Porter Hall Trailers
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Clifford Porter Hall (September 19, 1888 – October 6, 1953) was an American character actor known for appearing in a number of films in the 1930s and 1940s. Hall played movie villains or comedic incompetent characters. Hall was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and began his career touring as a stage actor with roles in productions of The Great Gatsby and Naked in 1926. Hall made his film debut in the 1931 drama Secrets of a Secretary. He made his last onscreen appearance in the 1954 film Return to Treasure Island, which was released after his death.
He was probably best remembered for four roles: a senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, an atheist in Going My Way, the nervous, ill-tempered Granville Sawyer, who administers a psychological test to Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, and a train passenger who encounters a man (Fred MacMurray) who has just committed a murder in Double Indemnity.
On October 6, 1953, Hall died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California at the age of 65. His interment was at Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery. Hall had two children, David and Sarah Jane.
Most Popular Porter Hall Trailers
Total trailers found: 75
31 December 1943
Bat Masterson, who after failing to secure a job as a newspaper reporter becomes marshal of Dodge City.
29 June 1934
Ruth Raymond works on the telephone switchboard of a large NYC office building. One day, a private detective informs her that she is actually the daughter of railroad tycoon Luke Carson, and that she had been kidnapped as a baby 14 years ago by Luke's vindictive brother Elwood, and placed with strangers.
11 February 1938
Joe McKnight temporarily leaves his fiancée, Nora Langdon, for an expedition in a South American jungle.
13 December 1940
A reporter goes undercover to break up an outlaw gang.
08 December 1939
A New Yorker moves West when he inherits an Arizona ranch.
01 April 1943
In the small town of Crownport local attorney Bill Adams is trying to break up the ring of corrupt town officials by running for mayor.
25 December 1940
Phoebe Titus is a tough, swaggering pioneer woman, but her ways become decidedly more feminine when she falls for California bound Peter Muncie.
28 November 1931
Elsa Carlyle is impulsive and a gambler. Though loved by her husband Jeff, she's spoiled and selfish, concerned with social standing.
22 April 1937
Working for a slick restaurateur who has fallen for her, a down-on-life songstress falls instead for a crusading crime reporter, unaware that her employer is the secret head of the city's major gambling machine racket and has a penchant for murdering anyone who gets in his way.
24 December 1938
The further adventures of Twain's most beloved fictional characters of Tom Sawyer and his friend, Huckleberry Finn.
18 January 1949
A woman takes in boarders to support her husband's harebrained financial schemes.
06 July 1944
An insurance representative is seduced by a dissatisfied housewife into a scheme of insurance fraud and murder that arouses the suspicion of his colleague, a claims investigator.
11 March 1938
Racketeer Steve Recka, art patron and political power-maker, rules his town and Madame Lan Ying, his beautiful friend and hostess (read:mistress), with an iron hand.
20 November 1948
When an heiress finds out that the friendly young man she's met at Sun Valley is really an investigative reporter, she ruins his career by falsely claiming they're married.
25 July 1941
As he looks over the dusty, deserted remains of the western "boom town" of Panamint, grizzled old prospector Chuckawalla Bill Redfield recalls the town's glory days.
16 June 1936
An heiress with a penchant for speeding runs afoul of a traffic cop. Romance develops between the two, but it's soon complicated when he believes she is responsible for killing someone due to reckless driving.
04 June 1947
Kris Kringle, seemingly the embodiment of Santa Claus, is asked to portray the jolly old fellow at Macy's following his performance in the Thanksgiving Day parade.
23 June 1939
A newspaper reporter gets involved with shady stock promoters when he listens in on a jury room session.
19 October 1939
After the death of a United States Senator, the idealistic Jefferson Smith is appointed as his replacement in Washington.
15 October 1937
A famous singer and matinée idol helps a pretty young theater usher in her dreams of becoming a singer, but when her career begins to take off and she becomes engaged to a wealthy young man, he realizes he's fallen for her and plots to break up her impending marriage.
04 October 1945
Film adaptation of the Broadway hit, about the comic mayhem that erupts in a small town when a 15-year old high-schooler (Shirley Temple) is wrongly suspected of being pregnant.
13 August 1947
After the war, Matt Gordon returns to Singapore to retrieve a fortune in smuggled pearls. Arrived, he reminisces in flashback about his prewar fiancée, alluring Linda, and her disappearance during the Japanese attack.
30 November 1941
Successful movie director John L. Sullivan, convinced he won't be able to film his ambitious masterpiece until he has suffered, dons a hobo disguise and sets off on a journey, aiming to "know trouble" first-hand.
18 January 1940
Walter Burns is an irresistibly conniving newspaper publisher desperate to woo back his paper’s star reporter, who also happens to be his estranged wife.
30 March 1945
A millionaire joins the Navy hoping to find a girl who'll marry him for himself, not for his money. A beautiful gold-digger who works at a resort hotel sets out to get him.
15 June 1953
Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok join forces to establish a mail route that can get mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in ten days.
11 May 1938
Two attractive jewel thieves, one female (Olympe Bradna), one male (Gene Raymond) escape together after their latest escapade and hide out in the home of an aged concert pianist (Lewis Stone).
10 October 1947
England, 1763. After being convicted of a crime, the young and beautiful Abigail Hale agrees, to escape the gallows, to serve fourteen years as a slave in the colony of Virginia, whose inhabitants begin to hear and fear the sinister song of the threatening drums of war that resound in the wild Ohio valley.
22 July 1936
In the second screen version of The Maltese Falcon, a detective is caught between a lying seductress and a lady jewel thief.
23 January 1942
Married sleuths (Gracie Allen, William Post Jr.) find a corpse in their closet and round up suspects.
23 June 1945
Pete Marshall is sent as a replacement to the mountain district town of Plainville when a public opinion surveyor who went there goes missing.
20 March 1942
Aloysius 'Butch' Grogan leads a life of criminal activities motivated to provide for a widow and her child.
16 July 1938
Reporter Nicholas Ranson is jubilant when, on 17 Dec 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright take their first airplane flight.
29 June 1951
An arrogant reporter exploits a story about a man trapped in a cave to revitalize his career.
25 May 1943
Popular mailcoach driver Uncle Willie is in fact in league with the town's crooked banker. They plan to have the bank robbed after emptying it, and when Willie's choice for this doesn't show in time, he gets some local boys to do it.
25 May 1934
A husband and wife detective team takes on the search for a missing inventor and almost get killed for their efforts.
05 October 1935
A con man who stages phony "lucky legs" beauty contests and leaves town with the money is found with a surgical knife in his heart by Mason.
14 October 1938
The Arkansas Traveler, an itinerant printer, returns to a small town to help save The Daily Record, a newspaper started by Mr.
01 January 1944
Youthful Father Chuck O'Malley led a colorful life of sports, song, and romance before joining the Roman Catholic clergy.
29 March 1939
Captain Drummond and his girlfriend want to marry but a hidden treasure in the house in which they want to celebrate their marriage is complicating the situation involving a series of deaths and an elusive murderer.
31 December 1937
In the 1840s, Ramsey MacKay, the driver for the struggling Wells Fargo mail and freight company, will secure an important contract if he delivers fresh oysters to Buffalo from New York City.
16 November 1936
Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill go up against Indians and a gunrunner.
29 March 1936
Alan Tanner's new play opens in a week, but he just can't finish the third act. He's retreated to a snowbound cottage to work, but blonde neighbor Pat Quinn wants to play.
15 April 1940
When transplanted Texan Bob Seton arrives in Lawrence, Kansas he finds much to like about the place, especially Mary McCloud, daughter of the local banker.
22 May 1936
A Swedish princess boards an ocean liner in Europe en route to an acting career in America and finds herself getting inconveniently attached to a bandleader returning home.
18 March 1938
Drummond's wedding with Phyllis is interrupted when the inspector guarding their gifts is killed. He tries to trace the killers and uncovers the mystery of diamond counterfeiters.
09 July 1937
A tightwad accountant for a newspaper becomes friends with a reporter. The bookkeeper goes on vacation, and while there he learns of a kidnapping conspiracy.
07 January 1944
During WWII, an executive and his secretary arrive in Washington, DC on business but, because of the housing shortage, are unable to find hotel rooms.
04 October 1945
Anything can happen during a weekend at New York's Waldorf-Astoria: a glamorous movie star meets a world-weary war correspondent and mistakes him for a jewel thief; a soldier learns that without an operation he'll die and so looks for one last romance with a beautiful but ambitious stenographer; a cub reporter tries to get the goods on a shady man's dealing with a foreign potentate.
08 February 1936
Gabby, the waitress in an isolated Arizona diner, dreams of a bigger and better life. One day penniless intellectual Alan drifts into the joint and the two strike up a rapport.
18 September 1944
A small-town girl with a soft spot for American soldiers wakes up the morning after a wild farewell party for the troops to find that she married someone she can't remember.
03 September 1937
Michael 'Nuggin' Taylor and Powdah save lives during a sea tragedy in this story about the slave trade on the high seas during 1842.
05 March 1942
When Andrew Long, hyper-efficient small town accountant, finds a $1240 discrepancy in the city budget, his superiors try to explain it away.
01 May 1952
David Marshall Williams is sent to a prison farm where he works in the tool shop and eventually develops the precursor of the famous M-1 Carbine automatic rifle used in World War II.
22 November 1949
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.
30 September 1938
A convict who has just escaped from Alcatraz Prison takes over a passenger ship. Two of the ship's crew hatch a plot to overpower him and rescue the ship's passengers.
31 July 1953
A Los Angeles police captain ties the case of a slain policeman to a bank robbery, all in a day.
17 June 1938
Shirley Ross plays an innocent young girl convicted for complicity in a crime committed by her boy friend (Lloyd Nolan).
03 May 1952
An Apache of mixed blood tries to make peace between Indians and whites.
09 May 1937
An elderly couple are forced to separate themselves from each other after their children refuse to take both into one house.
