The best James Kirkwood’s drama movies

Poor physics student Marie is studying at the Sorbonne in 1890s Paris. One of the few women studying in her field, Marie encounters skepticism concerning her abilities, but is eventually offered a research placement in Pierre Curie's lab. The scientists soon fall in love and embark on a shared quest to extract, from a particular type of rock, a new chemical element they have named radium. However, their research puts them on the brink of professional failure.

On a whim, a greedy tycoon decides to corner the world market in wheat. This doubles the price of bread, forcing grain producers into charity lines and others further into poverty. The film contrasts the differences between the lives of those who work to grow the wheat and the life of the man who dabbles in its sale for profit.

Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired. Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him, but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence.

A young Natalie Wood stars as an orphan who helps a doctor (Dean Jagger) fight an epidemic in a small western town, in one of Allan Dwan’s closely observed studies in Americana.

An old skipper, Captain Davis, has as his companions two derelicts -- one, Huish, is a Cockney, and the other, Robert Herrick was once a gentleman. In Tahiti they board a schooner and a storm takes them to an uncharted island. Living there is pearl broker Richard Attwater, and his daughter Ruth. Attwater is bitter because a supposed friend stole his wife and he has sworn to wreak vengeance on any white man he happens to encounter. Davis and Huish want to get their hands on his pearls, while, Herrick falls in love with the man's daughter.

John Ford weaves three "Judge Priest" stories together to form a good- natured exploration of honour and small-town politics in the South around the turn of the century. Judge William Priest is involved variously in revealing the real identity of Lucy Lake, reliving his Civil War memories, preventing the lynching of a youth and contesting the elections with Yankee Horace K. Maydew.

Young Lena Rivers, who was born out of wedlock, goes to live with a rich uncle. Unfortunately, her uncle's wife and daughter make no secret of their dislike of Lena and that they don't want her in their family.

As a luxurious ocean liner makes its way across the Atlantic Ocean, the audience is made privy to the travails of several of its passengers. Edmund Lowe heads the cast as Monty Greer, a suave gambler who falls in love with Judy (Lois Moran), the daughter of immigrant lens grinder Rudolph Kramer (Jean Hersholt). In trying to recover some valuable securities stolen from banker Henry Graham (John Halliday), Greer finds himself in the middle of a fierce gun battle in the ship's engine room. Meanwhile, Graham, who has been cheating on his wife Kay (Myrna Loy) with sexy dancer Sigrid Carline (Greta Nissen), is murdered by person or persons unknown. And that's only three of the plot strands in this marvelously complex shipboard thriller.

A gang of thieves lure a man out of his home so that they can rob it and threaten his wife and children. The family barricade themselves in an interior room, but the criminals are well-equipped for breaking in. When the father finds out what is happening, he must race against time to get back home.

A beautiful young concert pianist is torn between her attraction to her arrogant but brilliant maestro and her love for a farm boy she left back home.

The wall to Surprise Valley has broken, and Jane Withersteen is forced to choose between Lassiter's life and Fay Larkin's marriage to a Mormon.

In their farm house in a New York village, Ma Shelby prepares breakfast for her four children, Isaac, Tommy, Johnny and Susan, and then awakens them. The racket the boys make as they play and fight awakens their father, who spanks the eldest, Isaac. When a visitor chides Pa for not working, Ma sticks up for her husband, saying that he has a weak back and that he is waiting for a promised government job.

John Howard Payne leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart, Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.

During the American Revolution, a young soldier carrying a crucial message to General Washington is spotted and pursued by a group of enemy soldiers. He takes refuge with a civilian family, but is soon detected. The family and their neighbors must then make plans to see that the important message gets through after all.

Beautiful manicurist Hallie Hobart sets her sights on handsome David Stone, the son of wealthy wheat farmer Ezra Stone. Professing to hate men, Hallie is only interested in luring David in for a lucrative business deal. David easily falls in love, but older brother Mark brands Hallie a gold-digger. To get even with the straight-laced Stone family, Hallie accepts David's marriage proposal.

Fictionalized story of the 1869 adoption of women's suffrage in Wyoming Territory. In the new-founded railroad town of Laraville, Boss Jim Cork hopes to manipulate the sale of town lots to give him control, but Quaker schoolmarm Annie Morgan bags one of the key lots. Cork's lawyer Steve Lewis tries romancing Annie to get the lot back, finding her so overpoweringly liberated she leaves him dizzy. Still, Steve attains his nefarious object...almost...then has cause to deeply regret having aroused the sleeping giant of feminism!

After being shown what hypnotism can do, a doctor starts to study it in depth. When he experiments on a friend's wife, she regresses into an early life, that of Bridey Murphy.