Cereal At Midnight

There's more to Rain than meets the eye.  Joan Crawford takes center stage, buried under so much makeup that she's barely recognizable. She plays Sadie Thompson, a prostitute who has come to the South Pacific island of Pago Pago in an attempt to turn over a new leaf, find herself, and outrun her past. While there, she receives every reaction imaginable from the people that she's boarding with: the younger men want her, the women despise her, and the older men remember younger, wilder days with a drunken twinkle in their eye. But it's the local missionary, played by Walter Huston, who will impact her most. His cold piety is at odds with his human weakness. The setting is a kettle coming to a boil and it's just about to blow.  Despite its lush Polynesian setting,  Rain   is a claustrophobic movie. The title comes from the torrential downpour that starts right after the opening title screen and persists until the very end of the movie. This is alleviated somew...

Following immediately on the heels of 1931's Rich and Strange , Hitchcock's  Number Seventeen (1932) is an altogether different beast than its predecessor. Based on a play (which was based on a book), the story is mostly a comedic mystery that takes place in an empty house. The first half of the movie brings together a group of unidentified characters, who have converged upon the central location of the story for reasons that reveal themselves as the story unfolds. We have an inspector, a jewel thief, a hobo, a deaf mute, a corpse and the corpse's daughter, with performances by John Stuart, Ann Grey, Leon M. Lion, and several other British character actors of the early 1930s. Putting together the who, what, when, where, and why is most of the fun of the film.  The rest of the fun comes during the latter half of the movie, which is essentially one massive chase sequence set on and around a train. Using a series of elaborate miniatures, Hitchcock stages a huge action scene ...

A stunning, powerful pre-code drama from Paramount that features Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Charles Laughton in his big-screen debut! Laughton plays a submarine commander who is married to Tallulah Bankhead. Jealousy of his wife and how she's spending her time has driven him mad...or perhaps he was mad all along and his jealousy is what drives him into a complete break with reality. When he incorrectly suspects an affair between his wife and his lieutenant, played by Cary Grant, he has Grant transferred and replaced by Gary Cooper. Ah, but Tallulah and Cooper have already met, and shared a steamy one night stand in the desert night. They didn't realize that their tryst would tie them together with tragic consequences. The drama culminates on a submarine endeavour with a catastrophic climax, as the lives of every person on board hang in the balance, with Laughton's mad, suicidal (and homicidal) behavior leading to a final confrontation with the two peopl...

Ah, small town gossip! This pre-code Paramount programmer features a very early appearance by Cary Grant (who had just made his debut earlier in 1932 in This is The Night ) as a wealthy socialite and Randolph Scott as a down-to-earth (literally) geologist. Both men are the possible love interests of Nancy Carroll, a bank employee who is virtuous, but likes to spend the weekends partying with her pals. One hot Saturday night, things go a bit too far and before she knows what's happened, our sweet banker is the subject of gossip running through town like wildfire. Because this is a pre-code film, subjects such as infidelity, spending the night at a wealthy man's house and even possible cuckolding are pushed to the forefront to bring as much salaciousness as possible. Also of note, a scene in which Nancy Carroll passes out in the rain and awakes to find herself dry in bed with all her clothes removed and hung out to dry by Randolph Scott's character, who leans over her in an i...

1932's  This is the Night  comes from the short--but wonderful--pre-code era of cinema. More specifically, it was made before the days when the Hays Code (aka the Motion Pictures Production Code, which guaranteed the decency and moral value of each and every Hollywood production) was being firmly enforced. Those that consider movies of the thirties and forties to be gentrified might be surprised at just how bold and risque some of the films from the early days of cinema actually were, and sometimes still are.