Glenda Farrell

I Love Trouble

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Janet Blair and Franchot Tone publicity shot

I Love Trouble is The Rockford Files, or a dry run at it, give or take. If you don’t know what The Rockford Files is, that means you’re not ancient, so well done you. It’s the TV show where James Garner played a dog-eared detective raising a wounded eyebrow as he got beaten up week after week. Roy Huggins wrote both. I Love Trouble was his screen debut, an adaptation of his own novel, The Double Take, which S Sylvan Simon directs with half an eye on the drawing-room whodunits of yore. Huggins also wrote 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive and Maverick (also starring Garner) – so was something of a TV colossus … Read more

Mystery of the Wax Museum

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A wax figure melts in the flames

Screwball but not comedy, 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum is less well known than its remake, 1953’s House of Wax, but more fascinating in many respects, particularly in its portrayal of liberated young women making their way in the world. There’s sex and drugs too, though you wouldn’t bother with it for those. The Hays Code, which cleaned up American movies starting around 1934, wasn’t expressly designed to put women back in their box (discuss) but it did it anyway. The ostensible star of this pre-Code film is eminent stage actor Lionel Atwill, as the driven creator of wax effigies of great historical figures whose London museum burns down in the film’s … Read more