James Burke

Period music, film clips and newsreel footage combined into a visual exploration of the American entertainment industry during the Great Depression.

Insurance salesman Milford Farnsworth sells a man a life policy only to discover that the man in question is the outlaw Jesse James. Milford is sent t...

A woman marries a man for his wealth, then concocts a plan to kill him, take his money, and run off with her lover. Things go wrong when they accident...

Swindlers con a lunchroom clerk into doing them a favor, supposedly on behalf of the FBI.

Three struggling theatrical performers meet a famous songwriter who is trying to convince a wealthy oilman to finance a musical he is scripting, promi...

Rip-roaring big star, big budget semi-historical story about cattle baron Devereaux Burke, who is enlisted by an aging Andrew Jackson to dissuade Sam ...

Marshal Landry captures outlaw Girard and bringing him in finds a woman and two children, the only survivors of an Indian attack. Later, transferring ...

A Justice of the Peace performed weddings a few days before his license was valid. A few years later five couples learn they have never been legally m...

Jim Vesser and his team of railroading men try to build a rail line through a mountain pass, while a group of less scrupulous construction workers sab...

John Vickers has spent eight years hunting for the three men who murdered the woman he loved. He finds one, Woodson, and kills him in a gunfight, but ...

Foreign correspondent Pete Garvey has 5 days to win back his former fiancée, or he'll lose the orphans he adopted.

Career gambler Dan Milner agrees to a $50,000 deal to leave the USA for Mexico, only to find himself entangled with fellow guests at a luxurious resor...

Raton Pass is a curious western based on the rules of Community Property. Dennis Morgan and Patricia Neal portray a recently married husband and wife,...

The cavalry defend a small town from indians.

Harriet O'Malley tries to solve a murder aboard a train en route to New York.

Years after the death of her husband, Kitty McNeil takes her son and flees from the home of her wealthy and controlling mother-in-law. Alone and joble...

A group of copper miners, Southern veterans, are terrorized by local rebel-haters, led by deputy Lane Travis. The miners ask stage sharpshooter Johnny...

In her attempts to make a splash on Broadway, a lively would-be-actress lands herself in hot water with the mob.

After straight-arrow district attorney Joseph Foster says in frustration that he would sell his soul to bring down a local mob boss, a smooth-talking ...

A young girl holds a special place in her heart for a place called Shamrock HIll, and she tries to stop it from having a television station built on i...

A magazine's staff, including bickering ex-lovers Linda and Carey, cover an Indiana wedding, which goes slightly wrong.

A boy tries to protect his dog, a German shepherd that served with U.S. Army forces after it begins attacking strangers several years after the war.

Thinking he may have caused the death of his commanding officer Captain Daniels in Tunisia, Rocky visits Daniels' widow. She falls for him, he falls f...

Eddie Tayloe's grandfather leaves him six thousand dollars and the money belt it came in, freeing Tayloe to leave his dull newspaper job in Texas and ...

Monte Hale is a stagecoach driver for Jed Baker's stage-line. Jed believes his brother, Ralph, is behind the many hold-ups of his stagecoaches but has...

Stroud, a crime magazine's crusading editor has to post-pone a vacation with his wife, again, when a glamorous blonde is murdered and he is assigned b...

Charley Davis, against the wishes of his mother, becomes a boxer. As he becomes more successful the fighter becomes surrounded by shady characters, in...

Roustabout Stanton Carlisle joins a traveling carny and unsuccessfully schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena and her alcoho...

Society sleuths Nick and Nora Charles investigate a murder in a jazz club.

The Gas House Kids, the very poor man's Bowery Boys, head for Hollywood.

Upset at a new Broadway musical mocking The Nine Muses, Greek goddess Terpsichore comes down to earth to land a part in the show and change it.

Private Detective Philo Vance gets involved with a succession of murders and a mystery concerning the disappearance of an emerald that has been smuggl...

Comedy about an Irish father, who enjoys betting on horses, who keeps interfering with his daughter's romance with a serviceman.

"Wicked" Lily Bishop joins a wagon train to California, led by Michael Fabian and Johnny Trumbo, but news of the Gold Rush scatters the train. When Jo...

In 1834, Charles Stewart (Alan Ladd), the spoiled, dissolute son of a shipping magnate, is shanghaied aboard the Pilgrim, one of his father's own ship...

Slip (Leo Gorcey), Sach (Huntz Hall), Bobby (Bobby Jordan), Whitey (William Benedict) and Chuck (David Gorcey) unsuccessfully try to sell a dilapidate...

Arriving at Medicine Bow, eastern schoolteacher Molly Woods meets two cowboys, irresponsible Steve and the "Virginian," who gets off on the wrong foot...

