A serial-like pace and some stylish directorial choices by Gordon Wiles distinguish this "Charlie Chan" entry. The reading of a will is delayed until one of the principal heirs to the fortune, can be located. He shows up at the family mansion, only to be promptly murdered. It is now up to detective Charlie Chan (Warner Oland), an old friend of the ...
"Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff" read the billing on the opening credits of Charlie Chan at the Opera. Karloff plays a once-famous opera star who has long been confined to an insane asylum. He escapes, ostensibly to seek revenge on the diva wife (Nedda Harrigan) who'd betrayed him years earlier. Karloff shows up during the performance of a new ...
"It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily," purrs Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express. She certainly has her well-manicured hands full with more men than she can count in this exotic far-Eastern adventure. Among her fellow passengers on the Shanghai Express are her disillusioned former fiance, stalwart British medical corps ...
On the verge of receivership in 1926, Warner Bros. studio decides to risk its future by investing in the Vitaphone sound system. Warners' first Vitaphone release, Don Juan, was a silent film accompanied by music and sound effects. The studio took the Vitaphone process one step farther in its 1927 adaptation of the Samson Raphaelson Broadway hit ...
A W. Somerset Maugham novel was the source for the fair-to-middling Greta Garbo vehicle The Painted Veil. In a situation comparable to the plotlines of most of her silent films, Garbo is lovelessly married to Herbert Marshall, but carries a flaming torch for George Brent. (Also harking back to Garbo's silent days is the fact that neither one of ...
Contemporary viewers who go into Dishonored expecting a musty, dated espionage melodrama will be in for a surprise. Marlene Dietrich delivers a subtle and witty performance as a Viennese prostitute who offers her services as a spy during WWI. As "Agent X-27" our heroine proves invaluable to her superiors, seducing and betraying enemy officers with ...
Most existing prints of the 1931 melodrama Drums of Jeopardy are in pretty bad shape, but it's worth enduring the tinny soundtracks and messy splices just to watch Warner Oland in his full villainous glory. Oland plays a mad scientist who seeks revenge on the aristocratic family responsible for the death of his daughter. He travels from Russia to ...
Douglas Fairbanks returns as the great Spanish swashbuckler in this sequel to The Mark of Zorro. Don Cesar de Vega (Douglas Fairbanks) is the son of the famous masked avanger, Zorro; he's been sent to Spain to continue his education and learn the ways of his homeland. He soon becomes a favorite of the local dignitaries, but this does him little ...
Originally intended as a vehicle for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, this Universal production predated The Wolf Man by six years, but failed to whip up audience enthusiasm for the monster popularized by Lon Chaney, Jr. in the studio's later classic. Henry Hull stars as botanist Dr. Glendon, whose foray through Tibet in search of a rare night ...
First filmed by Fox in 1918 with William Farnum, Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage became a typically lavish Tom Mix extravaganza, filmed on locations at picturesque Lone Pine, California. Mix plays Jim Lassiter, the bold Texas Ranger whose sister, Millie Erne (Beatrice Burnham), and her little daughter (Seesel Ann Johnson, later Marian Nixon) ...
The same winning combination responsible for Don Juan-star John Barrymore, director Alan Crosland and screenwriter Bess Meredyth, once more aligned their talents for When a Man Loves. This adaptation of the classic novel and opera Manon Lescaut has been slightly rearranged to make the titular heroine (played by Barrymore's future wife Dolores ...
It's hard to believe that Darryl F. Zanuck, producer of such anti-prejudice films of the 1940s as Gentleman's Agreement and Pinky, wrote the incredibly racist screenplay of Old San Francisco. After a lengthy prologue detailing the establishment and settlement of San Francisco by the Spanish aristocracy, the story proper begins in 1906 at the ...
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