Zorro's Fighting Legion DVD

Zorro's Fighting Legion was a 1939 Republic Pictures film serial consisting of 12 chapters. It featured Reed Hadley as Zorro. The plot revolved around his alter-ego Don Diego's fight against the evil Don Del Oro. It was noted for its exciting stunts and thrilling cliffhanger chapter endings as well as a better-than-average plot.

A trademark of the serial's production is the sudden demise of at least one native informant each episode. The direction, being unsophisticated, was identical for each informant's death, and thus became a source of unintentional humor. Each informant, upon uttering the phrase, "Don del Oro is..." would be shot by a golden arrow and die with a before being able to name the villain's alter ego.

Zorro's Fighting Legion has been airing 3 episodes Saturdays at 9:00AM ET on TCM. It is popular for Saturday morning twittering. If you missed it or would like to experience again its available on DVD.

Zorro's Fighting Legion (1939) DVD »

Blacklisted Canada Lee indentured servant for Cry, The Beloved Country

Canada Lee, born Lionel Cornelius Canegata, (March 3, 1907– May 9, 1952) was an American actor who pioneered roles for African Americans. A champion of civil rights in the 1930s and '40s, he died shortly before he was scheduled to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Coming to acting after careers as a jockey, boxer, and musician, Lee furthered the African-American tradition in theater pioneered by such older actors as Paul Robeson.


Lee made his screen debut in Keep Punching (1939), a film about boxing. Perhaps his most famous film role was in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), in which he played a sailor. Lee insisted on changing his dialogue, which had been a semi-comical dialect typical of racist films. In 1947, he played a supporting role in Robert Rossen's Body and Soul, another boxing picture. In 1949, he took another supporting role in Lost Boundaries, a drama about passing. Lee's last film role was in Cry, the Beloved Country (1951).

As an actor, Lee came into contact with many of the leading progressive figures in the country. Langston Hughes, for instance, wrote two brief plays for Lee; these were submitted to the Theater Project, but their criticism of racism in America was deemed too controversial, and neither was staged. Lee spoke to schools, sponsored various humanitarian events, and began speaking directly against the existing segregation in America’s Armed Forces, while simultaneously acknowledging the need to win the Second World War.

By the late 1940s, the rising tide of anti-Communism had made many of his earlier contacts politically dangerous. In 1949, the trade journal Variety stated that under no circumstance was he to be used in American Tobacco’s televised production of a radio play he had recently starred in because he was “too controversial.”

In the same year, the FBI offered to clear Lee’s name if he would publicly call Paul Robeson a Communist. Lee refused and responded by saying, “All you’re trying to do is split my race.” According to newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, Lee stated that he intended to come out and “publicly blast Paul Robeson.” However, the fact that the friendship between the two actors remained until Lee's death suggests that Robeson put no faith in Winchell's claim.

At the height of the Hollywood blacklist, Lee managed to find work in 1950 as the star of a British film Cry, The Beloved Country, for which both he and Sidney Poitier were smuggled into South Africa as indentured servants in order to play their roles as African ministers. The film’s message of universal brotherhood stands as Lee's final work towards this aim; after it, the blacklist prevented him from getting work. Scheduled to appear in Italy to begin production on a filmed version of Othello, he was repeatedly notified that his passport “remained under review.”

Following his death, rumors persisted that he did come out and call Robeson a Communist. As he was unable to defend himself, Lee’s name remained sullied and overlooked as history marched forward into the era of Civil Rights.



Website for the documentary 'Blacklist: Recovering the Life of Canada Lee

Canada Lee's Homepage

Myrna Loy | Vamp Gypsy & Asian Femme Fatale

Young Myrna Williams, who would later be known as screen star Myrna Loy, had her theatrical debut around 1918

Myrna Loy (August 2, 1905 – December 14, 1993) was trained as a dancer, but after a few minor roles in silent films, she devoted herself fully to an acting career, and from 1925 gradually established herself as a film actress. She was initially typecast in exotic roles, often as a vamp, before career prospects improved following her performance as Nora Charles successfully paired with William Powell in The Thin Man (1934).

Her silent film roles were mainly those of exotic women including vamps in Finger Prints, (1927) to gypsies The Squall (1929) to Mexican senoritas Rogue of the Rio Grande (1930) to Asian femme fatales The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Studios thought she was perfect for Asian roles, thus casting her in yellowface several times such as parts in A Girl in Every Port and The Show of Shows to a lead role playing an Indian princess in John Ford's The Black Watch.

Her breakthrough occurred with the advent of talkies: she appeared in 1927's The Jazz Singer as an uncredited chorus girl. In 1929 she improvised a "foreign" accent, sang and danced in Warner Brothers' first musical The Desert Song (1929). Loy later commented on the film's success and noted "...it kind of solidified my exotic non-American image".

One of the last of these roles was Thirteen Women (1932) in which she played a vengeful half-caste named Ursula Georgi. For a few years she struggled to overcome this stereotype with many producers and directors believing that while she was perfect as femmes fatales she was capable of little more.
1926 film Across the Pacific

FURTHER READING The Orientalization of Myrna Loy »

Iconic Fuller Brush Salesman Inspires Movies

The Fuller Brush Company was founded January 1, 1906, by Alfred Carl Fuller, a businessman from Nova Scotia, Canada.

The company began with door-to-door sales of brushes of various sorts, including hairbrushes with a lifetime guarantee, for which the company gained fame.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the ubiquitous Fuller Brush salesman became a cultural icon, inspiring comedy and jokes, movies, and at least one song.