A young bride tries to rebuild her life after she learns her husband has been killed in the war.

Murder occurs when several of the most popular radio personalities of the '40s converge on a desert resort.

A painter suffering from amnesia convinces himself that he's a famous bandleader and finds romance with a pretty singer. Comedy with music.

A crook becomes the victim of a crafty card player who works for the District Attorney.

Two sailors on shore leave head out for four days of partying – only to become involved in the affairs of an aspiring singer and her precocious nephew...

A trumpet player in a radio orchestra falls asleep during a commercial and dreams he's Athanael, an angel deputized to blow the Last Trumpet at exactl...

Cass Brown is about to marry for the second time; his first marriage, to Isabel was annulled. But when he discovers that Isabel just had their baby, C...

Gillespie has to finally choose his official assistant, or Red and Lee are going to kill themselves in competition. So, it's another diagnosis competi...

No relation to the 1950 Frank Capra film of the same name, the 1943 Technicolor musical Riding High is a by-the-numbers vehicle for Dorothy Lamour and...

An Eddie Cantor look-alike organizes an all-star show to help the war effort.

A young songwriter leaves his Kentucky home to try to make it in New Orleans. Eventually he winds up in New York, where he sells his songs to a music ...

A private detective and a blonde acquaintance whom he has rescued from a misdirected murder charge, discover a body in his beachside cottage; only it...

A woman rents a gloomy basement apartment in Greenwich Village thinking it will provide the perfect atmosphere for her mystery writer husband to creat...

Drama about military doctors and nurses during wartime.

Detective Ellery Queen aids Free Dutch agents battle Nazi spies over a prize of industrial diamonds.

A washed up baseball player returns to Brooklyn to manage his old team but an old sports reporter is eager to prove that he is a loser.

A man is framed for embezzlement and runs off to San Francisco. His wife hires Ellery Queen to try and track him down before the police get to him.

Larry Haines, a mediocre vaudeville entertainer, boards a train for Los Angeles. Aboard, he meets an attractive, blonde British agent carrying a coded...

Amateur sleuth Ellery Queen learns the truth about a businessman's two long-lost daughters.

Broadway gamblers stumble across a plan by Nazi saboteurs to blow up an American battleship.

The benefactor of the Stack Memorial Hospital dies after an operation. Ellery Queen investigates when it is revealed the cause of death was murder by ...

A private detective takes on a case that involves him with three eccentric criminals, a beautiful liar, and their quest for a priceless statuette.

Several days after one of his company's dams burst, ruining the life savings of several investors, a shady power company president is found stabbed to...

A sudden windfall has unexpected consequences on a working class girl during the Great Depression.

Comedy of a North Woods clam-digger who journeys to Detroit to earn money for outboard motor by working on auto assembly line.

Jimmy, the owner of a failed music shop, goes to work with his uncle, the owner of a food factory. Before he gets there, he befriends an Irish family ...

Ventriloquist and world traveler Gordon Cobb is murdered by a gang of jewel thieves. Baffled by the contradictory clues, Inspector Queen asks his son,...

Famed detective and crime novelist Ellery Queen solves a case involving the suspicious death of a rich man whose inheritors fight over his estate.

Nellie Kelly, the daughter of Irish immigrants, patches up differences between her father and maternal grandfather while rising to the top on Broadway...

An aspiring playwright finds himself an overnight Broadway success.

A mild-mannered insurance salesman gets mixed up with gangsters.

Paul Kriza is a cashier of a bank in a small town, and the happy husband of Anna and the father of four children. He is sent to New York to deliver so...

The Saint Takes Over, released in 1940 by RKO Pictures, was the fifth motion picture featuring the adventures of Simon Templar, a.k.a. "The Saint" the...

Radio star Jack Benny, intending to stay in New York for the summer, is forced by the needling of rival Fred Allen to prove his boasts about roughing ...

A wise-guy reporter and a tippling sportswriter acquire an unclaimed trunk with a corpse inside.

On a cruise ship from Honolulu to San Francisco, the famous Chinese detective encounters four more murders while trying to figure out the murder of a ...

A man's ex-wife is found murdered, and he finds himself to be the prime suspect.

An orphan whose father has been killed by bandits inherits a mine. Cisco saves the mine and the child and also finds the child's real mother.

Jeff Wilson, the owner of a small circus, owes his partner Carter $10,000. Before Jeff can pay, Carter's accomplices steal the money so he can take ov...

Joel & Garda Sloan, a husband and wife detective team, who also sell rare books in New York, take a vacation to Seaside City. At Seaside, Joel's pal, ...

When three brothers join the Foreign Legion to escape a troubled past, they find themselves trapped under the command of a sadistic sergeant deep in t...

