Edward F. Cline
Monogram's Bringing Up Father series, based on the popular comic strip by George McManus, hit a high point of sorts with 1950's Jiggs and Maggie Out West. Joe Yule Sr. (Mickey Rooney's father) and Rene Riano are perfectly cast as nouveau riche Jiggs and Maggie, who head thataway when Maggie inherits a goldmine. As usual, Maggie spends her time trying to climb the frontier social ladder, while down-to-earth Jiggs is more interested in finding a plate of corned beef and cabbage.
Maggie is resentful of being pointed out and laughed at in public because she resembles the cartoon character in the George McManus comic strip "Bringing Up Father." She visits McManus in his studio office and tries to persuade him to stop drawing the syndicated comic-strip. He tells her he will...in 1959. Maggie, not getting any younger, retains counsel and takes McManus to court.
Maggi continues her forever-ever efforts to crash Manhattan's top society, while Jiggs still mingles with his old construction cronies at the bar of Dinty Moore on 10th Avenue.
Based on the comic strip by George McManus about the adventures of the social-climbing Maggie and her long-suffering husband Jiggs. In this film, one of Maggie's society friends enlists her help in evicting an undesirable tenant, who turns out to be Jiggs.
Ole and Chic are comedians employed in a nightclub, but seeking to be released from their contracts to take a better job. But the prissy nightclub owner, B. J. Wagonhorn, refuses to let them go. In reprisal, they start hurling insults at the nightclub patrons… a ploy that soon has them facing multiple lawsuits… to the delight of three struggling attorneys, Charlie Rodman, Bettty Wilson and Arthur Lane.
Two show-business wannabees get their big chance to show off their big-time act and talents in a nightclub,and bomb. Othet acts come on---endlessly---and do well, but the kids will be back.
The Andrews Sisters take a hiatus from show business to aid the war effort. They take on jobs at a pipe-organ plant now making artillery shells. But they still find time for plenty of singing and dancing.
Two zanies get mixed up with a Southern colonel, his beautiful daughters, a nightclub and a haunted mansion.
While husband Tim is away during World War II, Anne Hilton copes with problems on the homefront. Taking in a lodger, Colonel Smollett, to help make ends meet and dealing with shortages and rationing are minor inconveniences compared to the love affair daughter Jane and the Colonel's grandson conduct.
When a hat-check girl writes a story based on the life of a famous comedian, she helps to reunite a father and son who haven't spoken to each other for years.
The swinging Andrews Sisters provide the musical interludes and romance in this western. They play a trio of WW II era ranchers. That they are so good at running it proves terrible surprise for a ranch hand who has just returned home after serving in the Navy.
A manufacturer and an impresario (who has promised some young people he will stage their show) are twin brothers causes a lot of confusion when the manufacturer is mistaken for his no-money brother.
Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson are Broadway stars who return to Universal Studios to make another movie. The mere mention of Olsen and Johnson's names evacuates the studio and terrorizes the management and personnel. Undaunted, the comedians hire an assistant director and unknown talent, and set out to make their own movie.
The former members of a vaudeville team meet up again in a defense plant during WW II.
The Andrews Sisters headline this musical. They play the lead act at a popular nightclub. The trouble begins when they hire a few students from a financially foundering dance school for their newest production. One of the dancers, a rich young socialite, desperately wants to be in it too, but her prurient maiden aunts refuse to allow her to disgrace their family by becoming a common chorine. She and the club owner (who must have the aunt's permission because the girl is underage) try to convince them, but it's not easy.
A hillbilly moonshiner enlists in the army. Monogram Pictures' comedy was inspired by the then-popular comic strip character.
The film tells the story of army recruits following basic training, with the Andrew Sisters attending USO dances. The film is a mixture of comedy and songs.
J. P. Courtney wants to update the music on the radio program he sponsors, but his wife, Agatha Courtney, is the final authority and addicted to the classics and won't allow him to replace Professor Bistell and his symphonic orchestra. Conspiring with his daughter Sue and her friends, Marvo the Great, the Andrews Sisters, Anne Payne and bandleader Woody Herman, they devise a sabotage plot that gets rid of Professor Bistell, and a new sound is soon heard on the program.
