The Little Red Schoolhouse (DVD)

Disgraced after being disciplined at the quaint rural Hilldale School, orphan Frank Burke hops a freight train and runs away to the big city. While his desperate sister, Mary, searches in vain for her younger brother, Frank learns that New York is not the paradise that he envisioned. He is taken in by gangsters, who frame the gullible youth for one of their murders. Frank begins serving a long prison sentence, where his only hope is to be forgiven by the sister he abandoned.

Charles Lamont directs Dickie Moore (Oliver Twist, 1933) and Frank Coghlan, Jr. (Captain Marvel, 1941), two of Hollywood's best child-actors, in this Chesterfield production. In addition to the scores of short subjects he helmed in his five-decade career, Lamont is best remembered for directing some of Abbott & Costello's finest films, as well as many entries in the Ma And Pa Kettle series.

• drama