Larry Darmour
2 credits on HibingeTV
American film producer of the silent and early sound eras, born in 1895. He headed Darmour Productions, a Poverty Row outfit whose releases were distributed by Majestic Pictures, including the 1934 adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. He produced dozens of low-budget features and shorts through the 1930s. He died in 1942.
Produced
Drama
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
The Scarlet Letter
1934 - Drama
Crime, 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
The Sin of Nora Moran
1933 - Crime