Carl Laemmle, Jr. Movies

This second film version of the Edna Ferber/Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II musical Show Boat is considered by many film buffs to be the best of the three. Covering nearly four decades (was there ever an Edna Ferber novel that didn't?), the film stars Irene Dunne as Magnolia Hawks, a role she'd previously played on stage, though not in the Broadway version. The daughter of showboat impresario Captain Andy (Charles Winninger, who was in the Broadway original), Magnolia is swept off her feet by dashing gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Allan Jones). Yearning to appear on the showboat stage, Magnolia gets her chance when Captain Andy's leading lady, the tragic Julie (Helen Morgan, likewise a holdover from Broadway), is ordered not to perform by a small-town sheriff because she is Mulatto. Julie's husband Steve (Donald Cook) loyally walks out with his wife, thereby leaving the leading-man position open--but not for long, since Gaylord Ravenal agrees to take over for Steve, the better to stay close to Magnolia. Despite the disapproval of Magnolia's mother Parthy Hawks (Helen Westley), Magnolia and Ravenal are married. Later on, the couple has a baby girl named Kim. At first, the young family is blissfully happy, but as Ravenal's gambling debts begin to mount, things turn sour. Unable to support Magnolia and Kim, Ravenal walks out on them both. Desperately, Magnolia tries to get a job as a singer in Chicago. She auditions at a night spot where, fortuitously, Julie is the featured attraction. Hoping to give Magnolia a break, Julie gets drunk, forcing the manager to hire Magnolia as a replacement. During her New Years' Eve debut, Magnolia "chokes up" in front of the raucous audience--and then, who should emerge from the crowd but lovable Captain Andy, who gives Magnolia the encouragement she needs. Magnolia goes on to become a famous musical comedy star, as does her grown-up daughter Kim (played as an adult by Sunnie O'Dea). On the eve of Magnolia's retirement from the theater, she is reunited with her now-contrite husband Gaylord Ravenal. While the second half of Show Boat departs radically from both the novel (in which Ravenal never returns ) and the Broadway show, the film manages to capture the spirit of its literary and theatrical ancestors. Of the original score, "Cotton Blossom," "Ol' Man River," "Where's the Mate for Me?" "Make Believe," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," You are Love" and "Bill" are retained, while most of the other songs are heard as background accompaniment. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II penned three new tunes for the film version: "Ah Still Suits Me," "Gallavantin' Around" and "I Have the Room Above." As in all stage and screen versions of Show Boat, the Charles K. Harris standard "After the Ball" is heard in the New Year sequence. In addition to the aforementioned Dunne, Jones, Winninger, Westley, Morgan, and O'Dea, the Show Boat cast includes the magnificent Paul Robeson as Joe (his rendition of "Ol' Man River" can still induce goosebumps), Hattie McDaniel as Queenie and Sammy White and Queenie Smith as the engagingly second-rate vaudeville team of Frank and Ellie Schultz. Though James Whale of Frankenstein fame seems an odd choice for director, he brings a vibrant theatricality to the proceedings that is lacking in other versions. Show Boat literally saved the financially strapped Universal Pictures from receivership--but not soon enough to prevent the ousters of Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. in favor of a new administration. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This greatest of all Frankenstein movies begins during a raging thunderstorm. Warm and cozy inside their palatial villa, Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon), Percy Shelley (Douglas Walton), and Shelley's wife Mary (Elsa Lanchester) engage in morbidly sparkling conversation. The wicked Byron mockingly chastises Mary for frightening the literary world with her recent novel Frankenstein, but Mary insists that her horror tale preached a valuable moral, that man was not meant to dabble in the works of God. Moreover, Mary adds that her story did not end with the death of Frankenstein's monster, whereupon she tells the enthralled Byron and Shelley what happened next. Surviving the windmill fire that brought the original 1931 Frankenstein to a close, the Monster (Boris Karloff) quickly revives and goes on another rampage of death and destruction. Meanwhile, his ailing creator Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) discovers that his former mentor, the demented Doctor Praetorius (Ernst Thesiger), plans to create another life-sized monster -- this time a woman! After a wild and wooly "creation" sequence, the bandages are unwrapped, and the Bride of the Monster (Elsa Lanchester again) emerges. Alas, the Monster's tender efforts to connect with his new Mate are rewarded only by her revulsion and hoarse screams. "She hate me," he growls, "Just like others!" Wonderfully acted and directed, The Bride of Frankenstein is further enhanced by the vivid Franz Waxman musical score; even the film's occasional lapses in logic and continuity (it was trimmed from 90 to 75 minutes after the first preview) are oddly endearing. Director James Whale was memorably embodied by Ian McKellen in the Oscar-winning 1998 biopic Gods and Monsters. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In the wake of The Thin Man, every studio in Hollywood scrambled to churn out sophisticated mystery-comedies wherein murders are solved by a wealthy, attractive, fun-loving young couple. One of the best of these Thin Man derivations was Universal's Remember Last Night, adapted from Adam Hobhouse's novel Hangover Murders. During a wild cocktail party at the Long Island estate of Tony and Carlotta Milburn (Robert Young and Constance Cummings), one of the guests is murdered. It does not help at all that the revellers were too drunk to remember exactly what happened -- nor is it beneficial to the case that Detective Danny Harrison (Edward Arnold) is a personal friend of all the suspects. In addition, no one but Harrison seems willing to take the case seriously, though of course eventually Tony and Carlotta are obliged to do a bit of sleuthing on their own. The light-hearted aspects of the film are offset by moments of genuine terror, notably the scene in which Professor Jones (Gustav von Seyffertitz) attempts to solve the mystery by hypnotizing the suspects, only to become a victim himself when he gets too close to the truth. An unbilled E.E. Clive provides some great black-humor moments as a police photographer who prefers to "artfully" arrange the corpses. As always, director James Whale invests his material with several of his visual trademarks, including his fascination with elaborate set decorations. There are probably more off-angle close-ups of fancy wall clocks in this picture than in any other Hollywood film -- and how about that cocktail bar in the Milburn's living room, designed in the shape of a yacht? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Birdlike ZaSu Pitts and gangly Slim Summerville are together again in the Universal programmer Love Birds. The stars are cast respectively as schoolmarm Araminta Tootle and chicken farmer Henry Whipple, both of whom are sold the same abandoned ranch by the same fast-talking con artist. Neither Araminta nor Henry are entranced by the idea of sharing the property, but they try to make the best of things for the sake of precocious orphan boy Gladwyn (Mickey Rooney), whom the teacher hopes to adopt. The plot goes off on a new tangent when Henry loses a gold tooth filling, which when found on his property is mistaken for a gold nugget by a grizzled old prospector, leading to a slapstick finale in which the tiny ranch is invaded by all manner of suspicious-looking characters -- including the sharpster who sold the hero and heroine the property in the first place. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Set in Germany shortly before the collapse of the Weimar Republic, this romantic drama chronicles the travails of an impoverished newlywed couple who leave their home village and move in with the groom's stepmother in bustling Berlin to find success. The husband gets a small job in a department store and things are okay until they discover that the stepmother is really a notorious madame and runs an exclusive brothel. This leads the groom to quit his job and take his pregnant bride on the road in search of opportunity. The plot is based on a novel by Hans Fallada. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

