#john cromwell

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Jane Greer-Dennis O´Keefe "Prisionera de su pasado" (The company she keeps) 1951, de John Cromwell.

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Joseph Cotten-Claudette Colbert "Desde que te fuiste" (Since you went away) 1944, de John Cromwell.

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For the Defense, 1930

For the Defense is a 1930 pre-Code crime drama film starring William Powell as a lawyer whose ethics are challenged when the woman whom he loves kills a pedestrian while driving with another suitor. New York criminal defense attorney William Foster is so successful that prosecutors regard him as a menace. He holds himself to high ethical standards but is willing to mislead without actually…

For the Defense, 1930

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Scandal Sheet (1931) John Cromwell

June 5th 2026

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Don't you love me? - That's the tough part of it, but it'll pass. Those things do, in time. And there's one other thing—I loved him more.

DEAD RECKONING 1947, dir. John Cromwell

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Constance Collier-C. Aubrey Smith "El pequeño lord" (Little lord Fauntleroy) 1936, de John Cromwell.

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In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, and Kay Francis in In Name Only 

Cast: Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Kay Francis, Charles Coburn, Helen Vinson, Katharine Alexander, Jonathan Hale, Nella Walker, Alan Baxter, Maurice Moscovitch, Peggy Ann Garner, Spencer Charters. Screenplay: Richard Sherman, based on a novel by Bessie Breuer. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Roy Webb.

You have to feel a little sorry for Kay Francis in In Name Only, stuck there as the villain opposite two witty luminaries, Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Their background as comic actors make Grant and Lombard even more appealing in this mostly serious drama about frustrated love. We see the potential for happiness in their characters even as Lombard’s is suffering and Grant’s almost dies, mostly because we’ve seen the actors be giddy and funny before. Poor Francis is stuck in full grim glower as her character, Maida Walker, tries to hold on to her husband, Alec (Grant). Maida’s motives are impure, of course: She married Alec for his money, even though she was in love with another, less affluent man. Their marriage has long since gone sour, so when Alec finds himself falling for the pretty widow Julie Eden (Lombard), Maida has to pull out all stops to put a kibosh on their affair. In Name Only is one of the more cynical movies about marriage to come out of Hollywood under the Production Code, which while it didn’t prohibit the treatment of married couples falling out of love with each other and even getting divorced to marry their true loves, tried, under the Catholic leadership of Joseph Breen, to discourage it – or at least to make sure that it was as painful for the participants as possible. So Maida has to be cunningly deceitful in her attempts to hold on to her man. Naturally, in the end Maida gets her comeuppance and agrees to divorce Alec so he can marry Julie, but it’s a long time coming. Alec even has to be on the brink of death before this can happen, which provides one of the weaker moments in the film: Grant is so typically full of life that it’s almost beyond his considerable acting skills to seem to be seriously ill. In Name Only is no great film, but you probably can’t even care about its defects when Grant and Lombard are on the screen – they’re that good.

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Abe Lincoln in Illinois (John Cromwell, 1940)

Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois 

Cast: Raymond Massey, Gene Lockhart, Ruth Gordon, Mary Howard, Minor Watson, Alan Baxter, Harvey Stephens, Howard Da Silva, Dorothy Tree, Aldrich Bowker, Maurice Murphy, Louis Jean Heydt. Screenplay: Robert Sherwood, Grover Jones, based on a play by Sherwood.  Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: George Hively. Music: Roy Webb.

Young Abraham Lincoln (Raymond Massey) comes out of the backwoods and falls in love with Ann Rutledge (Mary Howard), who dies. But the ambitious Mary Todd (Ruth Gordon) quickly sets her cap for the promising young lawyer and lands him. The movie ends with the newly elected president leaving for Washington. The film is marred by lapses into historical pageantry, and director John Cromwell lets Gene Lockhart ham away as Stephen A. Douglas. Although Gordon begins badly in her role, flouncing around campily, she becomes quite effective in later scenes as the pushy but doom-haunted Mrs. Lincoln. Massey’s fine performance captures not only Lincoln’s wit and charisma but also his melancholia. He had appeared in Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play on Broadway, and it became the role with which he was most identified: He played Lincoln again in a brief appearance in the section of How the West Was Won (1962) directed by John Ford.