1931-1940

Soviet solidarity is strong in Germany where the Communist Party (KPD) marches under the clenched fist in spite of police harassment… Radio broadcasts reach all parts of the Soviet Union, including Magnitogorsk. On the steppe near the city, a family of nomads lives in their yurt. The father hears blasting: iron ore for the steelworks. Crushed ore and coke yield molten steel for the ladle. Stop-motion animation shows the bountiful tractor and freight car output of the future… A new blast-furnace is under construction. Accepting jobs at the site are women, ethnic minorities, and the nomad. An English-speaking engineer supervises; a young riveter learns his trade from an old hand… In the Kubass region, miners labour to produce the coal which becomes coke in Magnitogorsk… At last the blast-furnace is complete. Workers celebrate. A cheerful patriotic song is sung. Steel pours forth. The new day reveals a finished plant.Read More »

Dublin, 1922. Gypo Nolan, strong but none too bright, has been ousted from the rebel organization and is starving. When he finds that his equally destitute sweetheart Katie has been reduced to prostitution, he succumbs to temptation and betrays his former comrade Frankie to the British authorities for a 20 pound reward. In the course of one gloomy, foggy night, guilt and retribution inexorably close in…Read More »

Summary from the Film Society of Lincoln Center website:
Shooting on location in China, Tomotaka Tasaka presents a low-key but stirring account of the day-to-day travails and camaraderie of Japanese soldiers, swapping individual heroics for devotion to the group spirit. Tasaka’s typically clear-eyed treatment, which includes an extraordinary battle scene and an assault on a farmhouse, was so documentary-like in its feel for detail that when Americans later captured a print of the film, it was edited into a training reel for U.S. troops.Read More »

Inspiration is a 1931 English language film adapted from the Alphonse Daudet short novel Sappho (1884). It was adapted by Gene Markey, directed by Clarence Brown and produced by Irving Thalberg. The cinematography was by William H. Daniels, the art direction by Cedric Gibbons and the costume design by Adrian.Read More »

Young hobos are brought to a new camp to become good Soviet citizens. This camp works without any guards, and it works well. But crooks kill one of the young people when they try to damage the newly build railroad to that camp.Read More »

A young farmer and his lazy father try to help with the construction of the Dniprohes, but he learns that strength is not enough for a worker and joins the Communist party.Read More »

Even though its release date in 1933 pre-dated the most rigorous version of Hollywood’s Production Code,Man’s Castle still ran into censorship problems over such material as a man and woman skinny-dipping, and an unmarried pregnancy. Cuts were made to the original print even before the film came out, and still more for a 1938 re-release. Director Frank Borzage was at the height of his career, and Spencer Tracy on the verge of becoming a major star, but the controversy surrounding Man’s Castle seemed to affect its box office appeal, and it faded into obscurity.Read More »

An officer tries to convince an amnesiac bar entertainer that she is his long-lost lover.Read More »

The lurid title is tabloid drama but the film is a surprisingly effective drama of teen hobos rounded up and shunted into working like prisoners on a rural turpentine farm by unscrupulous racketeers. Probably made as RKOs answer to The East Side Kids or The Little Tough Guys or (pre) Bowery Boys, this even has lookalikes to Huntz hall and Frankie Darro. The lead juvenile Roger Daniel is excellent and research reveals he almost immediately went straight into obscurity (maybe the War intervened as he was 15 in 1940) and only turned up in several Monogram teen/rural pix and later their JOE PALOOKA films of the mid 40s in a bit part. Pity, as he is a good young actor. The older teen Tim played by James Mc Callion is exactly like Frankie Darro but plays his part a lot like a young Cagney. Far more successful as an actor and can be seen briefly in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. He had a long film and TV career right up until 1990. One of the kids, Walter Tetley ended up being the voice of Sherman in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons in the 60s. BOY SLAVES is a good small RKO drama worth catching. There is a very clever scene early in the film by a swamp with interesting model work using a model of a freight train ‘in the distance’.
(from IMDB)Read More »