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The popularity of the gangster genre originated in the early 1930s, and countless undisputed crime classics were produced in the following decades. As the period just after the Prohibition era and proliferating crime due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, it made sense that gangster movies took hold of the popular imagination as real-life crime bosses like Al Capone and John Dillinger were fresh in viewers' minds. With acclaimed directors like William Keighley, Raoul Walsh, and Howard Hawks making revolutionary crime films, its a testament to this eras appeal that so many remain beloved to this day.

Many of the best gangster movies of all time were released during the 1930s and 1940s, as major movie stars like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney dominated the genre with powerful portrayals of crooked cops, gun-wielding gangsters, and treacherous thieves. Through a mix of film noir, heist classics, and intense crime-based melodramas, the...

Did Republic’s serial-makers lose their marbles? This is an endurance test of a thriller, with 12 chapters that refuse to advance a story beyond the same repetitive ambushes and fistfights. It’s got monsters in the form of giant crawfish bred to… well, bred for almost no reason at all. With Phyllis Coates and Myron Healey. I tell you, watching this feels like watching an endless loop. But hey, it’s quite handsomely filmed!

Panther Girl of the Kongo

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1955 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame (originally widescreen) / 168 min. / Street Date February 21, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.95

Starring: Phyllis Coates, Myron Healey, Arthur Space, John Day, Mike Ragan, Morris Buchanan, Roy Glenn, Archie Savage, Ramsay Hill, Naaman Brown, Dan Ferniel, James Logan, Steve Calvert.

Cinematography: Bud Thackery

Film Editor: Cliff Bell

Original Music: R. Dale Butts

Written by Ronald Davidson

Produced and Directed by Franklin Adreon

Ah yes.

Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...

Coleen Gray actress ca. 1950. Coleen Gray: Actress in early Stanley Kubrick film noir, destroyer of men in cult horror 'classic' Actress Coleen Gray, best known as the leading lady in Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killing and – as far as B horror movie aficionados are concerned – for playing the title role in The Leech Woman, died at age 92 in Aug. 2015. This two-part article, which focuses on Gray's film career, is a revised and expanded version of the original post published at the time of her death. Born Doris Bernice Jensen on Oct. 23, 1922, in Staplehurst, Nebraska, at a young age she moved with her parents, strict Lutheran Danish farmers, to Minnesota. After getting a degree from St. Paul's Hamline University, she relocated to Southern California to be with her then fiancé, an army private. At first, she eked out a living as a waitress at a La Jolla hotel...

Jean Arthur films on TCM include three Frank Capra classics Five Jean Arthur films will be shown this evening, Monday, January 5, 2015, on Turner Classic Movies, including three directed by Frank Capra, the man who helped to turn Arthur into a major Hollywood star. They are the following: Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; George Stevens' The More the Merrier; and Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night. One the most effective performers of the studio era, Jean Arthur -- whose film career began inauspiciously in 1923 -- was Columbia Pictures' biggest female star from the mid-'30s to the mid-'40s, when Rita Hayworth came to prominence and, coincidentally, Arthur's Columbia contract expired. Today, she's best known for her trio of films directed by Frank Capra, Columbia's top director of the 1930s. Jean Arthur-Frank Capra...

Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Dames Joan Blondell has always been a favorite of mine, much like fellow wisecracking 1930s Warner Bros. players Aline MacMahon and Glenda Farrell. The fact that Blondell never became a top star says more about audiences — who preferred, say, Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney — than about Blondell's screen presence and acting abilities. As part of its "Summer Under the Stars" film series, Turner Classic Movies is currently showing no less than 16 Joan Blondell movies today, including the TCM premiere of the 1968 crime drama Kona Coast. Directed by Lamont Johnson, Kona Coast stars Richard Boone and the capable Vera Miles. Blondell has a supporting role — one of two dozen from 1950 (For Heaven's Sake) to 1981 (The Woman Inside, released two years after Blondell's death from leukemia). [Joan Blondell Movie Schedule.] Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing the super-rare (apparently due to rights issues) The Blue Veil, Curtis Bernhardt's 1951 melodrama that earned Blondell her...