The Stolen Jools (1931) and The Conquerors (1932)

Toronto Film Society presented The Conquerors (1932) on Monday, May 8, 1978 in a double bill with The Citadel as part of the Season 30 Monday Evening Film Buff Series, Programme 10.

PROGRAMME CHANGE

The Distributor of tonight’s scheduled second film, The Man From Laramie, let us down and left us with a last-minute emergency.  Instead of shipping us a 35mm, Colour & Scope print of the feature as booked and confirmed 10 months ago, they sent us a 16mm, black and white, flat print–no way we would ever show that!  In its place:

The Stolen Jools, USA, 1931, 18 mins., b/w, 16mm
Photographed and produced in co-operation with the Hollywood Film industry.  Released in April of 1931.  With more prominent stars than had ever before appeared in any one film:

Police Station: Wallace Beery, Buster Keaton, Jack Hill, J. Farrell MacDonald, Edward G. Robinson, George E. Stone.  Cops: Eddie Kane, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy.  Our Gang & Pete the Pup.  Polly Moran, Norma Shearer, Hedda Hopper.  Tete a Tete: Joan Crawford, William Haines.  Porch Swings: Dorothy Lee.  Breakfast scene: Victor McLaglen, Edmund Lowe, El Brendel.  In the Hotel: Charlie Murray, George Sidney, Winnie Lightner, Fifi D’Orsay, Warner Baxter, Irene Dunne.  Lunch Counter: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey.  Studio Set: Richard Dix, Claudia Dell, Lowell Sherman.  Newsroom: Eugene Pallette, Stuart Erwin, Skeets Gallagher, Gary Cooper, Wynne Gibson, Buddy Rogers, Maurice Chevalier.  Under the Tree: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Loretta Young, Richard Barthelmess, Charles Butterworth.  Two Couples at Home: Bebe Daniels, Ben Lyon; Frank Fay, Barbara Stanwyck.  Movie Set: Jack Oakie, Fay Wray.  Projectionist: George Gabby Hayes.  Midget: Little Billy.  Mitzi Green.

The Conquerors, USA, 1932, 76 mins, b/w, 16mm

Production Company: RKO-Radio.  Executive Producer: David O. Selznick.  Director: William A. Wellman.  Screenplay: Robert Lord, based on the story by Howard Eastabrook.  Music Director: Max Steiner.  Photography: Edward Cronjager.

Cast:  Richard Dix (Roger Standish/Lennox), Ann Harding (Caroline Standish), Edna May Oliver (Matilda Blake), Guy Kibbee, Donald Cook, Jason Robards, etc.

…The Conquerors, an obvious attempt (but a good one) by RKO Radio to repeat the success of Cimarron, even to starring Richard Dix again.  Directed by William Wellman, it contained some unusually powerful sequences…and a grim mass lynching episode so starkly designed and lit, and so casually underplayed, that it quite outshines the most carefully and lengthily constructed lynching scenes in Wellman’s much later The Ox-Bow Incident.

Pictorial History of the Western by William K. Everson