Forbidden Hollywood Collection Volume 5

# 5 Is The Weakest Forbidden Hollywood Collection
Volume 5 has no extras, & the films are the weakest in the series. The best film in the collection & worth the price is "Ladies They Talk About" with a great cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Lillian Roth, Preston Foster, & Lyle Talbot. A woman-in-prison film. The scene where Roth shows Stanwyck around the jail is a pip!
James Cagney is the star of "Hard To Handle" but it is lesser Cagney & he is not his usual dynamic self. (Why Warner's chose this over "Blonde Crazy" is unfathomable.).
"The Mind Reader" is a good Warren William film in a usual part as a swindler.
"Miss Pinkerton" has Joan Blondell as a mystery solving nurse in a film that's just OK.
I am a big Pre-code fan & the only film on this I would watch again is "Ladies They Talk About", which is also the only film in the set that was previously available on home video.

Really good pre-code films.
I have so far purchased all of the Forbidden Hollywood pre-code sets. The first three sets are great, while set four is mediocre. Set Five falls somewhere in between with the best two films being "Hard to Handle" and the really good "Ladies they talk about". Nobody did Pre-code better than Barbara Stanwyck and this is her show. It does make me wonder where these sets will go in the future as the best films already seem to be represented. Skip the fourth volume in this series...it isn't worth the money.

loosing ground
I am somewhat disappointed with the last two volumes: 4 and 5. The first two volumes had "forbidden" qualities easy to notice. The last two volumes require some "stretching". Again, like in volume 4, there are no features, no bios, no commentaries, nothing extra. "Ladies They Talk About" with Barbara Stanwyck is the gem from this particular pack. I wish the series would stick to the quality it had from Volume One!

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