Esther Dale

Sam and George strike gold in Alaska. George sends Sam to Seattle to bring George's fiancé back to Alaska. Sam finds she is already married, and returns instead with Angel. Sam, after trying to get George and Angel together, finally romances Angel, who, in the meantime, is busy fighting off the advances of George's younger brother, Billy.

7/10
5%

Drama focusing on a family of Southern aristocrats who are trying to deal with the dissolution of their clan and the loss of its reputation, faith, fortunes and respect.

6.2/10

After his wife dies in childbirth, a doctor (Joel McCrea) settles down in the small Oklahoma town of Cherokee Wells to raise his newborn daughter. Unfortunately, not all the citizens there are hospitable, especially when the doctor hires a pretty Indian teenager (Gloria Talbott) as his child's nanny. Directed by Francis D. Lyon and released in 1957, this western also stars Barbara Hale, Brad Dexter, Verna Felton, Esther Dale, Douglas Dick, Michael Pate, Sheb Wooley, Ray Teal, Mimi Gibson and Anthony Caruso.

6.4/10

Love-starved gun molls (Carole Mathews, Beverly Michaels) escape from a prison farm where matrons make their lives miserable.

6.1/10

Ma and Pa, along with daughter Rosie, go off to Hawaii in answer to cousin Rodney's call for help running his pineapple farm while he recovers from an illness. Pa soon causes a major explosion and gets himself kidnapped.

6.9/10

A dramatization originally for TV on the Plymouth Playhouse. A retelling of the Charles Dickens story.

5.4/10

Ma and Pa are trying to raise enough money at the county fair to send their daughter Rosie to college. Ma competes in baking and Pa enters a trotter in a horse race, while Rosie takes up with handsome young Marvin Johnson.

7/10

Research chemist Barnaby Fulton works on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company. One of the labs chimps gets loose in the laboratory and mixes chemicals, but then pours the mix into the water cooler. When trying one of his own samples, washed down with water from the cooler, Fulton begins to act just like a twenty-year-old and believes his potion is working. Soon his wife and boss are also behaving like children.

7/10
8.8%

Eric Wainwright (Van Johnson), a busy impresario, is besieged by hordes of wannabe concert stars, eager for their big break. One of them is Cynthia Potter (June Allyson), a talented pianist... but she can't get in to see him. When she learns that Wainwright is auditioning young musicians for a children's concert tour, Cynthia dons braces and bobby sox and passes herself off as a child prodigy.

6.3/10

A petty crook (Joseph Cotten) moves to an Ohio town and courts a factory owner's disabled daughter (Valli).

6.5/10

Violet Barton, a femme-fatale goal-setter, fascinates men and readily returns their affection to obtain the wealth she desires, even to the point of bigamy. She has an affair with gambler Gregg Delaney but marries his best friend, Johnny Hale, when she discovers Hale is the richest man in Texas. This loses her the respect of her sister, Janet, who loves Hale, and Delaney, who loves Violet. Meanwhile, town sheriff Bill Howard is working hard to get Delaney to confess to a murder.

6.2/10

A penniless pregnant woman adopts the identity of a rich woman killed in a train crash.

7.4/10

The Kettles and their fifteen children are about to be evicted from their rundown rustic home when Pa wins the grand prize by coming up with a new tobacco slogan. Birdie Hicks is jealous of the family's new wealth, which includes a completely automated modern home, and accuses Pa of stealing the slogan. Reporter Kim Parker proves Birdie wrong and marries Tom Kettle.

6.9/10

Just before Christmas, department store clerk Steve Mason meets big spending customer Connie Ennis, who's actually a comparison shopper sent by another store. Steve lets her go, which gets him fired. They spend the afternoon together, which doesn't sit well with Connie's steady suitor, Carl, when he finds out, but delights her young son Timmy, who quickly takes to Steve.

7.2/10

The story of seven scholars in search of an expert to teach them about swing music. They seem to have found the perfect candidate in winsome nightclub singer Honey Swanson. But Honey's gangster boyfriend doesn't want to give her up.

6.9/10
5%

It tells the story of young married couple who become chicken farmers. Betty has been raised to follow her husband's dreams with him, and Bob's dream is to be a successful chicken farmer. The problem is their home is old and needs to be repaired and the baby chicks need constant care. When a rich single woman with a new house and new farm equipment flirts with Bob, Betty questions their decision to move to the farm in the first place.

