Tag: warner archive

It All Came True (1940)

it all came true bluray

Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor. He made some of my favorite movies – The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and so many more. But the thing I always have to remember is that he spent more than a decade as a second-tier star. He played gangsters and heavies for a long time. He was often the third or fourth actor billed on a poster or in the credits before he became the star that we know and love.

He is exactly that in It All Came True. Originally he was third billed. He plays a gangster causing trouble for top-billed Ann Sheridan. But not long after this movie came out, Bogart did become a big star. In subsequent rereleases, suddenly Bogart was top billed. They even changed the opening credits for him.

Which is kind of dumb because this is Ann Sheridan’s movie through and through. It is an odd movie.  Part of it is a fairly serious drama, but then they keep injecting magic tricks, show tunes, and vaudeville acts.  That makes it less than a great movie, but it sure is fun. You can read my full review here.

Stranger On the Third Floor (1940)

stranger on the third floor bluray

I freaking love me some Peter Lorre. I am a huge film noir fan. Stranger on the Third Floor stars Peter Lorre and is often cited as the very first noir. Several times now I’ve gotten all sorts of excited thinking about that and put this movie on only to be disappointed by it. 

It isn’t a terrible film, but it is definitely a B-movie that never expected to be talked about some seventy years after it first appeared on screens. And Peter Lorre is in it for less than ten minutes.  He’s great, and there is a pretty cool dream sequence in the middle, but other than that it is kind of dull.  Anyway, you can read my full review here.

Red Dust (1932)

image host

Warner Archive and Kino Lorber both put out a lot of what you might call second-tier classic films. These are movies with big-name stars or directors that, for one reason or another, are not all that well known all these decades later. 

I quite enjoy watching and reviewing them because you never know what you are going to get. Sure, most of them are not the greatest films, but usually they aren’t bad, and once in a while you find a real gem.

Red Dust is a very enjoyable little film. It stars Clark Gable as a rubber plantation owner in Asia and Jean Harlow as the no-nonsense sex worker he falls in love with. Mary Astor also appears as the prim and proper lady Gable’s character initially falls for.  Anyways, I quite enjoyed it, and you can read my review here.

The Verdict (1946)

the verdict

Peter Greenstreet and Peter Lorre starred in nine films together including two absolute bangers – The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The Verdict was their final collaboration, and sadly it isn’t great. But it isn’t terrible and it was the first film ever directed by Don Siegel so it has that going for it. You can read my full review here.

The Hard Way (1943) Blu-ray Review

image host

You should never say no to Ida Lupino. I first discovered her playing a blind woman in On Dangerous Ground. It was a small role, but memorable. Soon after I learned what an incredible woman she was. She entered Hollywood at an early age, but was constantly getting in trouble for refusing roles she felt was beneath her.

As her star rose she formed her own production company and started directing her own films. She was only the second woman entered into the Director’s Guild of Hollywood. Like I say, I always watch her in anything I can get my hands on.

She stars with Joan Leslie in The Hard Way, a film that reminded me a lot of All About Eve. She plays a woman who pushes her sister into the life of an actress. Initially this is to get her out of the poor town poverty they grew up in, but that morphs into untethered ambition that destroys everything in its path.

I didn’t love the film, but I do think it is worth watching. You can read my full review here.

International Settlement (1938)

international settlement dvd

One of the things I love about going through my old reviews is that I find films that I had forgotten I’d ever even watched. I don’t remember this film at all. I certainly don’t remember writing a review of it. Yet here we are and here it is.

The funniest thing about this review of this B-movie thriller is that I apparently didn’t know who George Sanders was ten years ago. He’s become one of my favorite actors, yet apparently I didn’t recognize him. How crazy that is to me now.

The Tall Target (1951)

image host

There are loads of different types of film noirs but The Tall Target might just have the strangest subject matter of them all – protecting Abraham Lincoln from an assassination attempt (no not that one, but a different one. On a train. One that kind of, sort of really happened.)

It is pretty great, too. Dick Powell stars as a copper who thinks the President is going to get killed in Baltimore on a stop he’s making to speechify before he gets inaugurated.

It is a good little mystery with some great noir photography. You can read my full review here.

They Drive By Night (1940)

bluray

Humphrey Bogart is my all-time favorite actor. He was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden age. But he didn’t start out that way. He actually languished for over a decade before becoming a star. He spent most of that time being billed third or fourth in gangster pictures. They Drive By Night helped push him into the spotlight. It was not a gangster picture, and while he was still third-billed the movie was a big hit and it showed off his range. A year later he’d star in The Maltese Falcon and the rest is history.

George Raft is the star of the picture. And Ida Lupino. The film is a mix between a social message movie and film noir. It’s pretty good.

You can read my full review here.

Devil’s Doorway (1950)

cover

Obviously, I love a good Western. For the last two years, I’ve dedicated the month of March to the genre. A great Western is transcendent. Even a bad one can be a lot of fun. But there is no getting past the casual racism that is found in a great many Western. This is especially true in Westerns from the 1930s into the 1940s. Hollywood thought nothing of making Native Americans nameless, blood-thirsty savages who wanted nothing more than to rape the women, kidnap the children, and murder the men.

Slowly, Hollywood changed. By the 1950s they sometimes (but not always, not even all that often) made films that depicted Native Americans with an ounce of empathy. Devil’s Doorway is a film that points to the realities of how Native Americans were treated by white folk. Even ones who fought valiantly in the Civil War.

Unfortunately, the lead Native American is played by a decidedly white fella.

Were the film really good, I might be able to forgive that lapse in judgment. But as it is, the film isn’t great and so that bit of indiscretion stands out like a racist thumb.

You can read my full review here.