Grey Market Cinema: Nevada (1927)

Gunslinger Jim “Nevada” Lacy (Gary Cooper) successfully springs his sidekick Cash Burridge (Ernie Adams) from the Lineville hoosegow, and the two men decide to emulate the heroes of TV’s Alias Smith and Jones by taking the straight-and-narrow for a change.  They find their salvation in the tiny hamlet of Winthrop, “a quiet, calm, peaceful place”—but no sooner have they…

Buried Treasures: Frontier Gal (1945)

Johnny Hart (Rod Cameron) comes a-ridin’ into the town of Red Gulch after successfully eluding a posse…and no sooner has he entered the town saloon when he’s engaged in a barroom brawl.  (It will not take us too long to suss out that Monsieur Hart has anger management issues.)  His attentions are quickly drawn toward the “Boss…

Thoroughly MODern Alley: Victory (1919)/The Wicked Darling (1919)

In December of 1914, I joined what eventually numbered nearly 100 contributors on Indiegogo to raise money for a Manufactured-on-Demand (MOD) program at Flicker Alley, a small independent home video company “born out of a passion for cinematic history and a desire to bring filmmakers and films from out of the past to new audiences with renewed recognition.”  What…

Grey Market Cinema: The Light That Failed (1939)

Richard “Dickie” Heldar (Ronald Colman) has harbored a desire to be an artist ever since he was a youngster (Ronald Sinclair)—explaining to his girlfriend Maisie (Sarita Wooton) that while he can’t seem to pass any of his classes he does possess an aptitude for caricaturing his teachers.  Maisie has similar ambitions, and though her guardians have…

The Colleen and the Minstrel Boy: The Bride’s Play (1922)

In May of this year, I joined 158 additional Kickstarter backers to raise funds for the restoration of The Bride’s Play—a 1922 feature film starring the legendary Marion Davies, released in the same year as her breakthrough picture, When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922).  (Knighthood was the object of another Kickstarter project in late March, and successfully reached its initial goal within…

From the DVR: Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933)

A woman practicing medicine?  Ridiculous!  Out of the question!  Yes, there was a time when folks thought along those lines, before it finally registered in the gray matter of those backwards-thinking people that wimmin could do more than wear white starched uniforms and be sexless tormentors of hospital patients.  But for the time being, this “no female doctorin’” is the kind…