Movies: James Burke

A scatterbrained heiress opens her home to a succession of unemployed actors and vaudeville performers, then decides to produce her own show, much to the consternation of her father, her sister and her sister's boyfriend, who is actually after the yo...

Several days after one of his company's dams burst, ruining the life savings of several investors, a shady power company president is found stabbed to death. Ellery Queen gets to the bottom of the mystery....

No relation to the 1950 Frank Capra film of the same name, the 1943 Technicolor musical Riding High is a by-the-numbers vehicle for Dorothy Lamour and Dick Powell. Lamour stars as Ann Castle, a former burlesque queen who heads westward to claim her f...

Suave private detective Simon "The Saint" Templar arrives in San Francisco and meets Val, a woman whose police inspector father killed himself after being accused of corruption and dismissed from the force. Convinced of the man's innocence, Templar t...

In her attempts to make a splash on Broadway, a lively would-be-actress lands herself in hot water with the mob....

The Saint Takes Over, released in 1940 by RKO Pictures, was the fifth motion picture featuring the adventures of Simon Templar, a.k.a. "The Saint" the Robin Hood-inspired crimefighter created by Leslie Charteris. This film focuses on the character o...

The setting is a small town in 1870s Pennsylvania. Sally Waterson and her father have stopped in town with their traveling medicine show, but when their wagon catches fire, they find themselves stranded. They're taken in by Mrs. Cortlandt and her gra...

When headstrong pilot Bill Kellogg disobeys orders and takes a plane to photograph potential landing fields in uncharted Latin American country, he ends up running out of gas and crashing. The members of a nearby tribal village save Bill from the wre...

A woman rents a gloomy basement apartment in Greenwich Village thinking it will provide the perfect atmosphere for her mystery writer husband to create his next book. They soon find themselves in the middle of a real-life mystery when a corpse turns ...

During the American Civil War, Valette Bedford waits patiently for her husband Duncan Bedford, to return home, praying that she will not become a widow....

Southern California's Hotel Coronado caters to and is frequented by members of the social upper-crust. Although she lives on the wrong side of the San Diego track, in a tent-city with her father. Otto, and ditzy sister, Violet, June Wray is a singer ...

Joe and Lucky travel around New England painting barns in exchange for an advertisement on one side. The meet Madge, who is cruelly treated by a her father who plans to marry her off to someone she despises....

A washed up baseball player returns to Brooklyn to manage his old team but an old sports reporter is eager to prove that he is a loser....

Nellie Kelly, the daughter of Irish immigrants, patches up differences between her father and maternal grandfather while rising to the top on Broadway....

A mother sends her young son to military school so he won't find out she's been sentenced to a prison term on a framed fraud charge....

Reporter Nicholas Ranson is jubilant when, on 17 Dec 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright take their first airplane flight. Back home in Underwood, Maryland, however, his uncle Hiram F. Jenkins, owner and editor of the local...

Jimmy, the owner of a failed music shop, goes to work with his uncle, the owner of a food factory. Before he gets there, he befriends an Irish family who happens to be his uncle's worst enemy because of their love for music and in-house band who cons...

Swindlers con a lunchroom clerk into doing them a favor, supposedly on behalf of the FBI....

An orphan whose father has been killed by bandits inherits a mine. Cisco saves the mine and the child and also finds the child's real mother....

Duke and Jeanie Benson, an outlaw couple hiding out under assumed names. Duke realizes that he has a winning sweepstake ticket and will win $150,000 if he can cash it in without getting apprehended...