Loving The Classics

Starring Betty Hutton, Ralph Meeker, Robert Keith, Adele Jergens, Billie
Bird, Jack Benny
Directed by Irving Brecher

Print: color
Runtime: 97 min.
Genre: musical
Print Quality: B

Written and directed by Irving Brecher, best known for his weekly TV
series Life of Riley and The People's Choice, Somebody Loves Me is the
highly fictionalized life story of vaudeville and Broadway star Blossom
Seeley (Betty Hutton) and her husband-partner Benny Fields (Ralph
Meeker). Unflatteringly, the film depicts Fields as something of an
opportunist, who maneuvers Blossom into marriage for the benefit of his
own career. Eventually he does penance for his callousness, particularly
in a scene wherein Fields is reduced to playing straight for a pair of
crummy Burlesque comedians. Meanwhile, Blossom also goes into an
eclipse as a "single." The tearful finale is, like the rest of the film, a bit at
odds with the truth, but effective nonetheless. Betty Hutton does pretty
well as Seeley, even though she looks and sounds nothing like genuine
article; Meeker seems uncomfortable, except when lip-synching to the
prerecorded voice of Pat Morgan as Benny Fields. Jack Benny makes an
amusing cameo appearance.

Starring Al Pearce, Dale Evans, Stanley Brown, William Frawley, Jerome Cowan
Directed by Joseph Santley
Language:  English 
Print: Black and White
Runtime:74 min
Genre: Musical

A famous radio singer takes time off from her career and returns to New York City to visit with old friends, who don't know she's a famous singer (she uses a stage name). She falls in love with a struggling songwriter (who also doesn't know she's a famous singer), and sets out to get his songs into a play that some producers want her to be in.

3 classic shorts featuring everyone's favorite detective, Sherlock Holmes!

THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND (1949)
Sherlock Holmes gets the clues he needs to solve a murder, and to prevent another one from occurring, when he finds out that a doctor owns a poisonous snake--the deadly swamp adder.

 

THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED (1951)
An adaptation of the story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about a very wealthy businessman with a strange secret.

 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE (1951)
Watson arrives at 221B Baker Street where the page boy Billy shows him a wax effigy of Holmes placed near a curtained window in the sitting room. The effigy produces a shadow on the curtain that, when viewed from outside, is the unmistakable profile of Sherlock Holmes. Using this visual trick, Holmes aims to give a perfect target to a would-be murderer with a rifle. ..

 

Starring George O'Brien, Helen Chandler, William Janney, Stepin Fetchit, Frank Albertson,
Joyce Compton, David Butler, Ward Bond, Lee Tracy, John Wayne
Directed by David Butler, John Ford

Print: black/white
Runtime: 84 min.
Genre: drama
Print Quality: B

John Randall is an Army cadet at West Point. His younger brother Paul is a midshipman at
the Naval Academy. John contrives to help Paul's timid romantic interest in Nancy Wayne by
pretending to be interested in her himself. Paul, however, takes offense, and determines to
beat his brother in the Army-Navy football game on purely personal grounds. Meanwhile,
Paul and fellow midshipman Albert Price are hazed and tormented by upperclassmen.

134 episodes on 20 discs

Jack Benny was a regular on his own radio program since 1932. He brought the program, with his underplayed humor, to TV along with his radio regulars. Jack, who remained 39-years-old, kept his money in his basement and drove his old Maxwell car just as he had done on the radio. Also stars Don Wilson, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Dennis Day, Mary Livingstone and Mel Blanc.