Sunday, February 3, 2013

Now Playing: FEB 2-3, 1933

Milwaukee moviegoers are in for a treat at the Wisconsin this week:


They're not likely to be better entertained this year, with maybe one exception. Take my word for it!

At the Warner, here's an early Cagney film I haven't managed to see yet.


TCM.com can clue us in on the contents. The trailer says Cagney "puts sex appeal in a grapefruit," but I thought he'd done that already. In any event, this is as much as we'll see of the picture until TCM runs it again or it gets released to the Warner Archive. Strange that a Cagney film isn't there yet.



On to the Palace for the following Fox Film attraction.


The synopsis sounds interesting: a thief falls for an insurance detective, abducts her and holds her prisoner on a yacht. A promising mix of love and violence: has anyone actually seen this?

While I'm asking,  why haven't I heard of this Universal picture before?


 

Ernst L. Frank's film plays on a pulp archetype: modern doctors (including a Japanese) must cure primitive tribespeople of a disease or die themselves. You wouldn't have guessed that from the ads, would you? Tala Birell was another Germanic import (see also Gwili Andre) who didn't really catch on. She stuck around long enough to finally appear in a Universal horror film in 1945 -- the Inner Sanctum mystery The Frozen Ghost with Lon Chaney Jr. Like Andre, Birell died relatively young -- whether of natural causes or not I don't know.

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