Queen of Broadway (DVD)

Sherry Baker is the most popular bookie in New York, respected by all the city's top mobsters. Her good looks have half the town's eligible bachelors panting at her high heels. All that changes when six-year-old Jimmy Carson walks into Sherry's office looking to place a bet for his sick mother. When Sherry realizes that the boy's mother has died, she decides to take him in as her own. To her surprise, the former party girl discovers that she actually likes the domestic life, but the adoption agency is none too happy with her choice of vocation. Sherry must prove to the courts that she has what it takes to be a mother, or lose the little boy she has come to love like a son.

A heartwarming tearjerker from PRC, Queen of Broadway stars the stunning Rochelle Hudson. Though she made many such "B" pictures during her long career, the actress appeared in an equal amount of acclaimed big studio movies. These include William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933), the 20th Century Fox adaptation of Les Miserables with Fredric March, Curly Top starring Shirley Temple (both 1935), and, most famously, the original Imitation of Life (1934), in which she played Claudette Colbert's daughter. Her career was interrupted when she took on espionage work for the Naval Intelligence Service during World War II. In her more mature years, she had a prominent role as Natalie Wood's mother in the classic Rebel Without A Cause (1955). Co-starring as her love interest is Buster Crabbe, the world-famous Olympic swimmer-turned-actor best known as Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion to generations of kids. (Coincidentally, Rochelle Hudson was a longtime family friend of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan.)

• drama