The story takes place at a summer theater in the Berkshire Mountains, where heroine Joan Barry (Carol Bruce) is staging a Broadway-bound musical comedy. Only one problem: two guest stars are shot and killed on two successive evenings, right in front of the audience. Hoping to solve the mystery, detective William Demarest demands that everyone -- actors and theatergoers alike -- return the following weekend to restage the show. But with no major performer willing to assume the fatal guest-star slot, Joan is forced to hire the Three Jolly Jesters (Al, Harry and Jimmy Ritz), Manhattan washroom attendants with showbiz aspirations.
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is a 1941 film about a man who wants to sell a film story to Esoteric Studios. On the way he gets insulted by little boys, beat up for ogling a woman, and abused by a waitress. W. C. Fields' last starring role in a feature-length film.
A young couple buy a bankrupt vaudeville booking agency, and try to make it a success.
A young man in a small town wins $5000 in a radio contest. He goes to New York City to propose to his girlfriend, but gets mixed up with a crooked attorney and two con men...
A comedy about a man who tries to avoid giving up the $10,000,000 trust he's been administering so well that there's hardly any money left.
Victorian melodrama gets a big send-up in this spoof production of the old play "The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved." The play within the movie is the old one where evil villain Cribbs schemes to get his lusty clutches on the heroine by driving her naive husband to alcoholic ruin. Luckily, a temperance lecturer is on hand to set things straight, as is the great Buster Keaton as the drunkard's brother.
Set in the American Old West of the 1880s, Miss Flower Belle Lee (Mae West) is on her way to visit relatives out west. While she is traveling on a stagecoach a masked bandit on horseback holds up the stage for its shipment of gold. As he makes his getaway with the gold, he takes Flower Belle with him. Flower Belle then walks into town under suspicion of being in collusion with the bandit.
Egbert Sousé becomes an unexpected hero when a bank robber falls over a bench he's occupying. Now considered brave, Egbert is given a job as a bank guard. Soon, he is approached by charlatan J. Frothingham Waterbury about buying shares in a mining company. Egbert persuades teller Og Oggilby to lend him bank money, to be returned when the scheme pays off. Unfortunately, bank inspector Snoopington then makes a surprise appearance.
Fields plays "Larsen E. Whipsnade", the owner of a shady carnival that is constantly on the run from the law. Whipsnade is struggling to keep a step ahead of foreclosure, and clearly not paying his performers, including Bergen and McCarthy, who try to coax money out of him, or in McCarthy's case, steal some outright.
Breaking The Ice begins while Tommy Martin (Bobby Breen) and his mother, Martha Martin (Dolores Costello) say goodbye to Henry and Reuben Johnson ( John 'Dusty' King and Delmar Watson ). After having stopped by the Mennonite farm, where Tommy and Martha stay with the William and Annie Decker ( Robert Barrat and Dorothy Peterson ), the Johnsons are headed back to their hometown of Goshen. The balance of the film is concerned with both trying to get the necessary train fare and with Tommy clearing his name over a misunderstanding. -Wikipedia
After being nabbed while trying to stow away on board an ocean liner en route to Hawaii, young Bobby Breen sings for his travel fare and, along with sidekick Pua, turns detective to recover stolen naval documents from crooks
Trouble-prone Billy Peck and his gang descend on a traveling circus that has just hit town, and before long their antics are causing the circus owner all kinds of problems.
When a bank is robbed, a not-so-bright teller is wrongly suspected of being part of the holdup team. Comedy.
Hildegarde Withers (ZaSu Pitts) and Inspector Piper (James Gleason) try to solve a murder while attending the opening-night performance of a Broadway show. Comedy-mystery.
Two men running a carnival airplane ride are hired to fly to retrieve what they think are photos for a reporter. Actually, they are retrieving diamonds stolen from a noted gem dealer. As it turns out, their plane crashes on the very estate of the dealer. Thinking the duo are police officers, the dealer offers his home for their convalescence from the accident. Meanwhile, the diamonds have been snatched by a kleptomaniac dog and buried on the estate. When the smugglers track down the pair, they try to convince the dealer that they are officials from an institution from which the two have escaped. Before long, the carnival fellows, the crooks, the gem dealer and his family, along with a platoon of cops, are tearing up the grounds to find where the dog has buried the diamonds.
This wacky vaudeville-style romp casts the irreverent comedy team as feuding co-owners of a drug company, William “Willy” Hobbs (Wheeler) and Claude Augustus Horton (Woolsey), who agree to wrestle each other for the sole ownership of the business. The winner will take the company and the loser must become the other’s valet for a year. But when Hobbs loses, he sends his wife to Florida and schemes to trick Horton. What follows are hilarious hijinks as only Wheeler and Woolsey can pull off!
The star of "Song of the Toreador" receives threatening messages that he will not survive the preview screening of the film. The studio publicist works with the Director, the Producer and the police, to discover who is behind the threats.
Englishwoman falls for dude ranch cowboy but goes back to England when she thinks he's only pretending. But he follows her to England.
A landslide has diverted water from the Baldwin ranch to Cambert's. With their cattle dying, Cambert refuses to let them have any water. Easterner Larry Knight takes a job with the Baldwins and he has a plan to divert the water back to the Baldwin ranch. But Phil, jealous of Kitty's attraction to Larry, lets Cambert know of the scheme.
An Easterner Inherits a cattle ranch, only to discover that thousands of cattle have been stolen. He secretly signs on as a hired hand at his own ranch to discover who's stealing them.
Young boy Bill Peck adores his father and tries to be good, but the arrival of Bill's cousin Horace upsets Bill's plans. Horace's brattish ways result in Bill rather than Horace getting in trouble.
When attacked by two dogs, Joe Gilmore leaves them on the desert to die. Later one of the dogs saves John Blake from drowning. Men arrive claiming the dog is killing their chickens. They want to kill the dog but John convinces them the dog's fate should be determined by a trial.
Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey play a couple of broke, hungry vaudevillians who are holed up in a hotel room with a few (tame) lions. They are hired by a movie producer who wishes to send them and their lions to Africa with a great naturalist, in order to make a jungle picture. An earlier expedition by this same naturalist was a failure, because she is afraid of animals. They all head to Africa and the lions are not mentioned again. Once in the jungle they have to fend off the amorous advances of the naturalist, of a vine-swinging native girl, and of a gorilla. They then run into the fearsome Amazon tribe, made up entirely of nubile females. Eventually they disguise themselves as Amazons to avoid being "loved to death." But these disguises lead to further difficulties when the all-male tribe of Tarzans show up for their annual mating ritual with the Amazons.
A woman convicted of fraud aims to take her revenge on the man who put her inside after being released on parole.
A small country on the verge of bankruptcy is persuaded to enter the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as a means of raising money.
To impress his fiancee's aunt, a young man tries to become king in a small kingdom, but the people there have already crowned one, who has won this honor by gambling. So he plans a coup d'etat. He tries to achieve this with a bomb, but then something goes wrong...
Two fast-talking insurance salesmen meet Mary, who is running away from her wealthy mother, and they agree to help her run a hotel that she owns. When they find out that the hotel is run down and nearly abandoned, they launch a phony PR campaign that presents the hotel as a resort favored by the rich. Their advertising succeeds too well, and many complications soon arise.
Chick Evans is a Marine private in Honolulu, Hawaii. He falls for society girl Delphine Witherspoon, and begins to scheme as to how to win her over.
A coquettish socialite falls for a straight-laced associate in her father's law firm. But she must also fend off the advances of a greedy fortune-hunter and his sister.
The story starts with a prologue set in 1889 in which we see an angry husband murdering his wife's lover. The setting then moves to 1929, just as an antiques dealer Philip Vantine (John St. Polis) has finished moving into the same house where the 1889 murder occurred.
A young girl falls in love with a member of a gang of crooks. She determines to bring the rest of the gang to justice so she can save the man she loves.
When a young man acts foolish, he's either insane, in debt or in love, and there's not much difference! Real estate agent Charles Blaydon is in love and in order to get the father of his sweetheart Kay Weaver to purchase a nearby property he is must fill the vacant house next door. So he does something foolish when he offers a few months rent free to the first group of prospective buyer he finds. However in his eagerness he doesn't suspect that this peculiar group isn't a family looking for a home but actually a gang of robbers on the lam!
A present-day stereotypically-Irish American politician ('Charlie Murray') is vaulted into ancient Greece after receiving a bump on the head.
Ma and Pa Slocum sell up their thriving packed-lunch business (based on Ma's home cooking, Pa's packaging design, and pretty daughter Helen's salesmanship), and move 'uptown' to live the life of the idle rich on the proceeds.
Mack Sennett comedy short subject spoofing filmmaking, with girls, lions, and limburger cheese.
Donald Drake, a deep sea gondolier ex soda jerk, arrives at the All Nation Cafe in Shanghai. The proprietor believes he's a penniless ne'er-do-well - which he is - but he unexpectedly comes into a small windfall. So the proprietor orders slightly rough around the edges Maud and Mollie, two of his American good time girls working their way around the world, to get him to spend all his money while there. As Donald ends up telling the two good time girls his life story - most specifically about the blonde he let slip through his fingers, she who was the love of his life - a few revelations and the errant coin he left at the roulette wheel betting table change his life.
Douglas MacLean stars as The Young Thief, who falls in love with The Girl, played by Sue Carol. Alas, the Girl has been sold into the harem of The Wazir (Albert Prisco), forcing the Thief to sneak into the palace to rescue her.
Let-It-Rain Riley (MacLean) is a devil-may-care Marine sergeant who falls in love with a girl (Shirley Mason) who he assumes to be rich. His rival for the girl's affection is his pal, Kelly (Wade Boteler). The guys find out that the object of their affections is but a modest switchboard operator but she proves to be invaluable when she deciphers a code and discovers that a mail train is about to be robbed.
To make her boyfriend jealous a society girl starts dating a plumber but his sweetheart gets revenge.
The plot has Ben Turpin as the prince of a mythical country who is being forced to wed a princess not of his choosing. In 1947, an outfit headed by J.J.Balaber, called Grand International Pictures, acquired 1,300,000 feet of Mack Sennet films with the intentions of editing 26 short comedies from them. The first of these was a 13 minute short edited from "When a Man's A Prince" and released on June 18,1947 as the first of the "Americana Comedy Film Classic Series."
With her winnings from an essay contest, a waitress gets dolled up and goes to a swanky resort to snag a millionaire husband.
Third release in 'The Smith Family' series of 2-reel comedies. Omar the dog, usually the most sedate member of the Smith family, has a starring role in this episode, digging up the garden and stealing the landlord's hat.
Turpin plays a candidate who poses as the worker's friend but spends hi time buttering up wealthy women and seizing upn any opportunity to womanise.
A pretty harem girl is rescued by a U. S. Navy officer. Whilst fleeing from the guards the girl takes refuge in the rooms of the notorious Rodney St. Clair, an erring Knight, who is proud of his long list of feminine conquests. But the Navy officer again comes to her rescue, and Sir Rodney is left to marry the harem's fattest woman after she puts a love potion in his drink.
Baby Bubbles torments her babysitting grandmother (Sunshine Hart) while her parents enjoy a rare night out at the movies.
Tim Kelly is an orphan who runs away after his orphanage burns down. Presumed to be killed in the fire, he is able to roam the streets of New York freely. He meets Max Ginsberg, an old Jewish junk dealer with rheumatism, and the two strike a partnership and a close friendship.
