Personal Column

The real-life deportation of gangster Lucky Luciano was the inspiration for this romanticized and slightly crackbrained crime drama. Jeff Chandler plays the Luciano counterpart, who once he arrives in Italy renews his criminal activities.

Genial shopkeeper Philip has to endure the constant nagging of a shrewish wife (Rosalind Ivan) while he secretly yearns for a pretty young stenographer. When the henpecking gets to be too much, Philip murders his wife and manages to make her death look like an accident. A ruthless blackmailer and a low-key detective both discover Philip's secret, and he has to decide which of them poses the more dangerous threat.

A mystery woman is a murder suspect's only alibi for the night of his wife's death.

A man (Jon Hall) tracks his kidnapped bride (Maria Montez) to a jungle island, where her twin is the high priestess.

The story of Madame Leroy-Gomez, a wealthy divorcee living in Paris. Together with her servant Antoine she schemes to marry off her unmarried children and fix any issues that arise for those already married.

In this romance, a jilted lawyer joins the French Foreign Legion to help him forget his faithless love. While in the desert he espies a village beauty who is the exact double of his true-love.

Two journalists from different papers are looking for the same story. They want to know, who a group of gangsters getting young women from Europe to South America, where they are forced to work in brothels. But the gangsters have their own battels against each over, so the journalists can escape the danger, in which they've brought themselves.

Dorothea Angermann the daughter of a clergyman is accused of the murder of her husband, a brutal man that she was obliged to marry because she was pregnant and he was the father of the baby.

Robert Siodmak's second solo directorial effort was the breathless comedy-melodrama Der Mann, Der Seinen Moerder Sucht (Looking For His Murderer) In the face of ever-mounting debts, Heinz Ruhmann arranges for his own murder to be committed within the next 12 hours. During this period, Ruhmann falls in love and gains a whole new lease on life. Frantically, he seeks out the man whom he has hired to bump him off -- only to find out that the latter has sold his "contract" to another fellow -- who in turn has sold it to a third party. Eventually, the whole mess is wrapped up with a Keystone-like car chase. Famed composer Friedrich Hollander shows up in a minor role, complete with patently phony mustache. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Hella lives in a boarding house and has various romantic adventures before settling down with vacuum cleaner salesman Winkler.