Movies included The Fuller Brush Man, a 1948 comedy movie starring Red Skelton and Janet Blair and The Fuller Brush Girl, a 1950 comedy movie starring Lucille Ball and Eddie Albert.

The Fuller Brush Man is a 1948 comedy film starring Red Skelton as a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company who becomes a murder suspect.

The Fuller Brush Girl is a 1950 slapstick comedy starring Lucille Ball and directed by Lloyd Bacon. Animator Frank Tashlin wrote the script. Ball plays a quirky door-to-door cosmetics salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. The film also stars Eddie Albert and has a cameo by Red Skelton.

Today, over a century later, The Fuller Brush Company's Sales Force continues to grow »

Show Boat (1936) vs Show Boat (1951)

Show Boat (1936) is a film based on the musical by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (script and lyrics), which the team adapted from the novel by Edna Ferber.

This film version from Universal Pictures, which had in 1929 filmed a part-talkie version of Ferber's original novel, is, for the most part, a faithful adaptation of the famed Broadway musical version of the book, and retains the interracial subplot so important to both the novel and the show.

This film version of Show Boat stars Irene Dunne and Allan Jones, with Charles Winninger, Paul Robeson, Helen Morgan, Helen Westley, Queenie Smith, Sammy White, Donald Cook, Arthur Hohl, and Hattie McDaniel. It was directed by Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale, who tried to bring as many people from the stage production as he could to work on the film.

Robeson, for whom the role of Joe was actually written, had appeared in the show onstage in London in 1928 and in the Broadway revival of 1932. Dunne had been brought in to replace Norma Terris, the original Magnolia, in the touring version of the show, and had toured the U.S. in the role beginning in 1929.

According to film historian Miles Kreuger in his book Show Boat: The History of a Classic American Musical, great care was taken by director James Whale to insure a feeling of complete authenticity in the set and costume design for the 1936 film.

The 1936 version of Show Boat is considered by nearly all film critics to be one of the classic film musicals of all time, and one of the best stage-to-film adaptations ever made.

Except for the final sequence and the three additional songs written especially for the film by Kern and Hammerstein, it follows the stage musical extremely closely, unlike the 1929 film and the 1951 version released by MGM. It also retains much of the comedy in the show.

The 1936 Show Boat was successful at the box office, but was withdrawn from circulation in the 1940's, after MGM bought the rights so that they could film a Technicolor remake; however, MGM's version did not begin filming until 1950, and was released in the summer of 1951. The controversy surrounding Paul Robeson's supposed Communist leanings further assured that the 1936 film would not be seen for a long time, and it was not widely seen again until after Robeson's death in 1976.

The Kern-Hammerstein musical was remade in 1951 by MGM in Technicolor, starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Howard Keel, with Joe E. Brown, Marge Champion, Gower Champion, William Warfield, Robert Sterling, Agnes Moorehead and Leif Erickson. The film was the first screen version of Show Boat not to include any of the actors who had appeared in the original 1927 stage production (if one does not count Till the Clouds Roll By as a film version of Show Boat).

It was adapted by John Lee Mahin and was directed by George Sidney. Filmed in the typical MGM lavish style, this version is the most financially successful of the film adaptations of the play, and is one of MGM's most popular musicals, though arguably one of the studio's less inventive ones. It was the first film version of "Show Boat" not to feature Robert Russell Bennett's stage orchestrations in one form or another.

Oscar Hammerstein II's dialogue was almost completely rewritten (by Mahin), the story was given a major overhaul near the end of the film and the changes are considered to make this version of the story quite distinct from other versions. Changes included keeping the characters of Magnolia and Gaylord significantly younger at the end than in the play, and the expansion of the role of Julie to give her character greater depth. Kim (Magnolia and Ravenal's daughter) appears only as a baby and a little girl in this version. Nearly all of the purely comic scenes were removed, as much of the comedy in the show has no direct bearing on the plot.

The version of "Ol' Man River" heard here is considered by film historians to be by far the best moment, both musically and pictorially, in the film. Musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger, who had many harsh words for the 1951 Show Boat in his 1977 book Show Boat: The History of a Classic American Musical nevertheless had nothing but high praise for this sequence. It was staged and directed by an uncredited Roger Edens during an illness of George Sidney, who directed the rest of the film. However, the "Ol' Man River" sequence in the 1936 film version of the show, with its tracking pan around the seated, singing figure of Paul Robeson, and its expressionistic montages of field and dock workers performing their tasks, is perhaps even more highly regarded.

The aspects of the original stage version dealing with racial inequality, especially the story line concerning miscegenation, were highly "sanitized" and deemphasized in the 1951 film MORE »

Show Boat the musical is widely considered one of the most influential works of the American musical theatre. As the first true American "musical play."

The Brain That Wouldn't Die | Watch Movie Online!

The Brain That Wouldn't Die, also known as The Head That Wouldn't Die, is a 1962 science-fiction/horror film directed by Joseph Green and written by Green and Rex Carlton. The film was actually produced and completed in 1959, but was not released until three years later. A scientist develops a means to keep human body parts alive. When he unexpectedly must use his discovery on someone close to him, events do not go as planned. A gaffe during the end titles lists the film's name as "The Head That Wouldn't Die."

This film has fallen into the public domain and can be freely downloaded from the Internet Archive.

Or simply watch below...