Due to a clerical error, Harold, a bumbling small-town chap with Hollywood dreams, is invited to a film audition in Los Angeles. His screen test is a disaster, but he’s hired as a film extra. He begins a romance with actress Mary, not recognizing her as the “Spanish Lady,” the heavily-costumed female lead in the movie he’s in. On set, Mary uses her sultry alter ego to toy with Harold, who becomes so flustered that he blunders his way to comic stardom.
Category: Pre Code
Raised in poverty by a never-married mother, Stephanie Dale resents her mother’s working-class sensibilities. Dreaming of a rich lifestyle Stephanie gets a job modeling as a modiste shop. Executive David Meyer notices her and is immediately attracted to her. One day Stephanie returns home to find that her mother has died. David and Stephanie get involved, they share an interest in books, but she’s put off by his age, clothes, and manners. Young, handsome Nick Amory is also interested in Stephanie, but she prefers David’s wealth and interests.
A businesslike syndicate runs all the gambling joints in town; least profitable is honest Mike Lee’s. Under pressure to allow cheating, Mike “walks out,” leaving tough-minded daughter Lady Lee to earn a living the only way she knows. She soon becomes a success gambling among the rich, but, falling out with the syndicate, she considers the marriage proposal of blueblood Garry Madison. Can such a match work despite snobbery and old associations?
Temple Drake is a Southern belle who leads men on with her sexuality but usually leaves them wanting. She’s loved by lawyer Stephen Benbow, whom she likes but doesn’t love. While out carousing with one of her beaux, she finds herself stranded with a gang of bootleggers, one of whom, Trigger, rapes her and makes her his sex slave. When another man is accused of a murder Trigger committed, Stephen defends him and sets out to find Trigger. But he isn’t prepared for whom he finds with Trigger, or what she’s become.
Grumpy, a retired London criminal lawyer who lives on his country estate with his granddaughter, Virginia, is a witty and lovable, though temperamental, old man. Jarvis, one of Virginia’s recent acquaintances, is their houseguest when Ernest Heron, Virginia’s sweetheart, returns from South Africa as the secret bearer of a valuable diamond. That night, Ernest is attacked in the library and the diamond is stolen, the only clue being a camellia placed in his hand.
Miss Madeline Fane is a famous California screen star who has been devoted to her baby son Michael since her husband’s death the previous year. One morning she awakens to find Michael has been kidnapped. After a day, she calls in the police, who instantly begin an all-out search.
International con artist Martha Hicks a.k.a. Countess von Claudwig is released from another stay in prison and decides to treat her rheumatism with a stay at her estranged husband’s hotel at a Wisconsin spa. There undercover, she checks in on the two daughters she abandoned as infants.
Jacques Costaud, a French war veteran is sentenced to life in prison for killing a man but soon escapes from a penal colony in French Guyana. He then flees to Paris to find his daughter Manon, who believes him dead. Now he must try to keep her from being abducted into a life of prostitution and keeping his true identity a secret.