7.1/10

The Unfinished Dance is a 1947 drama film directed by Henry Koster. It is set in a ballet company, and is a remake of the 1937 French film La mort du cygne (also known by the title Ballerina). It won two awards at the 1948 Locarno International Film Festival.

6.6/10
8%

A twin takes her deceased sister's place as wife of the man they both love.

7.3/10

Margie and her daughter reminisce about Margie's girlhood in the roaring twenties. In flashback, Margie, a smarter, less popular girl at Central High, meets handsome new French teacher Ralph Fontayne. Circumstances keep throwing them together and Margie, in company with every other girl in school, develops a crush on him. Margie's date for the prom gets sick, and what happens next surprises everyone.

7.2/10

Tongues begin to wag when a lonely widow becomes romantically involved with a military man. Problems arise when the gossip is filtered down to her own children.

7/10

Clint Barkley first sees Smoky as a runaway, and drives him back to the ranch where he meets the owner, Julie Richards. He is given a job on her ranch, but the head cowhand is doubtful about Clint and fears that since he refuses to talk about himself, he must have some dreadful secret in his past. Clint and Smoky become close to each other, weathering the hardships of Western life and the suspicions of others together, until one day, Smoky tragically vanishes. Will Clint ever see him again?

6.7/10

This Republic programmer stars Lynne Roberts as a country gal who is slickered by a couple of city-fied jewel thieves, played by Peter Cookson and Jerome Cowan. Roberts is set up for a patsy by these two rogues, and nearly ends up in jail-and later on, narrowly escapes being rubbed out by gangsters.

A beautiful female doctor visits her small hometown on her way back to Chicago. Her overworked uncle, who is the town's doctor, wants her to stay and help him, and he and a macho test pilot who's fallen for her come up with a plan that involves the pilot faking an illness and being treated by her, with her uncle's "help".

6.2/10

Radio's miracle show is on the screen.

7.4/10

Two writers, friends since childhood, fight over their books and lives.

7.5/10

An actor becomes a suspect in the murders of four New Yorkers injected with rattlesnake venom.

6.5/10

A Ukrainian village must suddenly contend with the Nazi invasion of June 1941.

5.9/10

Caroline Bird, the crotchety and stingy owner of Bird Milk Products, is not amused when her employees at the Dairyville factory, the oldest plant in the company, broadcast a special radio program in honor of her birthday. Employees Lulubelle, Scotty and Vera Vague, fed up with the terrible working conditions at Dairyville, cut into the broadcast, and Lulubelle asserts that Caroline is a "big hunk of cheese." Lane, the factory manager, cannot find the culprit, and so Caroline goes with her secretary, Dale Evans, to Dairyville.

6.2/10

Follows a crew as they work under a deadline set by their boss to complete the demolition of a building. Touches on the lives of several of the crew in their lives away from the job and shows rhe comraderie of the crew in their work and even away from work.

6.2/10

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.

7.5/10

Other than the title, this film has no connection at all to the 1934 W.C. Fields film of the same title even though some sources give the plot of the Fields' film as the plot of this film. Hubert Abercrombie Gumm (Hugh Herbert), a flighty, eccentric screwball (what else)acquires a job as an executive at a radio station at the insistence of his only-slightly less eccentric aunt Fannie Handley (Esther Dale), who is married to one of the company owners, Ernest Truex. After mixing up the script pages to the various radio programs, Hubert sets out to get the name of a returning explorer on a contract for the radio station.

6.3/10

This historical drama tells the story of the first class to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In the early 19th Century, Congress appropriated the money to build the school, but opponents who believed it to be an illegitimate expansion of the powers of the federal government decided to sabotage the school. They put the hard-as-nails Major Sam Carter in charge of the academy, and he ruthlessly put the recruits through grueling training -- until only ten prospective soldiers remained. They include Dawson, a patriotic farm boy and Howard Shelton, a selfish playboy who has come to West Point only because of its prestige. The two vie for Carolyn Bainbridge, while they, along with the other eight, try convince Carter that the school is worth keeping.

