Majestic Pictures

A Poverty Row oddity and proto-noir, this pre-Code melodrama opens with twenty-one-year-old Nora Moran (Zita Johann, fresh from *The Mummy*) in the death house — the first woman executed in twenty years — then unwinds her life in a dreamlike spiral of flashbacks, narrated fragments, and memories within memories. Orphaned, assaulted, and passed between a traveling circus and a married governor, Nora goes to the electric chair for a murder she did not commit, making the film a surprisingly bleak argument against capital punishment. Its fractured structure anticipated noir techniques by a decade, and Alberto Vargas's poster art became more famous than the picture itself. Majestic Pictures collapsed soon after and the film's copyright was never renewed; it is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Drama · Noir

When corpses drained of blood begin appearing in a small European village, the townspeople suspect a vampire. The local police chief doubts it, but the village doctor insists the supernatural is real, and suspicion falls on a simple-minded young man who keeps bats as pets. The Vampire Bat is an early sound horror film made to cash in on the success of Dracula and Frankenstein, and it borrows freely from both. It stars Lionel Atwill as the doctor, Fay Wray as his assistant, Melvyn Douglas as the skeptical policeman, and Dwight Frye, fresh off Renfield in Dracula, as the accused simpleton. The film is in the public domain because it was published without a proper copyright notice.

Horror

A district attorney who uncovered a utilities price-fixing racket is murdered before he can present his evidence, and his successor (Pat O'Brien) picks up the case with a fast-talking reporter (Neil Hamilton) while the killers work through everyone connected to the grand jury. Evelyn Brent plays the dead man's mistress, who knows where the evidence is hidden. Made at Majestic Pictures during the pre-Code window, it moves quickly and lets O'Brien do the cocky, irritable thing he did best, with J. Carrol Naish among the heavies. Released in April 1933, weeks before the studios began enforcing the Production Code. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama · Mystery

The first sound adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, produced on a Poverty Row budget by Larry Darmour. Former flapper star Colleen Moore plays the Puritan Hester Prynne, branded for bearing a child out of wedlock, with Hardie Albright as the minister who hides his guilt and Henry B. Walthall as her vengeful husband. The production reused sets and players from Victor Seastrom's 1926 silent version, and Walthall repeated his Chillingworth role. The film is in the public domain.

Drama

A Poverty Row oddity and proto-noir, this pre-Code melodrama opens with twenty-one-year-old Nora Moran (Zita Johann, fresh from *The Mummy*) in the death house — the first woman executed in twenty years — then unwinds her life in a dreamlike spiral of flashbacks, narrated fragments, and memories within memories. Orphaned, assaulted, and passed between a traveling circus and a married governor, Nora goes to the electric chair for a murder she did not commit, making the film a surprisingly bleak argument against capital punishment. Its fractured structure anticipated noir techniques by a decade, and Alberto Vargas's poster art became more famous than the picture itself. Majestic Pictures collapsed soon after and the film's copyright was never renewed; it is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Drama · Noir