symphony he began so many years before. After an unpleasant episode in which Eric accuses Carl of "stealing my stuff," our nonagenarian protagonist finally hears his symphony in a radio broadcast arranged by his chastened grandson. Contented at last, Carl peacefully passes on. Ironically, leading lady Gloria Stuart was far more attractive when she really reached her 80s than when she was heavily made up as an old woman in Beloved. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Director George Stevens' fourth feature-film effort was a 1935 adaptation of the oft-filmed Gene Stratton Porter yarn Laddie. Set in rural Indiana, the story revolves around the romance between a local farm boy (John Beal) and English-born girl (Gloria Stuart). The lovers are separated during most of the proceedings by their warring families, headed respectively by the young man's remonstrative parents (Willard Robertson and Dorothy Peterson) and the girl's domineering father (Donald Crisp). Ironically, despite the parents' prattling about decency and propriety, it is a family scandal that ultimately provides a happy ending. Good though the "adult" actors are, the film is stolen by little Virginia Weidler, cast as Beal's wise-beyond-her-years kid sister. Previously filmed in 1926, Laddie was remade in 1940, with Tim Holt and Virginia Gilmore in the leading roles. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With little plot but incredible photography and choreography, Gold Diggers of 1935 was exactly what you would expect a Busby Berkeley movie to be--visually stimulating, awe-inspiring and almost Freudian in its obsession toward perfection. The Titanic scale of Berkeleian choreography was especially apparent in the "Lullaby on Broadway" number, showing the last day in the life of a "Broadway Baby" before she kills herself. This scene has some of the most precise choreography ever filmed. This was the second of the Gold Diggers films and it remains a classic for the startling technological display found in all Berkeley efforts. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide

Warner Baxter plays Dr. Samuel Mudd, American history's most famous victim of circumstance. In 1865, Dr. Mudd, a known Confederate sympathizer, sets the broken leg of a mud-caked stranger who stumbles into his home. The injured man turns out to be John Wilkes Booth, and Mudd is accused of conspiring to murder President Lincoln. Sentenced to hang with the genuine conspirators, Mudd finds his sentence commuted to life imprisonment at the very last moment. He is shipped to Shark Island, a brutal penal colony. Subject to the cruelties of a guard (John Carradine) who hates Mudd because of his "complicity" in Lincoln's death, the doctor suffers the torments of the damned, while outside Shark Island his wife (Gloria Stuart) campaigns desperately to get her husband pardoned. During a Yellow Fever breakout on Shark Island, Dr. Mudd performs heroically to save the survivors. For his humanitarian efforts, Mudd is finally released and reunited with his wife. While the script glosses over the fact that Dr. Mudd had never been officially pardoned by the US government (the pardon wouldn't be granted until years after this film was made), Prisoner of Shark Island strives long and hard to exonerate the man for whom the phrase "your name is mud!" was coined. Dr. Samuel Mudd's story was retold in the 1952 feature Hellgate, with Sterling Hayden as a (fictional) doctor, and in the 1980 TV movie The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd, starring Dennis Weaver in the title role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide