Category: B&W

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The Inner Circle 1946

Before he can finish placing his help-wanted ad over the phone, the perfect candidate shows up at the office of Johnny Strange and fills the position of secretary without even giving Johnny a chance to say yes. She immediately takes the call from a new client, a mysterious woman with a Spanish accent. When Johnny meets her, the client is dressed all in black and wearing a heavy veil that conceals her face. She takes him to a house with a corpse lying in it, and asks him to take care of it. Before Johnny can call the police she knocks him unconscious with a bookend. He wakes up to see Det. Lt. Webb, who tells him the dead man is a notorious gossip columnist with a popular radio program. A nightclub manager, a singer, a housekeeper, a hard-of-hearing groundskeeper and two beautiful blondes are among the whos who may have done it. IMDB

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The Bloody Brood 1959 w/ Peter Falk

The Bloody Brood is a 1959 Canadian thriller film directed by Julian Roffman.

A man begins to investigate on his own the death of his brother, who died from eating a hamburger laced with ground glass. With the police case stalled because of ineptness, the man’s own investigation leads him toward a beatnik hang-out frequented by Nico (Peter Falk), a shady character who supplies drugs to the patrons and philosophizes about the ills of the world. Wiki

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Three Husbands 1950

When a recently deceased playboy gets to heaven and is granted one wish–granted to all newcomers–he requests that he be able to see the reactions of three husbands, with whom he regularly played poker, to a letter he left each of them claiming to have had an affair with each’s wife. IMDB

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Breakfast in Hollywood 1946

This is a movie version of one of the most successful radio shows of the 1940s. Breakfast in Hollywood began airing in 1940 on Los Angeles station KFWB, and quickly became popular enough to be aired nationwide. It eventually aired on 3 networks, NBC, ABC and Mutual. The show lasted until 1948, when Breneman suddenly died and, failing to find a suitable replacement host, it was cancelled.

At the peak of its popularify, the radio version of Breakfast in Hollywood was estimated to reach a daily audience of ten million listeners.

This film provides a rare opportunity to see two of the most entertaining acts of the 1940s, each performing two musial numbers on camera. The Nat King Cole trio swings through both “Solid Potato Salad” and the jivey nonsense song “It’s Better to Be By Yourself.” Those crazy cats known as Spike Jones and His City Slickers pay musical tribute to “Hedda Hopper’s Hats,” and later perform one of their signature tunes, the jokes and sound effects laden wacky take on “Glow Worm.” IMDB

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The Phantom of 42nd Street 1945

An actor is killed during the performance of a play and critic Tony Woolrich (Dave O’Brien) undertakes to solve the crime. Claudia Moore (Kay Aldridge, in her last movie role), the girl he loves, is suspected, but when two more deaths occur, she is also threatened by the Phantom Killer. During a production of “Julius Caesar” the killer makes a final attempt. IMDB

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Cowboy and the Senorita /w Roy Rogers 1944

Chip has inherited a supposedly worthless gold mine from her father and Craig Allen is about to buy it. Roy suspects the mine may be valuable and using a clue left by Chip’s father, investigates. He finds the hidden shaft that contains the gold and with the posse chasing him on a trumped up robbery charge, races to town with ore samples hoping to get there before the ownership is transferred. IMDB

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Roar of the Press 1941

Married only a few hours, small-town girl Alice makes her first visit to New York with new husband Wally Williams, a hotshot reporter for the Globe.

A body falls from a building. Williams steals the identification and calls in the story to city editor MacEwen, who makes Wally follow it up. Reporters’ wives warn Alice to expect this kind of thing.

A personal ad leads Wally to a second corpse. The police read about in the Globe and angrily haul Wally in for questioning. Alice’s irritation grows, as does that of reporters from other newspapers at Wally’s continued scoops.

Evildoers from an anti-American organization kidnap Wally, and when he won’t reveal how he gets his information, they grab Alice as well. Sparrow McGraun runs a numbers racket but likes Wally better than these foreigners, so he saves the newlyweds. A grateful Wally gives this scoop to every paper except the Globe. Wiki

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Murder By Contract 1958

Claude is a young man with a regular job, no history of trouble with the law and no chance of making any real money. He also has the brains and emotional detachment to make the big bucks as a hit man, and that becomes his new job title. A string of successful hits gets him sent to Los Angeles for his latest job. There he is accompanied by two goons: one who is perpetually nervous and the other who quickly worships the young man as a hero. The cold, ruthless hit man finally becomes unglued when he finds out that his latest target is a woman. She’s a witness, set to testify against his boss, and guarded day and night by the police. It’s her femininity that worries Claude: women are unpredictable, they don’t do what you expect. Claude eventually proves that he is the unpredictable one and his own worst enemy. IMDB

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Hollywood Party 1934 w/ Laurel & Hardy

Jimmy Durante is jungle star Schnarzan the Conqueror, but the public is tiring of his fake lions. So when Baron Munchausen comes to town with real man-eating lions, Durante throws a big party with so that he might use the lions in his next movie. His film rival sneaks into the party to buy the lions before Durante. IMDB

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Babes in Toyland 1934 w/ Laurel & Hardy

Babes in Toyland is a Laurel and Hardy musical Christmas film released on November 30, 1934. The film is also known by the alternative titles Laurel and Hardy in Toyland, Revenge Is Sweet (the 1948 European reissue title), and March of the Wooden Soldiers (in the United States), a 73-minute abridged version.

The Plot
Stannie Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy) live in a shoe (as in the nursery rhyme There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe), along with Mother Peep (the Old Woman), Bo Peep (Charlotte Henry), a mouse resembling Mickey Mouse (and actually played by a live monkey in a costume), and many other children. The mortgage on the shoe is owned by the villainous Silas Barnaby (Henry Brandon as a character based on the English nursery rhyme “There Was A Crooked Man”), who is looking to marry Bo-Peep. Knowing the Widow Peep is having a difficult time paying the mortgage, Barnaby offers the old woman an ultimatum – unless Bo Peep agrees to marry him he will foreclose on the shoe. Widow Peep refuses, but is worried about where she’ll get the money to pay the mortgage. Ollie offers her all the money he has stored away in his savings can, only to learn that Stannie has taken it to buy peewees (a favored toy consisting of a wooden peg with tapered ends that rises in the air when struck with a stick near one end and is then caused to fly through the air by being struck again with the stick). He and Stannie set out to get the money for the mortgage from their boss, the Toymaker (William Burress). But Stannie has mixed up an order from Santa Claus (building 100 wooden soldiers at six feet tall, instead of 600 soldiers at one foot tall) and one of the soldiers, when activated, wrecks the toy shop. Stannie and Ollie are fired without getting the money. ….Wiki

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