Phil Goldstone
3 credits on HibingeTV
Polish-born American producer and director active in the silent era and Poverty Row of the early sound period. He produced low-budget westerns and melodramas for Tiffany and Majestic Pictures, and directed The Sin of Nora Moran (1933), a strikingly experimental pre-Code drama told in nested flashbacks.
Directed
Produced
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
Crime, Drama
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 World Gone Mad
1933 - Crime