Nitrate Treasures: Counsellor at Law

Hearst Metrotone News, Vol. 5, No. 226  (1933)

This “News Parade of 1933” features Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Chicago World’s Fair, the end of prohibition and more national and international historic events!

35mm, b/w, 10 min.

Ain’t She Sweet  (1933)

Lillian Roth swings “Ain’t She Sweet” with a menagerie of rambunctious critters at a barn dance.

35mm, b/w, 8 min. Director: Dave Fleischer.

Nitrate print!

Counsellor at Law  (1933)

Playwright Elmer Rice, who trained as a lawyer, adapted his own stage hit to the screen with William Wyler directing a powerhouse performance from John Barrymore as George Simon, an up-by-his-bootstraps celebrity attorney who finds his entire career jeopardized when a soft-hearted mistake from the past catches up with him. A dizzying cast of characters—wised-up secretaries, an unrepentant radical, high society matrons on the make—whizz in and out of Simon’s Manhattan skyrise office in a hilarious tour de force that never breaks pace until Rice and Wyler steer the whole shebang into a dark moment of reckoning for Simon that feels all the more earned and honest for the laughs that came before.  

35mm nitrate, b/w, 80 min. Director: William Wyler. Screenwriter: Elmer Rice. Cast: John Barrymore, Bebe Daniels, Doris Kenyon, Isabel Jewell, Melvyn Douglas.