Timothy and Max are partners in the junk business. They take poor young Mary in as a boarder. Mary gets a job in Nathan's office and falls in love with him, but his mother feels she is beneath Nathan. Nathan faces disaster unless he can corner a particular stock, with which Timothy and Max's room happens to be entirely papered. —Ed Stephan
All the qualified men line up to be chosen, as an heiress advertises that she will marry the man with the most interesting mustache, that marriage which comes with a mansion. John Syrup Soother wins the marriage to who he believes is the heiress, Olive Palmer, a tank of a woman who has lost her beauty with age. But he learns that he his betrothed is not the heiress, Diana Palmer, but her mother. Howson Lotts, a shyster and one of Diana's other suitors, sells John a beach-front house for his new life, that house which is not all that it seems on the surface. In the meantime, others still will do anything to be Diana's betrothed, that choice in which John now has a different but still vested interest.
Ralph Graves and Martin Loback are a streetcar team who hit the high spots one night (the highest spot being dancer Natalie Delys (Natalie Kingston) "who shook a wicked eyebrow". Despite an extremely poor seduction technique ("Hey, girlie, you're great"), Graves starts two-timing his girlfriend Marion (Alice Day) and spending money he cannot afford.
During a tempestuous storm, a lighthouse keeper finds an infant girl who washes ashore tied to some wreckage. He adopts her and they become inseparable. Eventually her real family finds her and wants her to live with them.
Billy Benson has a reputation as a "bad boy" largely due to his habit of winding up in fist fights. Billy is usually fighting to defend his dad's reputation. John Benson is the town ne'er-do-well: a failed inventor who has labored the past 20 years on what he believes is a revolutionary fire extinguisher. Wealthy businessman Walter Howe realizes that it really is a million-dollar idea, and plots...
The rituals of courtship, romantic rivalry and love play out three times as a man vies with a villain for the girl. In the Stone Age, the rivalry is set off by dinosaurs, a turtle used as a ouija board, and a round of golf with stones. In ancient Rome, the men display their brawn through a chariot race, using dogs instead of horses. In contemporary times, the man finds himself overcome by modernity, including a very fragile car.
Buster and Phyllis endure a number of outdoor adventures trying to prove to each other their survival skills. The balloon which lands Buster in the wilderness proves useful later on as their canoe is about go over a waterfall.
In an attempt to forget his lost sweetheart, Buster takes a long trip at the sea when he's caught by pirates.
Buster is falsely accused of breaking a window by a woman and is taken into a courtroom. Thinking that Buster and the woman are engaged, the judge mistakenly marries them and Buster is quickly taken home by the woman to meet her family. At first unwelcoming, the family begins to treat Buster nice when they come to believe that he is going to inherit a large sum of money.
Botany major Buster mistakenly graduates in electrical engineering and is hired to wire a new home.
A butterfly collector unwittingly wanders into an Indian encampment while chasing a butterfly. This tribe has resolved to kill the first white man who enters their encampment because white oil tycoons are trying to force them from their land. The Indian warriors give chase to Keaton, who ingeniously escapes their efforts to kill him. As a result, Keaton eventually becomes accepted by the tribe and given the title, "Little Chief Paleface". He subsequently leads the tribe's effort to stop the oil tycoons from displacing them from their land.
This satirical parody of William S. Hart's melodramatic films finds Buster in the frozen north, "last stop on the subway." He uses a wanted poster as his partner in robbing a gambling house. When he thinks he spies his wife making love to another man he shoots them both only to learn it isn't his cabin after all.
In order to impress the father of a girl he is keen on, Buster goes to the city in search of work. In his letters home he writes of his various jobs which her imagination expands into much nobler ones than those that he is actually attempting.
Buster's handmade boat, The Damfino, is finished and is, of course, too large to get through the basement door. When he drives off with it in tow, the side of his house, then the whole thing, collapses. At the harbor he rides the boat out only to have it sink beneath him. The rest is a series of adventures he and his family have with the restored boat.
Buster is thrown off a train near an amusement park. There he gets a job in a shooting gallery run by the Blinking Buzzards mob. Ordered to kill a businessman, he winds up protecting the man and his daughter by outfitting their home with trick devices.
