Wuthering heights 1939 - Torn with desire, tortured by hate!

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: William Wyler
Main Cast: Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, David Niven, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Geraldine Fitzgerald

"William Wyler's Wuthering Heights is one of the earliest screen adaptations of the classic Emily Brontë novel. Together with Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights represents the pinnacle of 1930s Hollywood romanticism. Laurence Olivier's contemptuous treatment of Merle Oberon in the film may have been partly heartfelt: He had wanted the great love of his life, Vivien Leigh, to play Cathy, but producer Samuel Goldwyn didn't see things that way, especially since Gone With the Wind had not yet established Leigh as a star of international magnitude. Though director William Wyler, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and art director James Basevi convincingly re-create the storm-tossed moors of Yorkshire, Wuthering Heights was filmed in California's Conejo Hills with extensive 'exterior' work within studio walls. The last image, of Heathcliffe and Cathy joyously walking hand in hand into the hereafter, is a bit of audience-pleasing idiocy which Wyler was dead set against: Neither he nor stars Olivier and Oberon participated in this scene (the actors were replaced by their stand-ins). Despite this artistic gaffe, Wuthering Heights is a well-nigh perfect example of studio-system moviemaking." - www.allmovie.com

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They won't forget 1937 - An emotionally gripping piece of American history

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IMDB rating: 7,4

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Main Cast: Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Edward Norris, Otto Kruger, Allyn Joslyn, Lana Turner

"This hard-hitting Warner Bros. courtroom drama begins with the usual 'Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental' disclaimer. Filmgoers with long memories, however, recognized Robert Rossen and Aben Kandel's screenplay as a blow-by-blow recreation of the Leo Frank-Mary Phagan case of 1915. Phagan, a 14-year-old employee in a Marietta, GA pencil factory, was found murdered. The bulk of the evidence pointed to a black janitor (who actually confessed to the crime years after the fact), but race-baiting Atlanta newspaper publisher Tom Watson decided to go after Leo Frank, the Northern Jew who owned the factory where Mary worked. 'We can lynch a nigger any time', the politically ambitious Watson is alleged to have said, 'but when do we get a chance to hang a Yankee Jew?' Thanks largely to Watson's 'guilt by headline' campaign, and to Fulton County's cooperative solicitor general, Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death. Georgia Governor John M. Slaton, who all along smelled something fishy in the case, commuted Frank's case to life imprisonment (and was ruined politically as a result). En route to prison, Frank was abducted by a mob and lynched, an incident that boosted the prestige of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.
Aben Kandel dramatized this appalling miscarriage of justice in his novel Death in the Deep South, which served as the basis for They Won't Forget. In Mervyn LeRoy's film version, Lana Turner (in a star-making turn) plays Mary Clay, a teen-aged typing school student who dresses garishly and flirts with every man she meets. Mary is later found murdered; the last person to see her alive was her teacher, recently arrived Northerner Robert Hale (Edward Norris). Once more, a black janitor (played as a superstitious moron by Clinton Rosemond) is the most likely suspect, but the ambitious district attorney (Claude Rains) seems sincere in his belief that Hale is guilty. Once Hale is sentenced to death, the governor, played by Paul Everton, commutes his sentence, serene in the belief that, once his career is finished, he'll be able to retire peacefully (real-life governor Slaton did not go down so benignly).
Except for the removal of the original case's anti-Semitic elements, They Won't Forget is stark, powerhouse filmmaking, one of the best of Warners' 'social protest' films of the 1930s. 25 years would pass before Hollywood would return to Southern racism with To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. Viewed outside its historical context, They Won't Forget succeeds as a motion picture due to the passion of its director Mervyn LeRoy, and the fine performances of Claude Rains, Edward Norris, and Lana Turner. The film's socially conscious screenwriters, Robert Rossen and Abel Kandel, were hardly rewarded for their efforts: Rossen was among the first people blacklisted in the 1950s, while Kandel spent much of that era writing low-budget horror films under a pseudonym.
It was remade as the 1987 TV movie The Murder of Mary Phagan starring Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Peter Gallagher, and Charles S. Dutton (as well as as the unsuccessful 1998 Broadway musical Parade)." - www.allmovie.com

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Kongo 1932 - A tropical human condition story

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IMDB rating: 6,9

Director: William J. Cowen
Main Cast: Walter Huston, Lupe Velez, Conrad Nagel, Virginia Bruce

"A remake of West of Zanibar (1928), this strange, gut-wrenching melodrama set in the African jungles, offers a disturbing portrait of a bitter, crippled and insane megalomaniac who vents his rage via mental torture against all those who get too near. Walter Huston plays the madman who lost the use of his legs during a battle with his nemesis Gordon. The accident happened many years ago and since then Huston has dragged himself about in his jungle home making the lives of those around him waking nightmares. He has terrified the local tribesmen into total submission with his knowledge deadly voodoo (he tells them guns are magical instruments). He is even crueler to his fellow Anglos. A young white woman comes to visit one day. Believing her to be the daughter of his arch rival Gordon, he gleefully embarks upon a heavy reign of psychological abuse until the poor girl is nearly destroyed. For more fun, he gets a new doctor addicted to drugs and of course he can also torment the woman who loves him, Velez. The horror continues until Gordon suddenly shows up. Vengeful Huston quickly picks a fight and during the ensuing struggle Gordon tells Huston a bitter truth, one that leads Huston to a horrible realization." - www.allmovie.com

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Border law 1931 - A well paced early sound Western

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IMDB rating: 6,2

Director: Louis King
Main Cast: Buck Jones, Lupita Tovar, Jim Mason

"Border Law, directed by Henry King's less remembered brother Louis, remains a fine B-Western typical of its stalwart leading man Buck Jones. Although Columbia Pictures had only begun its slow climb out of Gower Gulch in 1931, the Jones westerns were better-than-average, and awarded more care than most of their rivals. With old-timer Frank Rice as a not too annoying comic relief and Lupita Tovar as a very fetching saloon belle, Border Law makes a pleasant hour of so of juvenile sagebrush action, Columbia style. The film is also a welcome chance to see the other, American, James Mason in action. His credits always confused with the later British star of the same name, Mason was the typical suave B-Western 'Boss Villain', complete with pencil-thin mustache and supercilious airs. In films since the 1910s, Mason enjoyed his best years in the early sound era, when his villainy often added an air of true menace to an otherwise lethargic B-Western." - www.allmovie.com

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