Hollywood Mystery (1934)

★★★ · Hollywood Satire? · bobsluckycat · 2014-05-25

From the beginning of the film I started to suspect a farcical satire. There actually was a Supreme Pictures in Hollywood that turned out "B" pictures and mostly westerns at that. The bald Tenen Holtz looked a good bit like A.W. Hackel the head of Supreme Pictures and the Yiddish accent was also not a put-on. Some of the cliches' written by Jack Neville, a screenwriter of sturdy "B" pictures which included westerns and comedies and gangster pictures, were already cliches' to be sure which is saying something since the film is 80 years old. Jack Albertson as a young (he was 25 when this was…

★★★ · Early Talkie · billstyler · 2017-01-16

Being one of the early entries into talking pictures, this one has a quicker pace than some, less stiffness in the acting, better timing of lines delivered, and a story that could have shown up in much later productions after Hollywood got a little slicker at production. Typically without music, the early ones lack the mood changes aided by a score, but I watched the whole movie and wasn't sorry I did. Not a complex story, just entertaining, and good for students of motion pictures.

★★ · Tepid Non-Mystery · Poohbah70 · 2019-06-23

There is no mystery here - the story revolves around Frank Albertson (Daniel Patrick Ryan) a fast-talking, one-man publicity dept. at a small movie company, who sells the studio owner Tenon Holtz (Benjamin Vogel) and the foreign director John Davidson (Siegfried Sonoff) on producing a gangster film using a real gangster. He also wants to get a leading role in the film for his studio extra sweetheart June Clyde (Doris Dawn). He gets Joe Crespo (Tony Capello) as a fake gangster who is supposed to punch out another fake gangster, but instead knocks our notorious gangster Stanley Price (Joe…