Buster Keaton is a bank teller who becomes involved with a hold-up, counterfeiters, and a theatrical troupe posing as spooks in a haunted house.
After waking up from his wacky dream, a theater stage hand inadvertently causes havoc everywhere he works.
Buster competes with another farmhand for the love of the farmer's daughter.
The story involves two newlyweds, Keaton and Seely, who receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. The house can be built, supposedly, in "one week." A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates. The movie recounts Keaton's struggle to assemble the house according to this new "arrangement."
A young golfer is mugged by an escaped convict and finds himself in a prison where he foils a jailbreak.
A surrealistic stew of airplanes, tornadoes, trick mirrors, and underwater car repair. Footage was recycled for the studios’ 1920 release Hold Me Tight. (MoMA)
The movie starts out with Marie as The Girl in the Case in love with Neal Burns, “Her Sweetheart.” But her dad wants her to marry someone else (Chester Conklin) and takes her away on vacation to get her away from Her Sweetheart. He follows them, disguised as a widow. There is a genuinely funny scene where Marie is disguised as a man to go meet her boyfriend disguised as a widow, and slapstick happens which results in Chester being found in his underpants with the widow in a barn.
There is harmony in The Café until it is accidentally discovered that lovely Mary has had a fortune left her, whereupon Beery, the proprietor, Trask and Murray, two entertainers, all race to her home with the idea of marrying her.
The dog catcher of the title is arrow-narrow Slim , and his "love" is pert Peggy. Alas, his rival is handsome bow-wow fancier E.R. Ketchum, whose luck with women borders on the fantastic.
A henpecked husband and his wife vacation at a seaside resort. While he's enjoying the view of the local bathing beauties, he has to be careful not to let his wife see him enjoying himself.
Here's a rare 1917 Triangle Keystone, co-starring Slim Summerville, with whom Bobby Dunn would co-star again with later, both with Fox Sunshine comedies in 1920 and a series for Universal in 1924. Glen Cavender also features...
A mild-mannered man's problems with his domineering wife and mother-in-law lead to complications with the law.
Fatty and Al are Minta's suitors. After Fatty sics his dog on him, Al marks Fatty for roughing up by two thugs, but the plan backfires.
A happy young couple become engaged, and soon afterwards they are married. But after their marriage, the husband begins to stay out carousing with his friends, leaving his wife at home with her mother. Then, when the three of them go to the opera together, the husband spots one of his friends in another box. Soon the domestic difficulties reach their peak.
A very young Charley Chase is a starving artist. He does not have much luck stealing fruit from a food vendor's cart. He cannot escape from his landlady, who wants the overdue rent. When a pretty girl shows up, Charley and his downstairs neighbor, who is a weightlifter, compete for her affections.
The disgraceful Reggie Gussle spends a day at the park with his hated wife while trying to steal a lovely girl from her boyfriend.
Largely a typical Keystone flirting-in-the-park one-reeler, this one is differentiated slightly by dressing the players in early nineteenth century garb and having them adopt antiquated manners.
Mabel is pursued by her boss, despite being engaged to his son, in this gender-bending comedy of errors and mistaken identities.
When young Ruth Ambrose ( Viola Dana ) arrives in Action, Maine, she rents a room above the furniture store of Israel Hubbard. After he leaves her in charge of the shop, her vivacious charm advances sales, producing a profitable business and Ruth soon begins a romantic relationship with the storekeeper's nephew, Allan ( Raymond McKee ).
Four miscreants get revenge on the police chief by planting bombs in his house.
'Fatty' is looking forward to attending a formal occasion. But in order to go, he has to be properly dressed, and he encounters unexpected difficulties in getting himself ready.
The Chicken Chaser is a 1914 movie starring Roscoe Arbuckle and Charles Avery.
To show his girl how brave he is, Fatty challenges the champion to a fight. Charlie referees, trying to avoid contact with the two monsters.
