Grand National Pictures

Federal agent Alan O'Connor (Conrad Nagel) goes undercover to crack a gang pulling a string of small-town bank robberies, only to discover his sister (Eleanor Hunt) has unknowingly become engaged to the gang's smooth-talking ringleader. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier — the man behind Reefer Madness — for Grand National Pictures, it's a brisk G-man B-picture from the era when J. Edgar Hoover's bureau was Hollywood's favorite source of heroes. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama

A crime film starring James Cagney and directed by John G. Blystone, produced for Grand National Pictures after Cagney's departure from Warner Bros. Cagney plays Johnny Cave, a pugnacious new inspector for the New York Department of Weights and Measures who takes on corrupt merchants and the political machine behind them. Mae Clarke, his co-star from The Public Enemy, plays his love interest. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama

James Cagney between Warner Bros. contracts, starring for Grand National in a Hollywood satire he clearly relished. Terry Rooney, a New York band leader and hoofer, is shipped to Hollywood to become a movie star, hates everything about the factory system, and walks out on his own hit picture — while studio publicists try to manufacture a romance that has nothing to do with his real life. Evelyn Daw, William Frawley, and Gene Lockhart co-star, with Victor Schertzinger directing his own score. Cagney gets to tap-dance, roughhouse, and mock the industry that made him, and the film is far sharper than its poverty-row distributor suggests. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal of copyright.

Comedy · Musical · Romance

A racetrack melodrama from Grand National, one of the scrappier studios of the late 1930s. Gordon Jones plays Rinty, a trainer whose string of bad luck ends when he inherits a colt nobody wants — a horse with heart but no pedigree. Marsha Hunt co-stars as the owner who stakes him, and the picture builds to the big race where a lifetime of debts rides on one finish. Directed by Charles Lamont, who spent the decade grinding out programmers for every poverty-row outfit before settling in as Abbott and Costello's house director at Universal. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Drama

Federal agent Alan O'Connor (Conrad Nagel) goes undercover to crack a gang pulling a string of small-town bank robberies, only to discover his sister (Eleanor Hunt) has unknowingly become engaged to the gang's smooth-talking ringleader. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier — the man behind Reefer Madness — for Grand National Pictures, it's a brisk G-man B-picture from the era when J. Edgar Hoover's bureau was Hollywood's favorite source of heroes. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama

A crime film starring James Cagney and directed by John G. Blystone, produced for Grand National Pictures after Cagney's departure from Warner Bros. Cagney plays Johnny Cave, a pugnacious new inspector for the New York Department of Weights and Measures who takes on corrupt merchants and the political machine behind them. Mae Clarke, his co-star from The Public Enemy, plays his love interest. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama