Musicals
Street Angel (馬路天使) (1937) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Chinese Leftist Cinema Classic
Director Yuan Muzhi borrowed his title from Hollywood — specifically from Frank Borzage's 1928 silent film Street Angel, starring Janet Gaynor, which had reached Shanghai audiences during a decade when American pictures circulated widely through the city's cosmopolitan theater scene.…
The Perils of Pauline (1947) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Betty Hutton Musical-Comedy Classic
The real Pearl White died in Paris in 1938, an alcoholic, her life savings gone to medical bills from a career of doing her own dangerous stunts, having spent her final years largely forgotten by the industry she'd once dominated…
Paradise Isle (1937) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free South Seas Adventure Classic
Dorothy Davenport produced Paradise Isle under the screen credit "Dorothy Reid" — a name that carried real weight in 1937, and real tragedy behind it. She'd been married to Wallace Reid, one of the biggest stars of the silent era,…
Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Wheeler & Woolsey Comedy Classic
Max Steiner was born in Vienna in 1888, studied music under Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, conducted operettas in London's West End and on Broadway by his early twenties, and arrived in Hollywood in 1929 with a formal musical education…
The Stork Club (1945) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Romantic Musical Comedy
When Barry Fitzgerald walked onto the set of The Stork Club in the spring of 1945, he was carrying the single strangest distinction in Academy Awards history. A couple weeks earlier , at the 17th Oscars he ’d been nominated…
Honeymoon in Bali (1939) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Romantic Comedy Classic
The film was nearly made with Merle Oberon. Paramount announced it in 1936, shelved it, rebuilt it, and released it in September 1939 with a British blonde who had already survived a kidnapping conviction in a Hitchcock picture and would…
Dixiana (1930) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Musical Classic
Bill Robinson was fifty-two years old when he made his film debut in Dixiana. He plays a specialty dancer — the role is small, the screen time is brief, and the New York Times reviewer singled him out anyway, noting…