Tom Benner

Trip to Tahoe City, June 2022

The Maltese Falcon is a 1931 American pre-Code crime film based on the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and directed by Roy Del Ruth. The film stars Ricardo Cortez as private detective Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as femme fatale Ruth Wonderly. The supporting cast features Dudley Digges, Thelma Todd, Walter Long, Una Merkel, and Dwight Frye. Maude Fulton and Brown Holmes wrote the screenplay; one contemporaneous report said that Lucien Hubbard was assisting them. While the film was successful, its legacy was deeply hampered by the enforcement of the Hays Code. The film was remade by the studio twice, with its 1941 remake starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor overshadowing its predecessors. The film was not seen in its entirety until after the collapse of the Code in the mid-1960s. A print has been held by the Library of Congress since the 1970s.

Chinatown Nights, also known as Tong War, is a 1929 film starring Wallace Beery and begun as a silent film then finished as an all-talking sound one via dubbing. Directed by William A. Wellman and released by Paramount Pictures, Chinatown Nights also stars Florence Vidor, former wife of director King Vidor, who did not dub her own voice and quit the movie business immediately afterward, preferring not to work in sound films; her voice in Chinatown Nights was supplied by actress Nella Walker. The supporting cast includes Warner Oland as a Chinese gangster and Jack Oakie as a stuttering reporter. The movie was based upon the story "Tong War" by Samuel Ornitz.

The Talk of Hollywood is a 1929 American musical comedy film directed by Mark Sandrich and starring Nat Carr, Fay Marbe and Hope Sutherland. It was shot at the New York studios of RKO Pictures. The film's sets were designed by the art director Ernst Fegté. The film parodies the rush by Hollywood to convert to sound film production in the late 1920s, and leading moguls such as Samuel Goldwyn.

Dylan, the Champion White Standard Poodle, wearing his newly stolen plastic trash can collar, pays a visit to Tom Benner, who is busy broadcasting from his home studio, on KSRO in Santa Rosa.