Merian C. Cooper Movies

This 1933 movie version of Sinclair Lewis's novel Ann Vickers stars Irene Dunne in the title role. Left alone and pregnant by her soldier sweetheart (Bruce Cabot), Ann turns her life around by devoting herself to social work. A frustrating tenure as psychologist in a poorly maintained woman's prison only strengthens Ann's resolve to improve the world around her. She falls in love with the politically progressive judge (Walter Huston) who helps finance her career, standing by him when he is unjustly accused of graft. Ann Vickers contains one startling sequence in which Ann, following the premature end of her pregnancy, walks with great discomfort around her garden while she speaks wistfully about,"the daughter I'll never have." Otherwise, the film suffers from its adaptors' soap-opera mindset, as well as the decision to cram Lewis's complex novel into a brief 75 minutes' screen time. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A spoiled rich girl marries a gas station owner in this dated romance starring Joel McCrea, Ginger Rogers, and Marion Nixon. It is love at first sight when debutante Glory Franklyn (Nixon) spots handsome grease monkey Blacky Gorman (McCrea), who promptly dumps faithful girlfriend Marje Harris (Rogers) to marry the heiress. Wedded bliss, however, quickly gives way to everyday worries and Glory even fails at cooking a dinner. Because she still loves Blacky, Marje nobly gives her rival a crash course in good housekeeping, but the spoiled Glory discovers that she is expecting and high tails it back to Mama (Virginia Hammond), who never approved of the marriage and is only too happy to see it fail. Fearing that his wife will obtain an abortion, Blacky hurries to New York, but is too late. Divorced and heartbroken, the young gas station owner finds solace in the arms of the loyal Marje. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Joan Colby (Ann Harding) is the unmarried older daughter in a once-wealthy family. She's always been the mature, level-headed one among the two sisters, but she is feeling the pressure to find a husband especially strongly these days, as her much more flighty and impetuous younger sister Valerie (Lucille Brown) is about to marry. Joan has been lately seen in the company of John Fletcher (William Powell), the wastral heir to a once-great shipping company -- he doesn't care a bit about the family business, but still has enough money to live an upper-class lifestyle without worry, and is a well-known playboy, and enjoys Joan's company. With her sister's help and the unwitting participation of her well-meaning father (Henry Stephenson), Joan manages to set up a situation in which John is forced to do what they used to call "the decent thing" and marry her. Joan is secretly torn by guilt about how she got his name, however, and tries to be a truly good wife for John over the months that follow -- she gets him to clean up his life a bit, and to take himself more seriously and look past the next game of polo, and even starts to convince him to take more of a role in his family's moribund shipping line, which is about to pass into outside control as a result of his neglect. But when Valerie, in a fit of anger, blurts out the truth about how their marriage came about, John loses all interest in Joan, returning to the company of his ex-girlfriend (Lillian Bond) and turning the matter over to his lawyers. Now Joan has to fight on two fronts, to help save her husband's business, and also to save their marriage before it's too late. Given this plot, it may seem odd that Double Harness was presented as a comedy, but it is, and a good one, too. The humor lies in the way the upper-class are shown "coping" with the Great Depression, and the witty presentation of the romantic flirtations in the lives of Joan, Valerie, and John (and their friends), as well as the tone of John and Joan's marriage -- Joan, in particular, has a wryly detached side that comes out even at her most unhappy moments. It's all very sophisticated, a comedy by adults, about adults, for adults, and it holds up amazingly well as a piece of entertainment across 75 years. In some ways, Double Harness is also a bit reminiscent of the 1930 version of Holiday, which is perhaps not entirely accidental or surprising, as the latter also starred Ann Harding, although Cromwell's 1933 film is a far more skillful and accomplished cinematic work by modern standards. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

In this drama, a young surgeon and his driver must combat the racketeers who have taken over the hospital where he works. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

With William Boyd in the cast, one would think that Flaming Gold was a "Hopalong Cassidy" western -- and one would be wrong. Boyd and Pat O'Brien play Dan Manton and Ben Lear, wildcat oil men at large in Mexico. Dan and Ben continually run afoul of a powerful oil cartel, determined to put our heroes out of business. Meanwhile, the two buddies fall out over the affections of good-time Claire Arnold (Mae Clarke) who marries Dan. A "big gusher" climax caps Flaming Gold, which had it been made 10 years later would probably have been produced by Pine-Thomas Productions with Richard Arlen, Chester Morris and Jean Parker in the cast. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The first of John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy", Fort Apache stars John Wayne as captain Kirby York and Henry Fonda as Custer clone Lt. Col. Owen Thursday. Resentful of his loss in rank and transfer to the West after serving gallantly in the Civil War, the vainglorious Thursday insists upon imposing rigid authority on rough-and-tumble Fort Apache. He is particularly anxious to do battle with the local Indians, despite York's admonitions that the trouble around the fort is being fomented not by the so-called savages but by corrupt white Indian agents. Thursday nonetheless ends up in a climactic set-to with Indian chief Cochise. He and his men are needlessly slaughtered, but the Eastern press builds "Thursday's Charge" into an incident of conspicuous valor--and York, ever loyal to the cavalry, is not about to tell the whole truth. The bare bones of Fort Apache's plotline are fleshed out with several subplots, including the romance between Thursday's daughter Philadelphia (Shirley Temple) and Lt. Mickey O'Rourke (John Agar), the son of Fort Apache veteran Sgt. Michael O'Rourke (Ward Bond). There's also plenty of time for the expected drunken-brawl humor of Victor McLaglen. Not in the least politically correct, Fort Apache is a classic of its kind, and together with Rio Grande (1950) the best of the John Ford/John Wayne Cavalry films. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Headline Shooter is a brisk comedy/melodrama about a newsreel photographer (William Gargan). He prefers to risk his neck to get "swell" pictures, while his reporter girl friend (Frances Dee), though no less fearless, would prefer that he give up his dangerous profession. Ralph Bellamy (as always!) is around as Frances' "stable" boyfriend, who of course loses the girl. The story wraps up as Gargan rescues Dee from a band of kidnapping gangsters (though neither the girl nor her captors seem to regard the situation as life-threatening!) Padded out with yards and yards of stock newsreel footage, Headline Shooter is highlighted by the opening-scene appearance of humorist Robert Benchley, playing a radio announcer at a beauty contest who can't think of any descriptive phrase other than "feminine pulchritude." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

One of the greatest adventure stories in Hollywood history gets a new interpretation in this action drama from Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson. In the early 1930s, Carl Denham (Jack Black) is a daring filmmaker and adventurer who has gained a reputation for his pictures documenting wildlife in remote and dangerous jungle lands; despite the objections of his backers, Denham plans to film his next project aboard an ocean vessel en route to Skull Island, an uncharted island he discovered on a rare map. Correctly assuming his cast and crew would be wary of such a journey, Denham has told them they're traveling to Singapore, but before they set sail, his leading lady drops out of the project. Needing a beautiful actress willing to take a risk, Denham finds Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), a beautiful but down-on-her-luck vaudeville performer, and offers her the role; cautious but eager to work, Darrow takes the role, and onboard the ship she strikes up a romance with Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), a respected playwright hired by Denham to write the script for his latest epic.

When Denham and company arrive on Skull Island, the natives react with savage violence, but they happen to be the least of their worries. Skull Island is a sanctuary for prehistoric life, and lording it over the dinosaurs and other giant beasts is Kong, a 25-foot-tall gorilla who can outfight any creature on Earth. The natives kidnap Darrow, giving her to Kong as an offering to appease the giant beast; Denham and his men set out to find her, with Driscoll bravely determined to save the woman he loves. Eventually, Driscoll finds Darrow and Denham outwits Kong, intending to take the giant ape back to New York for display. But Kong has bonded with Darrow, and his attraction to her proves to be his undoing. Andy Serkis, who provided the body movements for Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings pictures, performed similar duties on King Kong, studying gorillas so he could mimic their actions, which were then used as the basis for the special-effects crew's digital animation of the great ape. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

"How would you like to star opposite the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood?" Enticed by these words, brunette leading lady Fay Wray dyed her hair blonde and accepted the role of Ann Darrow in King Kong -- and stayed with the project even after learning that her "leading man" was a 50-foot ape. The film introduces us to flamboyant, foolhardy documentary filmmaker Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), who sails off to parts unknown to film his latest epic with leading lady Darrow in tow. Disembarking at Skull Island, they stumble on a ceremony in which the native dancers circle around a terrified-looking young girl, chanting, "Kong! Kong!" The chief (Noble Johnson) and witch doctor (Steve Clemente) spot Denham and company and order them to leave. But upon seeing Ann, the chief offers to buy the "golden woman" to serve as the "bride of Kong." Denham refuses, and he and the others beat a hasty retreat to their ship. Late that night, a party of native warriors sneak on board the ship and kidnap Ann. They strap her to a huge sacrificial altar just outside the gate, then summon Kong, who winds up saving Ann instead of devouring her. Kong is eventually taken back to New York, where he breaks loose on the night of his Broadway premiere, thinking that his beloved Ann is being hurt by the reporters' flash bulbs. Now at large in New York, Kong searches high and low for Ann (in another long-censored scene, he plucks a woman from her high-rise apartment, then drops her to her death when he realizes she isn't the girl he's looking for). After proving his devotion by wrecking an elevated train, Kong winds up at the top of the Empire State Building, facing off against a fleet of World War I fighter planes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Though the story isn't much, this actioner does offer a neat behind-the-scenes look at the travails of Hollywood stuntmen as it chronicles the romance between a stunt man and an extra. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This 1998 version of Mighty Joe Young begins with a Gorillas in the Mist-type prologue and then jumps forward twelve years to find Bill Paxton leading a safari expedition to capture the legendary giant (two-ton) gorilla, the subject of the film's title. Paxton's intentions are admirable; he wants to remove the majestic beast from the imminent danger of poachers and set him up on a posh nature reserve in California. The x-factor comes in the form of Charlize Theron's beautiful jungle girl, Jill Young. Jill has been Joe's soul mate from birth and is the only human who can communicate with him. She is also the reason Paxton's maverick-on-the-run lingers at the reserve after his task is completed. From there, the plot is spurred on by the nefarious actions of a poacher with an Ahab complex and a battery of money hungry scientists who want to exploit Joe. Naturally, all of this puts a burr under the towering simian's skin, causing him to break free and go ape in L.A.'s concrete jungle. ~ Tom Meek, All Movie Guide

A boozy newspaper reporter is booted out of his job for drinking too much. A few fateful twists later, he becomes partners with a talented advertising executive and opens a business. The former reporter proves to have a killer's instinct and all the morals of a shark. Under his helm, the business thrives, but his personal life falls to ruin when his fiancee kills herself. Returning to the sanctuary of alcohol, he drinks himself blind and jeopardizes the career he worked so hard to build. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide