Synopsis:
Promises of happier times dawn for the financially distressed Patterson family when father Sweeney and brother-in-law Archibald “Doc” Finney win a $150,000 grand prize in the sweepstakes contest. With their windfall, each member of the family decides to pursue a dream. Drummer Sweeney reorganizes his old high school ragtime band, while Doc bankrolls his own horse betting system. Mother Elsie, who won an art contest in high school, takes up the easel and paint brush, while daughter Mary enrolls in finishing school in hopes of snagging a rich husband, and Junior is shipped off to military school. Grandpa Casey Patterson, meanwhile, thinks that the whole brood has taken leave of their senses. Clouds begin to darken the family’s dreams when Sweeney hires the comely Yolo to spice up his band, and Mr. Jordan, the wealthy father of Mary’s suitor, Johnny Jordan, pays a surprise visit to the family and is shocked to find Yolo balancing on Sweeney’s back. Matters go from bad to worse when during the band’s debut, Yolo’s jailbird boyfriend Diamond beats up Sweeney and the police arrest band member Phil Stokes for robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Next, Elsie reads that her art teacher is a swindler and has run off with her money. With both her parents brought down to earth, Mary is expelled from school for Johnny’s indiscretions and happily returns home to her old beau, Eddie Dunn. Although the whole family is now broke, the Pattersons’ fortunes begin to change once again as Elsie wins a thirty-five dollar first prize for a painting that Grandpa unwittingly drenched.

Sudden Money 480P (1939).mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 1mn
Size:	1.36 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	624x480
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	29.970 fps
Bit rate:	3 025 kb/s
Audio
English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 160 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/A473D0F2A5AC056/Sudden_Money_480P_(1939).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:No

The post Nick Grinde – Sudden Money (1939) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Shiftless Jeeter Lester (Charley Grapewin) and his family of hillbilly stereotypes live in a rural backwater where their ancestors were once wealthy planters. Their slapstick existence is threatened by a bank’s plans to take over the land for more profitable farming; subplots involve the affairs and marriages of son Dude (William Tracy) and daughter Ellie May (Gene Tierney).

Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford wrote:
Ford revisited — and parodied — the themes and milieu of The Grapes of Wrath a year later in Tobacco Road, Fox’s film version of Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel and the long-running stage adaptation by Jack Kirkland. Unlike Steinbeck’s novel, Caldwell’s revels in the comedy and pathos of proletarian defeatism. Ford evidently welcomed the opportunity to unwind from the liberal gravitas of The Grapes of Wrath with this bizarre divertissement about a decadent white-trash family in rural Georgia. Starring Charley Grapewin as the shiftless and raucous old farmer Jeeter Lester, Tobacco Road looks like something Ford would have made on a drunken bender, interrupted by crying jags and bouts of hymn singing (“Brighten the Corner Where You Are”). Schizoid in the extreme, it alternates between the crudest, most grating low-comedy scenes Ford ever directed and some deftly sketched moments of sentiment as moving as any he ever put on the screen.

Andrew Sarris writes that Ford transformed Jeeter “from a greedy animal to a seedy but serious mainstay of tradition.” True enough, for Grapewin’s wonderful performance enriches and ennobles a character that could have been merely a caricature. The elegiac montage of Jeeter and his wife, Ada (Elizabeth Patterson), leaving the land to make their way to the poorhouse is heartbreakingly beautiful, the melancholy stillness of Fords compositions lit with late-afternoon chiaroscuro by the masterful Arthur C. Miller. But for the director of The Grapes of Wrath to stoop to ridiculing impoverished sharecroppers as lazy and stupid, as Ford does throughout much of Tobacco Road, is inexcusable. William Tracy’s hideous screeching as the moronic Dude Lester and the embarrassing spectacle of Ward Bond and Gene Tierney writhing toward each other in the dirt to convey sexual passion are among the lowest points in Ford’s oeuvre.

It’s almost as if Tobacco Road were directed by Ford’s evil twin, the dark-hearted mess he became whenever he crawled into his sleeping bag between pictures to drink himself incoherent. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay for Tobacco Road, correctly described it as a “fiasco.”

1.91GB | 1h 24m | 766×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8490B6026401093/Tobacco.Road.1941.WEBRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese

The post John Ford – Tobacco Road (1941) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Ralph Bellamy made the first of four appearances as fictional sleuth Ellery Queen in Columbia’s “Ellery Queen, Master Detective”. For reasons that defy logic, the studio elected to transform the brilliant, analytical Queen into a hopeless bumbler, who seems incapable of tying his own shoes, much less solving a murder. Set at a posh health resort, the story gets under way when wealthy physical culturalist John Braun (played by former director Fred Niblo) is killed after threatening to cut all his heirs out of his will. Investigating the killing is crime novelist Ellery Queen, his police-inspector father (Charles Grapewin), and another mystery writer, Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay). In short order, the body disappears, along with the will, a set of X-rays, and an ambulance! Somehow, Ellery Queen manages to put the pieces together and solve the crime, whereupon Nikki Porter offers to become Ellery’s secretary-even though it’s clear she’s got more brains in her left toe than he has in his whole carcass.

853MB | 1h 07m | 624×478 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/77B1EAD19ACD3DF/Ellery_Queen_Master_Detective_1940.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Kurt Neumann – Ellery Queen, Master Detective (1940) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Plot:
Celebrate the short career (10 Hollywood films and two Oscars®*) and long life (100 years young in 2010 and an honored participant in the TCM Classic Film Festival) of one of the screen’s nonpareil stars with this threesome of the fourth, fifth and sixth films Luise Rainer made in Tinseltown. The Viennese beauty portrays a Czarist Russian spy alongside William Powell in the ornate The Emperor’s Candlesticks. Cabbie Spencer Tracy and his immigrant wife Rainer struggle to make a life for themselves in the Big City while coping with a bitter labor dispute between organized and freelance cab drivers. And Rainer is a reckless Southern belle who marries the man her sister loves but flees to the arms of a wastrel playboy in The Toy Wife. From Warner Brothers!

1.10GB | 1h 19mn | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/01DE79B579A71D3/Big_City_(1937)_WAC_DVDRip_BBM.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:Spanish

The post Frank Borzage & George B. Seitz – Big City (1937) first appeared on Cinema of the World.