Young Pud is orphaned and left in the care of his aged grandparents. The boy and his grandfather are inseparable. Gramps is concerned for Pud's future...

In this epic Western, Wade Hatton, a wagon master turned sheriff, tames a cow town at the end of a railroad line.

Sweeney Bliss, champion mule raiser in Missouri, takes his prize mule Samson to London, where the British government is trying to decide whether to bu...

Promises of happier times dawn for the financially distressed Patterson family when father Sweeney and brother-in-law Archibald "Doc" Finney win a $15...

Rose Pierce is discontent with her life as the wife of a small town plumber and has visions of becoming a wealthy socialite. Consequently, when her sm...

Shopgirl Mary Turner, sentenced to prison for someone else's theft, is released and takes revenge upon those who wronged her in powerful but lawful wa...

Suave private detective Simon "The Saint" Templar arrives in San Francisco and meets Val, a woman whose police inspector father killed himself after b...

In 1915 France, Major Brand commands the 39th Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps. The young airmen go up in bullet-riddled "crates" and the casualty r...

Annie (Ann Gillis), an orphan, (based on Harold Gray's comic strip but who is at no point in the film called 'Little Orphan Annie), is befriended by a...

When the murdered body discovered by beautiful, vivacious socialite Melsa Manton disappears, police and press label her a prankster until she proves t...

Wonder Pictures has been striking out at the box office lately, causing the seedy PR man to involve main star Annabel in ever outrageous stunts for pu...

Alice, the only relatively normal member of the eccentric Sycamore family, falls in love with Tony Kirby, but his wealthy banker father and snobbish m...

Reporter Nicholas Ranson is jubilant when, on 17 Dec 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright take their first airplane flight. ...

Falling in love with the voice of Broadway chanteuse Margaret Garret, cocksure young tycoon Daniel Brewster decides to rescue the star from her hectic...

When headstrong pilot Bill Kellogg disobeys orders and takes a plane to photograph potential landing fields in uncharted Latin American country, he en...

Raised in seclusion to be the epitome of mental, physical and moral perfection, Gerald Beresford Wicks is resigned to following his grandmother's wish...

A spoiled playboy is forced to leave town to avoid the press, which latches on to his statement, while tipsy, that he will give away his fortune. He d...

Mobster "Baby Face" Martin returns home to visit the New York neighborhood where he grew up, dropping in on his mother, who rejects him because of his...

The setting is a small town in 1870s Pennsylvania. Sally Waterson and her father have stopped in town with their traveling medicine show, but when the...

In Vienna, a new jazz club featuring American trumpeter Buzzy Bellew threatens the existence of its neighbor, the Waltz Palace, run by Franz Strauss a...

A man convicted of murder escapes from jail and hides out in the home of a small town newspaper publisher who has befriended him. She knows who the re...

A meat inspector sets out to rid his town of payoff deals affecting the quality of meat being sold to the public.

A young girl and her uncle who run a traveling medicine show lend their efforts to salvage an old plantation.

Duke and Jeanie Benson, an outlaw couple hiding out under assumed names. Duke realizes that he has a winning sweepstake ticket and will win $150,000 i...

Cowboy Jeff Larabee returns from the east and meets Doris Halloway, a young girl, that he regards as a vagabond, till he learns that she's the owner o...

Harry Ashton is a superstitious gambling house owner, who relies on sprigs of heliotrope as his good luck charm. One day, Harry catches his wife, Cleo...

Julia and Hap are a dance team. He drinks and gambles, she succeeds for a while with the help of producer Alan.

A San Francisco singer flees Chinatown on murder charges and poses as a missionary in Alaska.

Dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Marines after starting a barroom brawl that gets his leatherneck buddy "Tubby" Waters killed, hothead "Woody" Da...

Peyton Wells (Ben Lyon) rescues Judy Jones (Joan Marsh) from a very dull young man, at a sedate party given for her by her multi-millionaire grandfath...

During the American Civil War, Valette Bedford waits patiently for her husband Duncan Bedford, to return home, praying that she will not become a wido...

As California gubernatorial candidate Burton is about to cast his vote a truck crashes into the polling booth, critically injuring him and his opponen...

Southern California's Hotel Coronado caters to and is frequented by members of the social upper-crust. Although she lives on the wrong side of the San...

A thief on the run dumps some hot money in Thelma and Patsy's lap.

An aging star finally recognizes the truth when she is replaced in her new movie by a girl from the chorus.

After an argument with his newspaper's city editor, press-photographer Jimmy Hudson quits his job and takes up free-lancing as a street-photographer f...

Two people go to Coney Island to find romance and wind up in jail.