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, Rovi

Horror film icon James Whale directed this well-detailed thriller about a man questioning his wife's honesty after a friend begins to doubt his own. Dr. Paul Held (Frank Morgan) is an attorney who has been asked to come to the aid of his old friend Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas); Bernsdorf has been accused of killing his wife, and he wants Held to defend him in court. Bernsdorf admits to shooting his spouse, but he tells Held that he lost control when he found out his wife was having an affair. Held takes on his friend's case, but as he pours over the facts in the Bernsdorf slaying, he finds himself wondering about the fidelity of his own wife, Maria (Nancy Carroll) -- and begins to seethe with jealousy when he find that she has indeed been sleeping with another man. A Kiss Before The Mirror also features actress Gloria Stuart; James Whale would remake the same story six years later, under the title Wives Under Suspicioun. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

In the same year that she directed Victory of the Faith (1933), her first of several famous cinematic projects for the Nazi Party, German actress and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl played a supporting role in this epic adventure, co-written and co-directed by her frequent "mountain film" collaborator Dr. Arnold Fanck. Rod La Rocque stars as Dr. Carl Lawrence, leader of a mission to Greenland to recover the lost records of the ill-fated, real-life Alfred Lothar Wegener polar expedition of 1929-30. Lawrence's party includes experienced explorer/guides, as well as an adventure-seeking financier, who is in over his head and slowly driven mad by the perils of the voyage. When Lawrence's band is trapped on an iceberg, Lawrence's wife Ellen (Riefenstahl) -- a famous female pilot fashioned after Amelia Earhart -- takes off on a rescue mission, but she crashes her aircraft upon landing and is stranded along with the others. Before total disaster claims the Lawrence party, however, native eskimos and Major Ernst Udet (playing himself) arrive via kayak to save the day. Two surviving members of the Wegener party served as advisors for this well-received Man vs. Nature treatise, filmed on location in Greenland. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

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, Rovi

Tom Mix goes undercover as a prison inmate in this Western from Universal. The reason for Tom's masquerade is a bank robbery that wiped out his pretty boss, Nora Lane (Judith Barrie). The perpetrators, Doc (Donald Kirke), Spike (Raymond Hatton), and Big Ben (Eddie Gribbon), were all sent to the big house, but without revealing where they hid the loot. It is Tom's job to find out and a prison break offers him the perfect opportunity to do so. But the cowboy's disguise works all too well and soon both Nora and the law believe him to be in cahoots with the escapees. According to Hidden Gold's publicity, an actual forest fire was used in the film, the crew having been enlisted by the fire brigade during location filming in the hills north of Los Angeles. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

Having missed the opportunity to direct Frankenstein for Universal, Robert Florey was offered Murders in the Rue Morgue as a consolation, whereupon he transformed a pedestrian property into a minor classic. Owing more to Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than to Edgar Allen Poe, the film stars Bela Lugosi as Doctor Mirakle (accent on the second syllable), a carnival sideshow entertainer who doubles as a mad scientist. Kidnapping prostitutes off the Paris streets, Mirakle endeavors to mix their blood with that of his pet gorilla. His experiments will forever be doomed to failure, however, until he is able to obtain the blood of a virgin -- and that's where Camille L'Espanye (Sidney Fox) comes into the picture. When Mirakle's monkey kidnaps Camille and murders her mother, suspicion immediately falls upon the girl's sweetheart, starving artist Pierre Dupin (Leon Waycoff, later known as Leon Ames). But by using the deductive skills displayed in the original story by Poe's master detective C. Auguste Dupin, our hero not only proves his innocence, but rescues the helpless heroine from Mirakle's clutches. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

William Wyler directed this melodramatic story about a boy who, after growing up in the shadow of his father, learns the old man wasn't all he claimed to be. Tom Brown (played, as coincidence would have it, by an actor named Tom Brown) is a boy who has been struggling to help his mother keep body and soul together ever since the death of his father during World War I. The elder Brown died in combat when Tom was a baby, but her heroism earned him a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, and in tribute to his father a local American Legion post presents Tom with a full scholarship to attend the prestigious Culver Military Academy; while Tom has his doubts about his future as a soldier, he certainly understands the value of an education and accepts. However, its not until after he's enrolled at Culver that Tom learns the truth about his father -- "Doc" Brown (H.B. Warner) fled in the midst of battle, exchanging his identification with a dead soldier, and has been living the life of a coward ever since. Will Tom be able to restore the good name of the Brown family? Andy Devine, Sidney Toler, Slim Summerville and a young Tyrone Power highlight the supporting cast. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A semi-sequel to Tom Mix's 1932 Destry Rides Again, Rider of Death Valley finds Mix protecting the gold-mine claim of little Edith Fellows. Fellows' father has met his end at the hands of villain Fred Kohler. Kohler confronts Mix in the wastes of Death Valley, hoping to leave Mix to perish beneath the merciless sun. In a climax reminiscent of Erich Von Stroheim's Greed, both men struggle over a half-empty canteen of water, as leading lady Lois Wilson looks on helplessly. Rider of Death Valley was the second of silent western hero Tom Mix's talking features for Universal, though it was released fourth. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi