Jack Holt

Flight is a 1929 pre-Code aviation adventure directed by Frank Capra for Columbia Pictures, dedicated to the United States Marine Corps and made with their full cooperation. Jack Holt plays Panama Williams, a hard-boiled Marine gunnery sergeant and pilot stationed in Nicaragua, where he and a hotshot young corporal (Ralph Graves) fly missions against the rebel leader Sandino and rivalry over a nurse (Lila Lee). Columbia built a complete flying field at North Island in San Diego and shot the aerial sequences from real planes without process photography, and Holt's plane actually crashed during filming. Capra wrote the dialogue from a story by Graves, and the film was advertised as the "first all-talking aviation epic." As a 1929 release whose copyright was not renewed, the film is in the public domain.

Adventure · War

Alan Curtis plays a former FBI agent flying passengers to Honolulu who gets pulled into a hunt for a stolen map of uranium deposits in Death Valley — a map that agents of a foreign power will kill for. Evelyn Ankers co-stars as a fellow passenger with her own reasons for the trip. A Screen Guild B-thriller trading on post-war atomic anxiety, with most of the action confined to the hotel and the doomed flight. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Mystery · Thriller

A 15-chapter Columbia cliffhanger serial directed by James W. Horne, with Chapter 1 titled "Chaotic Greek." Jack Holt plays a Secret Service agent infiltrating a gang of counterfeiters who have kidnapped the government's best engraver to produce undetectable phony money. Evelyn Brent co-stars as his undercover partner Kay Drew. Holt, Columbia's longest-tenured star, was effectively demoted to serials by studio head Harry Cohn, but the production retained a feature-film crew under producer Larry Darmour. The serial is in the public domain.

Action · Crime

When Gabby Kendrick refuses to breed his prize stallion Golden Sovereign to Roy Rogers' mare, fate intervenes — the horses run off, a rustler's bullet kills the Sovereign, and Roy is blamed and jailed. A year later he returns with Trigger, the Sovereign's son, determined to clear his name. Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Gabby Hayes star in the film Republic used to explain how the smartest horse in the movies came to Roy. It is in the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Western · Music

Mary Pickford plays an American girl whose ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat on the way to France — a sequence Cecil B. DeMille staged as open propaganda while the United States was still deciding whether to join the war. Rescued and sheltered in a French chateau near the front, she is caught between a French officer and a German officer who both love her, and the film builds to the occupation of the chateau and an attempted assault that American audiences in 1917 read as Germany's crimes in miniature. Released months after the US entered the war, it was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. A 1917 release, it is in the public domain.

Drama · War · Silent