A scatterbrained heiress opens her home to a succession of unemployed actors and vaudeville performers, then decides to produce her own show, much to ...

A con artist attends a reunion in his hometown and discovers that his former classmates are trying to trick an old millionaire into returning to build...

Jack Thornton has trouble winning enough at cards for the stake he needs to get to the Alaska gold fields. His luck changes when he pays $250 for Buck...

Hard-working, henpecked Ambrose Ambrose Wolfinger takes off from work to go to a wrestling match with catastrophic consequences.

A taxi driver travels to Venice and poses as a gondolier to land a radio singing job.

A college economics professor's "radical" ideas about capitalism get him fired. When he decides to put those ideas into practice, he finds that they a...

A farmer tries to convince a girl to leave her life on a canal boat to live with him on his farm.

Though he was protecting her when he accidentally killed a man, Mabel Kane (Thelma Todd) refuses to testify on behalf of her dance partner Jerry Davis...

A mother sends her young son to military school so he won't find out she's been sentenced to a prison term on a framed fraud charge.

A young pacifist after refusing on principle to defend her sweetheart's honor and being banished in disgrace, joins a riverboat troupe as a singer, ac...

In this comedy of an Englishman stranded in a sea of barbaric Americans, Marmaduke Ruggles, a gentleman's gentleman and butler to an Earl is lost in a...

Hard-boiled newspaper reporter Larry Doyle (Robert Armstrong) goes a bit too far in celebrating a work bonus and wakes up on a train bound for St. Lou...

After a jeweler hires a private detective to help him find $50,000 missing from his company, he is murdered while attending a society party; and the p...

Newly arrived in the nineteenth century court of Emperor Francis 1st of Austria Countess Valerie happens to overhear a young pianist and advises him t...

To improve her image, a fan dancer "adopts" an old woman to be her mother.

In this early film adaptation of the classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, young Jim Hawkins is caught up with the pirate Long John Silver in searc...

Asaph (Charles Ruggles) is a meek, mild-mannered homebody who occasionally shows some backbone to his prudish, overbearing boss, only to be beaten dow...

An aspiring young writer becomes infatuated with a successful romance novelist, who realizes his life as a philandering Lothario is suddenly threatene...

Big Steve Halloway, gambler and proprietor of New York's Horseshoe Cabaret, is in desperate need of money. He arranges for his fellow bookies, especia...

An heiress abandons an out-of-work husband, two sons and a lovesick daughter.

A temperamental Broadway producer trains an untutored actress, but when she becomes a star, she proves a match for him.

During the 18th century, German noblewoman Sophia Frederica, who would later become Catherine the Great, travels to Moscow to marry the dimwitted Gran...

A maid has romances with a two-timer, a boozing millionaire and the master of the house.

Well respected local good guy, "Feet" Samuels finds himself heavily in debt due to an uncharacteristic gambling binge. Feet decides the only way to se...

The wealthy president of a big railroad, who's beginning to crumble under the combined pressure of business, personal and physical problems, meets up ...

On the wharfs of San Francisco, saloon girl Toy, also known as Mary, lives over Mother Bright's bar. When Como Murphy, a fugitive from the law, hides ...

A businesslike syndicate runs all the gambling joints in town; least profitable is honest Mike Lee's. Under pressure to allow cheating, Mike "walks ou...

A runaway heiress makes a deal with the rogue reporter trailing her but the mismatched pair end up stuck with each other when their bus leaves them be...

The Whinneys share expenses for their trip to Hollywood with George and Gracie and their great Dane. A clerk in Whinney's bank has put fifty thousand ...

A professor tires of the direction his life is going and wants to move west, but his girlfriend doesn't understand why he is so dissatisfied.

Popular monarch Queen Christina of Sweden must choose between love and loyalty to her nation when she unexpectedly falls for a Spanish envoy.

An ex-gang member tries to resist his old cohorts' criminal influence after he suddenly becomes a Hollywood movie star.

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broke...

A glamorous film star rebels against the studio, her pushy press agent and a family of hangers-on.

In Kentucky just after the Civil War, the Hayden-Colby feud leads to Jed Colby being sent to prison for 15 years for murder. The Haydens head for Neva...

When she can't support her illegitimate child, an abandoned young woman puts her up for adoption and pursues a career as a torch singer. Years later, ...

A college professor and the school's star football player are both rivals for the same beautiful coed.

A hospital surgeon (James Dunn) protects a mystery woman (Gloria Stuart) who knows too much about a card-game murder.

A couple of down-and-out British aristocrats buy an American roadhouse.

Joe and Lucky travel around New England painting barns in exchange for an advertisement on one side. The meet Madge, who is cruelly treated by a her f...

1930s Thalians Club comedy.