6.5/10

A Brooklyn showgirl launches a stage act with a hick comic.

6.3/10

Number 10 in the Blondie series, Blondie Goes to College is predicated on the notion that Dagwood Bumstead (Arthur Lake) must receive a college diploma or lose his job with the Dithers Construction Company. Not wishing to be separated from her husband, Blondie (Penny Singleton) enrolls in college as well. But Leighton College rules stipulate "No Married Couples", forcing Blondie and Dagwood to pretend that they're not married. This causes quite a dilemma when coed Laura Wadsworth (Janet Blair) begins flirting with Dagwood and Rusty Bryant (Larry Parks) does same with Blondie. And Blondie's discovery of a very pleasant secret threatens to expose her and Dagwood's marital status too. The student body at this particular seat of learning is comprised of quite a few familiar faces, including Lloyd Bridges, Sid Melton, and Adele Mara.

6.3/10

A young South Seas native boy is sent to the U.S. for his education and returns to his island after his father dies to try to stop a revolution.

5.8/10

With Irene Dunne, Robert Montgomery, Preston Foster, and Eugene Pallette. This sublime film exemplifies La Cava’s gift for creating comedies that contain a profound depth of feeling. Starting with a cruel joke – a couple of callow men make a bet that one of them can seduce the woman sharing their train compartment – the film charts the relationship that develops between Irene Dunne, a small-town girl in the big city, and Robert Montgomery, the brother of the man who has heartlessly seduced and abandoned her. Their love affair is all the more affecting for taking place against a backdrop of heartbreak and alcoholism, all conveyed under the guise of comedy. UNFINISHED BUSINESS is truly one of the most remarkable Hollywood films of the 1940s.

6.5/10

All-girl school Mar Brynn tries to get more pupils and publicity by making fun of the Quincton college. For revenge, the boys there sent Bob Sheppard to Mar Brynn, dressed as a girl, to give them a slight scandal. But he falls in love with Virginia, the girl who is putting on a show there. Now Bob has the problem of getting revenge for Quinceton and not loosing his girl, especially when Quinceton hears about his relationship and decides to sent him support...

5.2/10

Happily married for three years, Ann and David Smith live in New York. One morning Ann asks David if he had to do it over again, would he marry her—and to her shock, he answers, "No". Later that day, they separately discover that, due to a legal complication—they are not legally married.

6.4/10

A doctor tries to rescue a young innocent from Nazi agents.

6.5/10

Previously filmed in 1932, and remade a third time in 1961, this second film version of Fannie Hurst's novel stars Margaret Sullavan as a fashion designer in love with a married banker (Charles Boyer). Directed by Robert Stevenson, the film also stars Richard Carlson, Tim Holt, Frank McHugh, Esther Dale and Cecil Cunningham.

6.8/10

A reporter and a lawyer investigate a women's prison and help an inmate who does not belong there.

5.9/10

Dan Martin, an unemployed college graduate, drifts into the town of Lyndale, only to learn that the town and everything in it are dominated by Minerva Withers, a tight-fisted, old skinflint whose welcome does not extend to tramps.

A courageous doctor braves a fierce blizzard in the Canadian wilderness to save a remote community from a deadly epidemic. He has come North to visit and ends up stealing a wife from her husband. When the epidemic hits, he and the wife begin their arduous journey.

5.3/10

Things get under way when Blondie Bumstead demands that her husband request a raise from his boss Mr. Dithers, so that she can afford to hire a maid. But Dithers has no time for any salary disputes: his construction firm is currently stuck with an unsaleable old mansion that is rumored to be haunted. To disprove this theory, Dithers asks the Bumstead family to spend a night in the crumbling old house, throwing a retinue of servants into the bargain.

6.9/10

A teenager falls hard for an irresponsible playboy.

6.4/10

Joyce and Fred MacNeil's honeymoon comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying halt when Fred is accused of murder. Railroaded into prison through the efforts of politically ambitious assistant DA Marlin (John Miljan), Fred awaits his doom on Death Row, while Joyce works overtime on the outside to clear her husband's name

6.7/10

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

6.2/10

The Roth family leads a quiet life in a small village in the German Alps during the early 1930s. When the Nazis come to power, the family is divided and Martin Brietner, a family friend is caught up in the turmoil.

7.8/10
10%

Handsome Laddie Stanton courts neighbor Pamela Pryor, meeting opposition from her stern military father, recently immigrated from England.

6.6/10

In 1939, American Tom Martin, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, awaits execution at the hands of the Fascist victors when reporter Augusta 'Gusto' Nash, for a scoop, aids him in an audacious escape. Of course, Tom tries to romance Gusto; but though she likes him, her career comes first, and Tom himself prefers freedom-fighting to settling down. Comedy becomes drama as their mixed feelings lead them on a circuitous path through the deepening chaos and catastrophe of the early days of World War II.

6.8/10

An out-of-work professor gets a break from an old college buddy to teach at an exclusive girl's school. But events conspire against him: he finds an abandoned child which he takes under his wing, despite the school's rules against teachers having a family; and the girls in the school resent his replacing a handsome and popular teacher, and do everything in their power to get him fired.

6.8/10

Chase across the country romance.

5.7/10

Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a 1940 biographical film which tells the story of the life of Abraham Lincoln from his departure from Kentucky until his election as President of the United States.

7.3/10
8.3%

A married singer, pianist/composer team are struggling to hit it big in New York. Finally, they audition before a Broadway producer, but the producer only wants the singer, leaving the husband without a job and feeling a failure.

5.8/10

A pregnant prison inmate shares her problems with the patients in a maternity ward.

6.1/10

A happily married woman lets her catty friends talk her into divorce when her husband strays.

7.8/10
9.2%

A fugitive from a chain gang becomes an oil-well firefighter and meets the man who framed him.

6.8/10

In 1923, Gregory Vance, a widower with two children, is a former scholar who has turned from book-to-bottle. He works, slightly, as a night-watchman and his children, who know him for what he is and what he isn't, are his only admirers. Then, it is discovered that he is the only registered voter in a key precinct and the politicians, from both parties, arrive in droves bearing inducements. What he does about this situation, and the relatives who want to take his children away from him make up the story.

6.7/10

Swanee River is a 1940 American biopic about Stephen Foster, a songwriter from Pittsburgh who falls in love with the South, marries a Southern girl, then is accused of sympathizing when the Civil War breaks out. Typical of 20th Century Fox biopics of the time, the film is more fictional than factual biography.

6.6/10

A newspaper editor turns a kidnapping into the banner headlines and exclusive story that could save his publication.

6.6/10

A dedicated police officer is torn between family and duty when his son turns to a life of crime.

6.1/10

A man fumbles through a sub-let assessment while his wife is away.

6.3/10

When gangster Phil Daley gets rid of his chief Paul Burgess he has everything that money can buy, except the respect of his parents and his sweetheart Susan Warren. His younger brother Danny quits college and forces Phil to make him part of the gang. The overly-ambitious Danny fixes a prize-fight on which rival gang-leader Mike Luger loses heavily and, thinking that Phil has double-crossed him, sends gunmen out to kill Phil. They kill Danny instead and the frightened Phil flees to a country hideout. His chief lieutenant, Sid Travis, sets a trap for Phil when he returns.

5.3/10

A bible-guided Victorian orphan befriends a bootblack in a strange town.

6.9/10

A highly successful assistant district attorney who is framed for taking bribes and finds himself serving time with the same men he earlier prosecuted and convicted.

6.1/10

A couple struggle to find happiness after a whirlwind courtship.

6.4/10

A shoplifter gets sentenced to a women's prison.

6.1/10

Shirley Ross plays an innocent young girl convicted for complicity in a crime committed by her boy friend (Lloyd Nolan). The male crook is sentence to six months on a prison farm populated by both men and women (segregated, of course). Ross is also incarcerated, suffering the cruelties of the sadistic male and female guards (including J. Carroll Naish and future "Ma Kettle" Marjorie Main!)

6.2/10

Two attractive jewel thieves, one female (Olympe Bradna), one male (Gene Raymond) escape together after their latest escapade and hide out in the home of an aged concert pianist (Lewis Stone). To cover their tracks and keep the old man from turning them in, the thieves pretend to arrange his comeback concert. The artifice becomes reality, the pianist makes a triumphant return, and the thieves reform. This 1938 film is not a remake of 1932's Stolen Heaven, which wove an entirely different story about a suicide pact.

