MAN TROUBLE (1930) in 35mm

Special Features: Intro by film historian Sheila O’Malley

This long-unseen pre-Code gem is one of three films in the series featuring actress Dorothy Mackaill. (She also stars in THE MAN WHO CAME BACK and THE BARKER.) A hardboiled bootlegger (Milton Sills) saves the life of a singer on the skids (Mackaill). Both attracted and repelled, she accepts a job at his nightclub before drifting into a romance with a newspaperman; over a Christmas visit, his relatives treat them as married and her as a dream child, the daughter they never had. When the bootlegger learns of the affair, he drags her back into the underworld (to the immortal line “A wife? Why pay for a Ford when I can get Rolls Royces for free?”). DIR Berthold Viertel; SCR George Manker Watters, Marion Orth, from the short story “A Very Practical Joke” by Ben Ames Williams; PROD William Fox. U.S., 1930, b&w, 88 min. NOT RATED

35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive; preservation funded by Glenn and Eleanor Padnick and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Run Time: 88 Minutes

Opening Date: Thursday, November 12, 2026

Genre: Drama

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