Conrad Nagel

Lights of Old Broadway
Essay by Matthew Kennedy
By 1924, Metro Pictures was ailing. Founded in 1915 it had major successes with child star Jackie Coogan, “Great Stone Face” Buster Keaton, and sensational Rudolph Valentino in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). But Metro lost Valentino to Paramount and was also in need of more theaters to better control exhibition. Goldwyn Pictures was in trouble, too, thanks to internecine fights between management and board. A merger could mitigate their respective business worries. When Metro and Goldwyn united on April 17, 1924, with the manipulative, canny, and robust Louis B. Mayer in charge, it became the nascent film empire Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer. Twenty-four-year-old “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, formerly at Universal, was signed as supervisor of production.Read More »

Plot: MGM’s big showcase of musical talent is the main appeal of this film. It’s clunky, but it was filmed literally at the dawn of the sound age. So where else could you see Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Marie Dressler, Laurel, & Hardy, Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Norma Shearer, Cliff Edwards, Rose Tyler, Conrad Nagel, Charles King, Polly Moran, Bessie Love, William Haines, Anita Page, Gus Edwards and your master of ceremonies, Jack Benny.Read More »

Synopsis
A group of international and American criminals are trying to learn the secret formula of a concentrated vapor fuel invented by a U. S. Navy officer, Lieutenant Dan Carrington.Read More »

Although his murdered friend was by all accounts a scoundrel a true “bounder” Edward Wales is determined to trap his killer by staging a seance using a famous medium. Many of the 13 seance participants had a reason and a means to kill, and one of them uses the cover of darkness to kill again. When someone close to the medium is suspected she turns detective, in the hope of uncovering the true murderer.Read More »