5.7/10

A dizzy young girl falls into crime but wins her lawyer's heart.

5.8/10

Unfounded suspicions lead a married couple to begin divorce proceedings, whereupon they start undermining each other's attempts to find new romance.

7.7/10
9.3%

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 gangster lifestyle, and his old girlfriend, Francey, now a syphilitic prostitute. Martin also crosses paths with Dave, a childhood friend struggling to make it as an architect, and the Dead End Kids, a gang of young boys roaming the streets of the city's East Side slums.

7.3/10
9.1%

A physician in a small town suddenly finds himself the object of vilification and persecution when one of his patients commits suicide.

7.4/10

Warning of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, specifically syphilis.

5/10

A tightwad accountant for a newspaper becomes friends with a reporter. The bookkeeper goes on vacation, and while there he learns of a kidnapping conspiracy. He quickly phones the paper and they order him to follow up on the story and stay off the phone so the reporter (whom he secretly has a crush on) can use it.

6.8/10

J.B. Ball, a rich financier, gets fed up with his free-spending family. He takes his wife's just-bought (very expensive) sable coat and throws it out the window, it lands on poor hard-working girl Mary Smith. But it isn't so easy to just give away something so valuable, as he soon learns.

7.6/10
10%

Joe, who owns a gas station along with his brothers and is about to marry Katherine, travels to the small town where she lives to visit her, but is wrongly mistaken for a wanted kidnapper and arrested.

7.9/10
10%

With a full Hollywood background and settings but more an expose of scandal-and-gossip magazines of the era, has-been actor John Blakeford agrees to write his memoirs for magazine-publisher Jordan Winston. When Blakeford's daughter, Patricia, ask him to desist for the sake of his ex-wife, Carlotta Blakeford, he attempts to break his contract with Winston.

6.7/10

An Iowa farmer's wife makes him move to Hollywood so their daughter can become a star.

7.1/10

An attorney falls for the woman he's representing on a murder charge.

7/10

Because of a very unhappy affair she had earlier in her life, a woman shuts herself off from the rest of the world.

6/10

Horse trainer Steve Tapley is caught between the feuding Martingale and Shattuck families. He sides with young Nancy Martingale and her grandfather Ezra, and the feud is to be resolved by a horse race between the favorites of each family. Unfortunately, the Martingale's horse, Greyboy, only runs well in mud. And it hasn't rained in a long time.

6.6/10

A society girl tries to make a go of her marriage to an archaeologist.

5.8/10
4%

A young woman who owns a coffee shop falls for a handsome young customer, unaware that he is a gangster.

6.7/10

While working on a novel in his country home in Connecticut, married writer Tony Barrett (Cooper) becomes attracted to Manya (Sten), the daughter of a neighboring farmer. Manya is unhappily engaged to Frederik (Bellamy). Due to a snowstorm, Tony and Manya are trapped together in his house overnight. The next day, Manya's father insists her wedding to Frederik take place in spite of Manya's misgivings. Drunkenness and jealousy result in tragedy at the wedding reception that night.

6.6/10

The second of the three film versions of the E. Phillips Oppenheim espionage thriller set largely in an old dark house where a tremulous wife wonders if her husband is really his double, a dastardly German spy.

6.5/10

At the Brentwood Asylum for the mentally ill, psychiatrist partners Jane Everest and Alex MacGregor are broken up by the new superintendent, Dr. Charles Monet, who has a low regard for women physicians. Jane and Charles clash on patient treatment, and Jane learns that Charles has a sister, Claire, with a mysterious past.

6.6/10

Wealthy Edward Morgan becomes charmed with a curly-haired orphan and her pretty older sister Mary and arranges to adopt both under the alias of "Mr. Jones." As he spends more time with them, he soon finds himself falling in love with Mary.

6.9/10

Caddish lawyer Lee Gentry is going out with Katy Costello, but carrying on an affair with dancer Carmen Brown. When he wants to end the dalliance with Carmen, she is so distraught that she becomes suicidal. Seizing the gun from Carmen, he accidentally shoots her, and thinking she's dead, concocts a series of increasingly outlandish alibis to cover his tracks under the guidance of a ghostly apparition that is his alter ego.

7/10