Buster Crabbe

15 Part Columbia serial starring Buster Crabbe concerns the search for 5 million dollars in diamonds that went missing at the close of the Second World War. Crabbe plays Jeff Drake who is summoned to a small south pacific island by a war time buddy who has run in a nest of vipers looking for the stolen gems. The story begins as Jeff is summoned to the island, and how he reluctantly heads out, the result not so much of wanting to help a friend, rather because several people, including his friends sister, all want to go to the island. Once he’s on his way Crabbe and his friends are beset by many of the usual and several unusual serial dangers.Read More »

Plot
The film series is a complicated serial with more twists than a maze that basically centers around a U.S. Air Force captain and his quest for missing microfilm that contains vital information. The heroic Buster Crabbe plays Captain Roger Drum, who shoots down an enemy plane on its way to Africa with the secret microfilm. Intent on revealing the subversive group that the message was for, Drum assumes the pilot’s identity and flies to Africa himself and crashes in the jungle. He is rescued by the pacific Rock People, led by Princess Phi (Gloria Dea), and is renamed Thunda, King of the Congo, after he rings a temple gong in alarm. With the subversives believing Thunda is their missing pilot and under constant attack by another tribe called the Cave Men, our hero plots to bring down the subversives who are searching for a new metal more radioactive than uranium. At the end, Thunda (or Drum) clear the jungle of villains and reunites the Rock People and Cave Men for well. From WikipediaRead More »

Quote:
“Red Barry” was the 40th sound-era serial produced by Universal Pictures (followed “Flaming Frontiers” and preceded “Scouts To the Rescue”), and was based in the Will Gould comic strip distributed to newspapers by King Features Syndicated, Inc. It was the third of five serials from Universal starring Buster Crabbe, and while the plot only revolves around two million dollars in bonds and soon evolves into a game of “Bonds, Bonds, Who Has the Bonds?”, it has so many groups, and their armies of henchmen, acquiring and re-acquiring the bonds that, in a chapter or two, the people who have the bonds don’t appear to know they are the current holders. Wing Fu (Cyril Delevanti), brings the bonds to the USA to buy war planes for an unnamed county, and quickly loses them to Quong Lee (Frank Lackteen), a Eurasian underworld chief, but they are re-taken in chapter two by Red Barry (Buster Crabbe). Ballet dancer Natacha (Edna Sedgwick), representing a ruthless group of Russians, acquires them in chapter three, but Barry gets them back in chapter four. Read More »

Synopsis from Allmovie.com
W.C. Fields stars in a remake of his silent comedy So’s Your Old Man. Fields plays Sam Bisbee, an erstwhile inventor who is the laughingstock of his small town. Returning in defeat from a disastrous big-city demonstration of his latest invention, Sam makes the acquaintance of a beautiful young woman (Adrienne Ames) who happens to be an incognito foreign princess. After Bisbee tells her of how he’d like to be a success for the sake of his family, the princess decides to use her celebrity to Sam’s benefit. She arrives in his town and lets it be known of her high regard for the downtrodden Bisbee. Suddenly Sam is the town’s big shot, enabling him to merchandise his inventions and do right by his wife and daughter. Sam earns the respect he’s so long deserved–but he’s never completely convinced that the princess is who she claims to be, and keeps congratulating her on her “racket.” Based on a story by Julian Street, You’re Telling Me is climaxed by a sidesplitting recreation of W.C. Fields’ Ziegfeld Follies golf routine. ~ Hal EricksonRead More »