Commentary tracks, vintage cartoons, shorts and two documentaries "Wild Bill" and "The Men Who Made Movies" ---

The "Forbidden Hollywood" series has exposed an entire era of movies that had been forgotten for the longest time by Hollywood when the Production Code took effect. The first in the series had a number of classic films including James Whale's long missing "Waterloo Bridge" (which MGM purchased, removed from circulation so that their remake wouldn't face any competition from any second run theaters or as the bottom half of a twin bill). Whale's film was brilliant where the MGM remake was pedestrian at best--flatfooted and a weak drama because much of the power of the film resided in the fact that the lady was, well, no lady in the film. ***

The third go round for "Forbidden Hollywood" again brings us a series of films long out of circulation. This is the first set where all of the films were directed by one person--William Wellman. Wellman was a talented director that has largely been forgotten who directed what would be considered "gritty' dramas for the time. ***

The films include Wellman's "Other Men's Women", "The Purchase Price", "Frisco Jenny", "Heroes for Sales","Midnight Mary" and "Wild Boys of the Road" which proved to be popular programmers in the 1930's. All of these were originally Warner films except for "Midnight Mary" which was produced at MGM. The films deal with a variety of plots with "Midnight Mary" for example dealing with a Loretta Young as a gangster mol put on trial. Others such as "Wild Boys of the Road" were depression dramas dealing with 3 boys who go on the road looking for work in an ecomomically turbulent nation (not too different from today). ---

Image & Sound:

Warner has done a fine job with the transfers for all these vintage films. The source negatives may no longer exist for many of these and Warner has found--where possible--the best source prints for these films and cleaned them up for their DVD debut. Warner has done a fine job here as the films all look good to excellent. ***

Audio is clear throughout and the mono soundtracks sound surprisingly spry given their age with nice detail although there is a fair amount of hiss in a couple of scenes most of the soundtrack has been cleaned up to make the dialog clear.

We get a number of interesting commentary tracks by film historians including one for "Wild Boys of the Road" by William Wellman Jr. (the director's son) and Frank Thompson. "Heroes for Sale" has a commentary by film historian John Gallagher."Midnight Mary" includes Commentary by Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta as well as the following shorts:The Studio Murder, Classic Cartoon: Bosko's Parlor Pranks, Theatrical Trailers. "The Purchase Price" includes the following special features: You Don't Know What You're Doin'! a cartoon,Moonlight for Two,The Wall Street Mystery Short . We also get additional cartoons and short features that were popular during the era. ***

We also get two documentaries including "Wild Bill" about Wellman's life and "The Men Who Made Movies" which traces his career as a director. Wellman was best known in the late 1930's as the writer/director of the original "A Star Is Born". ---

Final Words: