Carol Vinson is a showgirl turned gambling house hostess, flirting with customers and encouraging them to gamble recklessly.  Her casino boss also dabbles in stolen goods.  When she helps her boss evade a police raid, a local detective decides to make it his mission to hound Carol until he catches her doing something illegal.  She skips out with her best friend Violet (Ann Miller) and Violet's boyfriend Eddie. They travel from town to town looking for vaudeville work and Detective Cramer follows them putting the kibosh on every potential job by spreading the word of their bad character. The trio are at rock bottom financially when they attend a revival show promising free coffee.  Carol suffers an epiphany hearing the coins hit the collection plate. She believes that with her knowledge of showmanship she could make good money in the revival racket.  Newly blonde and adopting the name "Sister Connie", Carol together with her friends starts to clean up on the revival circuit, planting "cripples" in the audience so that she can heal them.  Cramer finally tracks her down again but Carol preempts his accusations by publicly acknowledging her previous life of shame as further proof that her current spirituality is real and accessible to anyone.  Things start to go wrong as Carol is forced to make real contributions to a children's charity to maintain her image and a jewel thief from her previous life wants her aid in stealing a necklace from the patron of this charity.  Add to all this that her scheduled "cripple" fails to show up for one of her shows and she accidentally heals someone who really uses crutches. In the end she turns to good, confesses her sins and is forgiven by everyone, including Detective Cramer.

Tarnished Angel trailer on TCM

Ann Miller auditions for a job

Sister Connie's Revival Show

When did they stop having phones like this?

This is the story of a boy raised in austerity in an Ohio frontier town right before the Civil War.  His father is the town preacher and is poorly compensated. The boy is resentful of their poverty, and grows up to be a resentful man.  This resentful man is played by Jimmy Stewart. He finally leaves home to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor, and callously asks his mother to sell all her family heirlooms to cover his costs.  He rarely writes and only goes home for his father's funeral. He goes straight from medical school to serve in the War, still only writing to his mother when he needs money.  After his mother writes the President to try to find out if her son is alive or dead, Lincoln calls him to Washington to berate him for not writing his mother more often.

This is the first of four movies where Beulah Bondi plays Jimmy Stewart's mother, the last being It's a Wonderful Life. Other familiar faces: Walter Huston as his dad, Charles Coburn as the town doctor who inspires him to pursue medicine, Anne Rutherford as his hometown girl, Gene Lockhart as the janitor in the medical school, Sterling Holloway as the shopkeeper's son.

Charles Coburn, Anne Rutherford, and Jimmy Stewart

Bill is the rich man, Joan is the poor girl, respectively played by Robert Young and Ruth Hussey (the female half of the tabloid journalist team in The Philadelphia Story). Joan is Bill's secretary, and he wants to marry her, but she comes from a tight-knit lower-income family and is afraid that if she marries Bill she will become distant from her family.  Bill decides to allay her fears and prove that he can become part of her family by moving in with them and sleeping on the davenport. Lew Ayres plays the opionated Cousin Henry, and Lana Turner has her biggest role to date as sister Helen.

Familiar face: Marie Blake (Grandmama Addams) as the neighbor.

Marie Blake on the right

Lana Turner

Rich Man, Poor Girl trailer on TCM

Start Cheering is mostly a vaudeville revue.  Jimmy Durante is the main comic, with the Three Stooges and some other acts popping in and out periodically.  They devote substantial time to a guy who humorously eats cigarettes and paper packaging.

Here's the plot:  Ted Crosley is a movie star who has had great success playing college football heroes.  At the peak of his career, he decides to chuck it all and actually attend college.  Crosley's manager (Walter Connolly) along with his bumbling assistant (Jimmy Durante) plot to sabotage Crosley's college career so that he will return to the movies.  The sabotage attempt is doomed, however, because the Dean of the college has misspent funds on a football stadium and has only barely convinced the board of directors not to fire him, hanging his entire career on "football star" Crosley coming to school.  So despite numerous frame-ups and circumstantial evidence of wrong-doing on Crosley's part, the Dean always laughs and looks the other way.


Interesting note: Charles Starrett, who plays Ted Crosley, was on the Dartmouth football team and it was this that got him his first acting job playing an extra in The Quarterback (1926).

Familiar face: Broderick Crawford as the BMOC.

Jimmy Durante and Walter Connolly

The Three Stooges

Dancing the Susie Q as part of the Big Apple

Hey, this one is in color!

This is the third movie named Valley of the Giants based on the 1918 novel Valley of the Giants by Peter B. Kyne. In it, a California sequoia lumberman must defend his land and trees from unscrupulous lumber speculators.  The good guy is played by Wayne Morris, the bad guy is played by Charles Bickford.  There is a runaway caboose and a dam that must be dynamited.

Here's an interesting thing: There is a 1952 movie starring Kirk Douglas named The Big Trees that is based on this movie (not on the Kyne novel).  In my 1938 movie, Alan Hale plays a rough and tumble lumberjack; in the 1952 movie, Alan Hale Jr. plays a similar character.

Familiar faces: Jerry Colonna performs in the gambling house; Frank McHugh as a gambler; Donald Crisp as a generous banker.

Jerry Colonna

Alan Hale stares down Frank McHugh

Valley of the Giants trailer on TCM

Merle Oberon is the daughter of a wealthy politician, and Gary Cooper is a cowboy with a traveling rodeo. Merle is bored and convinces her maids to take her on a blind date, and she ends up eloping with Gary, to whom she has lied about her circumstances (claiming to be a lady's maid who supports her alcoholic father and younger sisters).  Merle is sweet always but Gary turns nasty when faced with deceit.

Stretch suddenly has an urge to find the captain so they can get married

Familiar faces: Harry Davenport as indulgent Uncle Hannibal, Patsy Kelly as a maid in Palm Beach, Walter Brennan as one of two sidekicks for Gary Cooper.

Ronald Reagan plays attorney Neil Dillon in maybe not his first leading role, but certainly one of his first. It is a solid B-movie as the evocative title would suggest. Jane Bryan plays Connie Heath who (through a series of unfortunate coincidences) is accused of a series of crimes. Here's how it went: Connie's father rules his household with an iron fist and forbids Connie from buying a new dress to go dancing. Connie's co-worker Hilda convinces her to go out on the sly and loans her a dress to wear. Hilda is a fun-loving rule-beaker, and has actually "borrowed" the dress from the dry cleaners where both girls work.  At the Hula Club, Neil is out with his girlfriend Susan Hayward who realizes that Connie is wearing her dress. To make matters worse, the dress is damaged during the evening. The next day Connie is accused and fired. Hilda refuses to 'fess up and leaves town.  Neil turns out to be the attorney for the insurance company responsible for replacing the dress. He makes good the loss out of his own pocket so that the insurance company will not press charges against Connie, to whom he has taken a shine. Connie decides to strike out on her own in a different town where she hopes to earn enough to pay Neil back. In this different town, she runs across Hilda and stops to give her a dressing down. Unfortunately, Hilda is at that moment playing getaway driver for a bank heist, and Connie gets caught up in that. Hilda and her bank robber boyfriend are sent to prison, but Connie manages to convince the probation board that she is relatively innocent and is given probation. She travels back to her hometown where she finds that Neil is now Deputy District Attorney, and they become engaged. Hilda is eventually released on parole and returns to blackmail Connie. Hilda's boyfriend escapes from prison and causes even more trouble. Things turn out okay in the end.

"She's wearing my dress!"

Look out! Your dress is caught in the taxi door!

Familiar face: John Hamilton (Perry White to George Reeves's Superman) as the Police Chief

John Hamilton with the accused women