Dumbrille, Douglass

TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman)

Waterloo Bridge:On the eve of World War II a British officer revisits Waterloo Bridge and recalls the young man he was at the beginning of World War I and the young ballerina he met just before he left for the front. Myra stayed with him past curfew and is thrown out of the corps de ballet. She survives on the streets of London falling even lower after she hears her true love has been killed in action. But he wasn't killed. Those terrible years were nothing more than a bad dream is Myra's hope after Roy finds her and takes her to his family's country estate.Baby Face:Lilly (Baby Face) sleeps her way from basement speakeasy bartender literally floor by floor to the top floor of a New York office building. Bank submanager Jimmy McCoy finds her a job in the bank only to be cast aside as she hooks up with the bank's president. When he complains of not seeing her she says: "I'm working so hard I have to go to bed early every night."Red-Headed Woman:Lil works for the Legendre Company and causes Bill to divorce Irene and marry her. She has an affair with businessman Gaerste and uses him to force society to pay attention to her. She has another affair with the chauffeur Albert.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/CLASSIC Rating: NR UPC: 012569679641 Manufacturer No: 67964

Here are three films that couldn't and wouldn't have been made at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could "get away with" on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national mood of shock over the stock market crash and impatience with Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industry's self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in movie plots and characterizations, even when repressed--became a more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be shockingly blunt.

Baby Face (1933) was made at Warner Bros., the golden-age studio with the grittiest style and the most street cred. The gutsy Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman from a factory town who hops a boxcar to the big city and sleeps her way to the top--a progress famously indexed by a camera ascending floor by floor outside a Gotham office building as she trades up, one corporate suitor after another. No other major-studio film was more explicit about sex as a tool and a commodity, yetBaby Face is curiously less sexy than any number of movies that weren't so outspoken about it. This TCM collection features both the theatrical-release version familiar for decades and a recently rediscovered preview version that is markedly superior, runs five minutes longer, and includes more sexual liaisons. It also happily lacks an absurd final scene that got tacked onto the release version to explain how the heroine learned to be content with a modest lifestyle.

Red-Headed Woman (1932) is arguably the raunchiest movie Jean Harlow made at MGM (though not as raunchy as her scenes in Howard Hughes' 1930 Hell's Angels). Unlike Stanwyck in Baby Face--a proletarian heroine grimly selling herself to beat capitalism and the patriarchy at their own game--Harlow's character brazenly relishes both the sex and the posh life it wins for her. The lion's share of this sardonic comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on Harlow's seduction of her married boss (Chester Morris) and the havoc she wreaks in his upper-crust world. Charles Boyer has a role (his first Hollywood credit) as a French chauffeur who knows how to give satisfaction, and the film's air of breezy ribaldry even allows the star a casual flash of bare breast.

The rarest item in the collection, the 1931 Universal version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been unseen because MGM bought the film in order to do a 1940 remake (starring Vivien Leigh) and locked the original away in the vault. Directed by James Whale the same year he did Frankenstein (1931), the picture charts the romance of a chorus-girl-turned-streetwalker (Mae Clarke) and a well-born young soldier (Kent Douglass) on brief furlough from the trenches during WWI. Apart from a zesty prelude in a London music hall and two scenes on the titular bridge, the film remains yoked to its talky theatrical source, a Robert E. Sherwood play flogging the hoary conceit that no fallen woman, however pure of heart, could be permitted to marry into a good family. Unlike the Hays Code-compliant remake, the film leaves no doubt how the heroine makes her living. --Richard T. Jameson

On the Road With Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Collection (Road to Singapore/Road to Zanzibar/Road to Morocco/Road to Utopia)

They are some of the best-loved film comedies ever created. Now, four of the most popular "Road" pictures, starring the unbeatable screen duo of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, are here together in this deluxe DVD collection. Join Bing and Bob as they travel the world and experience rollicking, fun-filled misadventures in the company of the alluring Dorothy Lamour in such screen gems as Road to Singapore, Road to Zanzibar, Road to Morocco and Road to Utopia. You'll laugh yourself silly with four of the titles that made Hope and Crosby one of the most successful comedy teams of the 1940s and which continue to charm and entertain audiences of all ages today.

Julius Caesar

Film adaptation of Shakespeare's play chronicling the aftermath of Caesar's assassination at the hands of Marc Anthony Cassius and Brutus.Running Time: 121 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569659186 Manufacturer No: 65918

An examination of the relationship between political power and personal conscience, Joseph Mankiewicz's traditional Julius Caesar (1953) is a veritable master class for aspiring thespians. As the opportunistic Marc Antony, Marlon Brando delivers the famous funeral speech with pure conviction, elsewhere casting an intense physicality that recalls his work in A Streetcar Named Desire. James Mason suggests a latent Hamlet in his turn as the honorable Brutus, while John Gielgud is positively serpentine as the lean, hungry Cassius. Louis Calhern invests Caesar with intelligence and edgy noir echoes, and director Mankiewicz astutely balances the Renaissance view of Caesar as a power-obsessed, corrupt tyrant destined for punishment with modern suggestions that his murder may have been ill advised. The director's scrupulous pacing is supported in no small measure by Miklós Rósza's stunning score. At film's end, power itself is without a master, and the spirit of Caesar has been left unrevived: and to Mankiewicz's credit, the latter is revealed to be the true tragedy of Julius Caesar. --Kevin Mulhall

The Best of Abbott & Costello, Vol. 3 (Abbott & Costello Go to Mars / Abbott & Costello in the Foreign Legion / Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein / Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man / Abbott & Costello Meet the Killer / Comin' Round the Mountain / Lost in Alaska / Mexican Hayride)

Includes the following movies,
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
Mexican Hayride
Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff
Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man
Comin' Round the Mountain
Lost in Alaska
Abbott and Costello Go to Mars

Mr. Moto Collection - Vol. 2 (Mr. Moto's Gamble / Mr. Moto in Danger Island / Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation / Mr. Moto's Last Warning)

When Mr. Moto the no-nonsense martial arts-savvy Japanese detective inspired by J. P. Marquand's best-selling books hit the big screen he infused the genre with an exotic flare it hadn't previously known. Fans of film noir mystery and crime thrillers had a new hero. This outstanding collection includes four favorite Mr. Moto hits all starring the inimitable Peter Lorre as the world famous sleuth. And as a special bonus the 1965 feature film The Return Of Mr. Moto starring Henry Silva is included!Includes:Mr. Moto In Danger IslandMr. Moto's GambleMr. Moto's Last WarningThink Fast Mr. MotoSystem Requirements:Run Time: 265 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: MYSTERY/SUSPENSE Rating: NR UPC: 024543381808 Manufacturer No: 2238180

Abbott & Costello in Hollywood / Lost in a Harem

Buzz (Bud Abbott) and Abercrombie (Lou Costello) work in a Tinseltown haircut salon where they usually just take a little off the side. But why not take 10% off the top instead? So the fellas become movie talent agents setting in motion the lights-camera-comedy antics of Abbott and Costello in Hollywood including Costello being mistaken for a prop dummy during the filming of a saloon brawl Bud and Lou coping with insomnia and a pursuit finale in the cars and on the tracks of a roaring roller-coaster. You'll also find Lost in a Harem. Locked in is more like it as the two land in the hoosegow twice where their timing repartee and monkeyshines shine. Douglas Dumbrille plays the evil potentate who uses hypnosis against the boys ? making this a tale of Arabian daze and nights. The grand wazir orders you to watch!Running Time: 172 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 012569794580 Manufacturer No: 79458

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is Frank Capra's classic screwball comedy about a village innocent who inherits $20 million, only to discover it's more trouble than it's worth. The screwball in question is Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), a small-town greeting-card poet and tuba player transplanted to the big city to administer his newly inherited wealth, where fast-pattering, wised-up cynics, sneering society denizens, and corrupt lawyers lord it over the ingenuous and straightforward. Deeds's idiosyncrasies are amply magnified in the tabloids by journalist "Babe" Bennett (Jean Arthur), dating Deeds as a cover, only to discover she's the sap when she falls irresistibly for him. But the damage has been done, when Babe's column is used by a pack of corrupt lawyers, Cedar, Cedar, Cedar & Budington, to prove Deeds mentally unfit. The miracle of this unforgettable comedy is how it embraces dark material, calling into question some common assumptions about capitalism while maintaining an approachable atmosphere of light comedy, and deceptively so. You'll be so pixilated by its charm, you won't rest until you've doodled your way to a rhyme for "Budington." --Jim Gay

Walt Disney Treasures - The Complete Davy Crockett Televised Series

Available uncut for the first time, the five episodes of Davy Crockett that aired on Walt Disney's "Disneyland" show (1954-55) launched one of the great pop culture crazes of the '50s. An estimated $300 million worth of Crockett merchandise was sold during the first eight months of the craze, including 10 million "coonskin" caps. Disney didn't spend a lot on the original episodes, but as host Leonard Maltin observes, the colorful location and matte shots distinguished Davy Crockett from the cheesy-looking westerns of the 1950s. The three original episodes were later recut into the theatrical feature Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955); the more comic adventures from the second season that introduced the flamboyant riverman Mike Fink (Jeffrey York) became Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956). Tall and ruggedly handsome, if somewhat limited as an actor, Fess Parker was effective as the laconic frontiersman. The more experienced Buddy Ebsen (playing sidekick Georgie Russel) carried many of their scenes. Fifty years later, Davy Crockett remains an engaging example of national myth making. Younger viewers may be surprised to find this straightforward hero retains much of his appeal in an uncertain time. --Charles Solomon

All 5 episodes of Walt Disney's Davy Crockett series chronicling the adventures of the King of the Wild Frontier. Beginning with Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter and featuring Davy's adventures all the way up to the Alamo, these classic adventures are fun for the whole family. Introduction by Leonard Maltin.
Episodes: Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter; Davy Crockett Goes to Congress; Davy Crockett's Keelboat Race; Davy Crockett and the River Pirates; Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

Son of Paleface

Four years after his hit comedy The Paleface Bob Hope returned to the screen as Junior Potter son of Painless Peter Potter the hapless hero of the first film. The Harvard-bred Junior heads out west to claim his father's inheritance. Returning for the sequel but in a different role is Jane Russell (The Outlaw) as an outlaw named Mike who continually has to save our hapless hero. Also starring in the sequel is the King of the Cowboys himself Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger who portray themselves. Hope teams with the pair to help get to the sequel is the Oscar-winning song "Buttons and Bows." Co-writer and director Frank Tashlin a former cartoonist and screenwriter of the first Paleface also worked with Hope on The Private Navy of Sgt O'Farrell and wrote and directed several Jerry Lewis films such as Cinderfella and The Geisha Boy.System Requirements:Starring: Bob Hope Jane Russell Roy Rogers Iron Eyes Cody and Trigger. Running Time: (approx.) 95 mins/color. Copyright: l952 Columbia Pictures Television.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 090096098296 Manufacturer No: 60982-9

Bob Hope returned to the wild West in Son of Paleface, mining the rootin' shootin' genre for gag after gag. Hope plays Junior Potter--another variation on his lascivious, cowardly, yet somehow endearing persona--a college boy who's come to California seeking his father's hidden gold. What he finds is an empty treasure chest, a pile of unpaid bills, vengeful Indians, buxom Jane Russell (as a saloon girl by day, wily bandit by night), and singing cowboy Roy Rogers. It's prime silliness, an ancestor to movies like Airplane! that never let a moment go by without an absurd joke. Russell sashays about in spectacular form-fitting outfits, Rogers yodels a few tunes, and Hope snivels and wheedles his way out of endless scrapes. Good-natured slapstick (though its depiction of Native Americans will raise the hackles on politically correct viewers). --Bret Fetzer

Carole Lombard - The Glamour Collection (Hands Across the Table/ Love Before Breakfast/ Man of the World/ The Princess Comes Across/ True Confession/ We're Not Dressing)

A queen of the silver screen Hollywood star Carole Lombard carved a place for herself in film history with her roles in the six films gathered here: MAN OF THE WORLD WE'RE NOT DRESSING HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE LOVE BEFORE BREAKFAST THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS and TRUE CONFESSION. See individual descriptions for details.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 025192845420 Manufacturer No: 28454

In the 1930s, nobody combined glamour, romantic comedy, and drama better than Carole Lombard. Having entered show-biz at the age of 12, the former Jane Alice Peters (b. Oct. 6, 1908, in Fort Wayne, Indiana) distinguished herself from equally stellar contemporaries like Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Jean Arthur by establishing her versatility as a fashion icon whose beauty was matched by playful intelligence and a bright, independent persona (on screen and off) that predated feminism by 40 years and made her an appealing foil for admiring male costars. As this delightful half-dozen of her lesser-known features makes abundantly clear, her meteoric success was entirely well-deserved, and The Glamour Collection shows her as a star on the rise, gaining confidence and adoring fans with each new picture. As one of Paramount's most valued contract players, she starred in five of the six films included here (Love Before Breakfast was a loan-out to Universal), beginning with 1931's Man of the World, a Parisian romance written by Herman J. Mankiewicz (10 years before Citizen Kane) and headlined by future Thin Man star William Powell as an expatriate con artist who falls for Lombard's spoiled heiress--a romantic pairing made all the more believable by the stars' real-life marriage later that year.

A loose adaptation of The Admirable Crichton, We're Not Dressing (1934) is Depression-era entertainment at its most diverting, employing a full stable of Paramount players (including George Burns and Gracie Allen, Ethel Merman, and a young "Raymond" Milland) in a shipwreck romance between socialite Lombard and singing sailor Bing Crosby, who croons songs aplenty (including "Stormy Weather") and shares equal screen-time with an affectionate bear! Directed by Norman Taurog (best known for his later work with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Elvis Presley), it's every bit as fun as the Marx Brothers hits from the same period. Arguably the best film in this set, Hands Across the Table is noteworthy for the typically stylish direction of Mitchell Leisen, who brings his reliable sophistication to the tale of a New York manicurist (Lombard) who must choose between potential suitors Fred McMurray (as a would-be heir to a fortune) and disabled ex-pilot Ralph Bellamy. (This being 1934, Norman Krasna's otherwise excellent script restricts Bellamy to the romantic sidelines with outdated feel-good sentiment.) Love Before Breakfast (1936) is a similarly enjoyable but typically chauvinistic dose of '30s high-society love-play, in which Lombard bounces between boyfriend Cesar Romero and a Wall Street tycoon (Preston Foster) who knows what's best for her and bosses her around accordingly. In the mystery/comedy The Princess Comes Across (1936), McMurray returns as a lovestruck bandleader, falling for Lombard's radiant Swedish princess (played as a playful nod to Greta Garbo) on a cruiser bound for Hollywood.

After completing the classic Nothing Sacred, Lombard (who married Clark Gable in 1939) teamed with McMurray yet again in True Confession (1937), a black screwball thriller/comedy elevated by the presence of comedy stalwarts John Barrymore, Edgar Kennedy and Una Merkel. It rounds out The Glamour Collection in fine form (Lucille Ball is said to have modeled her TV persona after Lombard's character), and leads the way to such later classics as Made for Each Other (1939) and To Be or Not to Be (1942). Tragically, Lombard's outstanding career was cut short when she perished (along with her mother and 20 other passengers) in a 1942 plane crash. Fortunately for DVD collectors, these six films (all remarkably well-preserved with clear image and sound) serve as a fitting tribute to Lombard's unique talent, allowing movie lovers of all ages to rediscover one of the most alluring queens of the silver screen. --Jeff Shannon