Nancy Carroll

A Pre-Code social comedy directed by Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast for Paramount. Peggy (Nancy Carroll) is a cabaret dancer who marries a wealthy industrialist for security, only to find herself trapped in a loveless marriage. When she reconnects with Paul (Fredric March), a carefree old flame, she must choose between respectability and happiness. The film was a deliberate attempt to capture the spirit of Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated comedies, and d'Arrast—who had worked with Chaplin on A Woman of Paris—brings a similar visual elegance and wry observation of class manners. Though less well-known than the films it emulated, Laughter is a sharp, stylish look at the tension between wealth and freedom in the Jazz Age. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance · Pre-Code

A pre-Code musical comedy directed by Frank Tuttle for Paramount. Nancy Carroll plays Barbara Pell, a chorus girl who inherits a school for boys and uses her position to sabotage the football career of the man who jilted her. Helen Kane, the "Boop-Oop-a-Doop Girl" whose vocal style inspired Betty Boop, co-stars as Helen Fry. Jack Oakie appears as Tap-Tap Thompson. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain.

Musical · Comedy · Romance

A pre-Code musical film directed by John Cromwell and A. Edward Sutherland, the first of three film adaptations of the popular 1927 Broadway play Burlesque. Hal Skelly reprises his Broadway role as Skid Johnson, a vaudeville comic who teams up with dancer Bonny King (Nancy Carroll) to form a comedy- dance act. Their marriage and career flourish until Skid's Broadway success leads him astray. The film was originally made with Technicolor sequences, now lost; only black-and-white prints survive. It entered the public domain in 1957 when its copyright was not renewed.

Drama · Musical · Romance