Acting
In the gay '90s, cardsharps take over a Mississippi riverboat from a kindly captain. Their first act is to change the showboat into a floating gambling house. A ham actor and his bumbling sidekick try to devise a way to help the captain regain ownership of the vessel.
In 18th-century France, a young man masquerades as an actor to avenge his friend's murder.
A happily married woman lets her catty friends talk her into divorce when her husband strays.
Teenager Susan Turner, with a severe crush on playboy artist Richard Nugent, sneaks into his apartment to model for him and is found there by her sister Judge Margaret Turner. Threatened with jail, Nugent agrees to date Susan until the crush abates.
A French playboy and an American former nightclub singer fall in love aboard a ship. They arrange to reunite six months later, if neither has changed their mind.
Frank Bigelow is about to die, and he knows it. The accountant has been poisoned and has only 24 hours before the lethal concoction kills him. Determined to find out who his murderer is, Frank, with the help of his assistant and girlfriend, Paula, begins to trace back over his last steps. As he frantically tries to unravel the mystery behind his own impending demise, his sleuthing leads him to a group of crooked businessmen and another murder.
Two married couples become engulfed in a storm of emotional fury when Doctor Leslie Yates runs into writer Doris Wilding, his old college flame, whom he has not seen in ten years. After reminiscing about their past, Doris and Leslie make a dinner date with their respective spouses. On the eve of the Yates's dinner party, Leslie's wife Helen brings home a magazine article written by Doris, which sparks Leslie's memory of his separation from her.
A film director, in bad standing with his studio, tries to turn a local carnival dancer into a "French" movie star and pass her off as his big new discovery.
A gangster hides out on a farm and falls for the farmer's daughter.
A mysterious plague, the Purple Death, ravages the earth. Dr. Zarkov, investigating in his spaceship, finds a ship from planet Mongo seeding the atmosphere with dust. Sure enough, Ming the Merciless is up to his old tricks. So it's back to Mongo for Flash, Dale, and Zarkov.
Lucky Jordan is a gangster living in New York City and when he's drafted into the army, he tries to escape duty by using an old con woman named Annie to convince the draft board he's needed at home. When that fails, Jordan is sent to boot camp, but he doesn't stay there long. He takes a beautiful USO worker hostage and flees back to New York. There, he learns that a rival gangster is plotting against America.
Eleven Gilbert & Sullivan numbers are melded within the murder-mystery plot of "Girl on the Spot", with a result that either G&S and/or the plot are always seemingly on stage-wait or in the wings awaiting a cue. Lois Collier is the girl-on-the-spot of the title because she was on the scene of a murder. The police conclude she didn't do it and they use her to set a trap for the real killer, a G&S addict, by financing a Broadway production starring Collier.
A Broadway show is forced to bow to the whims of a talentless, whacky, but rich, Broadway actress with a contract.
Frantic screwball comedy about a meek personal assistant (Frank McHugh) who is promoted to managing editor of a newspaper features syndicate that is owned by and staffed with cuckoos.
Young Scattergood Baines arrives in the small New England town of Coldriver. Through some shrewd business maneuvering, he manages to open up a hardware store. Twenty years later he has become a prosperous and respected member of the community, a member of the local school board and the owner of a railroad that transports timber to the local sawmill. Problems begin to arise, however, when a young schoolteacher he has hired turns out to be not quite what he expected, and the mill owners pressure Scattergood to sell them his railroad, with the idea of raising the transportation fees paid to them by the local loggers.
Frank Faylen and Charlie Hall (a longtime Laurel & Hardy foil) star as Dolan and Doolittle, a pair of goofy druggists who join the army to escape the wrath of bill collector Mulligan
The title character, played by Bonita Granville, is the secretary at a boys' reformatory. Sociology professor Noah Beery Jr. shows up to study the juvenile-delinquent mindset. Not surprisingly, he ends up taking a post-grad course in amour from the winsome Ms. Granville.
A detective must solve a case where a girl was murdered in a room--and all the doors and windows were locked from the inside.
Two starving songwriters will only get funding if they get British actress Jane Clarke to star in their show.
Wanted by the law in New York, Dr. Steve Kells heads west and arrives in an area controlled by an outlaw gang known as the Border Legion. When the gang's boss is wounded, they kidnap Kells and force him to remove the bullet. Not allowed to leave and being a wanted man, he joins the gang. Now wanted as a gang member also, he nevertheless plans a raid that will lead the entire gang into a trap.
