Movie archive

Dr. John Pearly is an affable turn-of-the-century con man who sells a patent medicine that is mostly whiskey. He resurrects a broken down steamboat with a makeshift crew and challenges the respectable but arrogant Captain Eli to a winner-take-all river race. Pearly hopes his nephew Duke will serve as pilot, but he stands accused of murdering a ’swamp rat’ who threatened the honor of swamp girl Fleety Belle. After Duke is arrested, Pearly tries to raise money for a lawyer by displaying a wax museum aboard ship. Ultimately he gambles it all in the river race to Baton Rouge, where he hopes to find a witness whose treatment will free Duke.

John Marion Stryker is the ultimate Marine, a tough rifle squad leader who in 1943 is assigned a squad of new recruits saddled with three veterans and an old enemy of Stryker’s from previous duties in the Far East. One recruit in particlar is a source of friction with Stryker, Peter Conway, whose father was Stryker’s CO at Guadalcanal and who felt his son was too soft and cowardly to be a Marine. The squad grows more and more resentful at Stryker’s increasingly brutal training regimen and his lack of sympathy for the varied personal problems of the recruits, but his determination to mold them into fighting men helps save their lives when the squad is landed at Tarawa in November 1943 and Stryker risks his life to blow up a Japanese bunker that has slaughtered Marines trapped at a log wall. The now battle-tested squad becomes more closely-knit and Stryker’s relationship with the men warms as the squad eventually finds itself in the bloodiest island battle of the war, at Iwo Jima.

While ostensibly on vacation with his wife and twelve children, famed detective Charlie Chan visits a circus at just the right time to become involved in the murder of one of the circus owners. Chan is prevailed upon to travel with the circus in hopes of discovering the killer before he, she - or it - strikes again.