The Big Gamble (1931)

Director
Fred Niblo

Main cast
William Boyd; Dorothy Sebastian; Warner Oland; James Gleason; Geneva Mitchell

Genres
Thriller, Crime

Description
A gambler fakes his death so he can pay off his creditors with the insurance money.


Similar movies

A psychiatrist comes to the aid of a compulsive gambler and is led my a smooth-talking grifter into the shadowy but compelling world of stings, scams, and con men.
Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) is an expert gambler, and has been so as long as he can remember, and has never lost a game. These skills bring him to the attention of the underworld don Saxena (Utpal Dutt), who is interested in hiring him for winning large amounts of money from rich people and then influencing them into doing whatever he wants. Jai agrees to do so, and plays successfully, though unknowingly to entrap a patriotic Indian named Nath (Jagdish Raj) who works for the government. After losing large amounts of money, he is blackmailed into revealing the blueprints of a top-secret military laser weapon that hit any target within 50 miles. When the Indian police come to know of this, they assign the case to Inspector Vijay, who is asked to apprehend Jai at any cost. The only problem is that Inspector Vijay is Jai's look-alike, and is not at all a good gambler. After this Jai and Vijay's professional...
Gambling fever -- along with a brutal bookie -- leads three crooked cops into a double-dealing scheme that lands them in hot water way over their heads.
Literature professor and gambler Jim Bennett's debt causes him to borrow money from his mother and a loan shark. Further complicating his situation is his relationship with one of his students. Will Bennett risk his life for a second chance?
Slevin is mistakenly put in the middle of a personal war between the city’s biggest criminal bosses. Under constant watch, Slevin must try not to get killed by an infamous assassin and come up with an idea of how to get out of his current dilemma. A film with many twists and turns.
Private Detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich family. Before the complex case is over, he's seen murder, blackmail, and what might be love.
A former college athlete joins forces with a sports consultant to handicap football games for high-rolling gamblers.
Director Phil Karlson harks back to the no-nonsense, no-thrills directness of his 1950s "B" pictures in Framed. Joe Don Baker plays Ron, a high-rolling gambler that always seems to loose his big scores. Framed by the film's villains after a big win gambling with high rollers-- Ron is carted off to prison. Upon his release, he embarks upon a carefully calculated campaign of revenge.
Arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse sets out to make a fortune and run Berlin. Detective Wenk sets out to stop him.
A film noir drama in which a sophisticated con man, who has just stolen from the mob, is forced to impersonate a psychiatrist who looks just like him, going so far as to cut himself on the cheek to duplicate a similar scar on the doctor. When he takes matters even further, karma arrives, forcing him to pay the debts of his double.
It's been two years since John Falk and Frank Wagner broke their cooperation and Frank started working undercover with the police. Frank's search for Kevin crosses Johan's investigation and opens up a new collaboration between them - with the big difference being that this time it's personal for Frank.
Ronald Plasmeyer (Ruben Van Der Meer) is a small-time Amsterdam detective, struggling with financial problems because of his gambling habit. When the Chinese crime boss Hao threatens Ronald's ex-wife and son to get his money back, Ronald comes up with a plan that will solve all his problems. Ronald enlists two petty criminals (Ton Kas and René Van 't Hof) to rob an illegal poker tournament he's taking part in, providing him with a perfect alibi. Quick, simple and non-violent; the plan is foolproof... until people start getting killed. Soon, Ronald's partners take off with the money, leaving him empty handed. To make matters worse Ronald's colleagues in the police force begin to suspect him of the robbery, setting the stage for a nerve-racking game of cat and mouse. Ronald is all-in... holding the worst hand of his life.
In an effort to get his buddy out of a gambling debt, Jeff agrees to join forces with Judge in a weapons heist. The job goes bad and Judge betrays Jeff. Jeff plots the ultimate revenge on Judge and his followers and it is a question of whether he can follow through with his plan.
A drama based on an ancient Chinese proverb that breaks life down into four emotional cornerstones: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love. A businessman bets his life on a horse race; a gangster sees the future; a pop star (Gellar) falls prey to a crime boss; a doctor must save the love of his life.
When a poor college student who cracks an online poker game goes bust, he arranges a face-to-face with the man he thinks cheated him, a sly offshore entrepreneur.
Sequel to the hot film Wild Things, Wild Things 2 sees teenage bad girls Maya and Britney go on a sex and killing spree to win millions.
Over the summer of 1976, thirty-six bombs detonate in the heart of Cleveland while a turf war raged between Irish mobster Danny Greene and the Italian mafia. Based on a true story, kill the Irishman chronicles Greene's heroic rise from a tough Cleveland neighborhood to become an enforcer in the local mob.
Dan Mahowny was a rising star at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. At twenty-four he was assistant manager of a major branch in the heart of Toronto's financial district. To his colleagues he was a workaholic. To his customers, he was astute, decisive and helpful. To his friends, he was a quiet, but humorous man who enjoyed watching sports on television. To his girlfriend, he was shy but engaging. None of them knew the other side of Dan Mahowny--the side that executed the largest single-handed bank fraud in Canadian history, grossing over $10 million in eighteen months to feed his gambling obsession.
A disfigured killer with glazed-over white eyes is doing the dirty work so that an insurance agent-doctor can get the victims' insurance money.
A fine art auctioneer mixed up with a gang, joins forces with a hypnotherapist to recover a lost painting. As boundaries between desire, reality and hypnotic suggestion begin to blur, the stakes rise faster than anyone could have anticipated.
Broadway gambler 'Gloves' Donahue wants to find who killed the baker of his favorite cheesecake. He sees nightclub singer Leda Hamilton leaving the bakery. When her boss Marty's partner Joe is murdered, Leda and her accompanist Pepi disappear. It turns out that beneath all the mystery is a gang of Nazi operatives planning to blow up a battleship in New York harbor.
After a young woman and her parents are murdered by a killer determined to wipe out the entire family, Detective Inspector Joona Linna works with a psychiatrist to hypnotize the son who narrowly escaped death in order to find the one surviving daughter before the murderer does.
On her deathbed, a mother makes her son promise never to get married, which scars him with psychological blocks to a commitment with his girlfriend. They finally decide to tie the knot in Vegas, but a wealthy gambler arranges for the man to lose $65K in a poker game and offers to clear the debt for a weekend with his fiancée.
A greedy but successful professional gambler wants to join the British Establishment when he falls in love with a blue-blooded lady. But first he must mend his ways and then dump his nightclub singer girl friend. She's not so easy to get rid of, neither is his past.
A hard-luck limo driver struggling to go straight and pay off a debt to his bookie takes on a job with a crazed passenger whose sought-after ledger implicates some seriously dangerous criminals.
The professional gambler Case Silverthorn wants to quit and retire to a small ranch in Marlpine he bought recently. On the way there he saves the Sheriff's life, who got into an ambush. However another man is dead, Will Donovan, from whom he bought the ranch! Neither the Sheriff nor Donovan's children know about the sale. So Case has to switch back to his former profession, while he tries to clarify the situation. He comes across a group of cattle thieves.
Fumiya owes 5 million yen to a female load shark for a gambling debt, while having affair an with Mrs. Hosoi who offers him 5 million to murder her husband. Fumiya has no choice but to kill Mr. Hosoi. Unfortunately he's see by a neighbor. In the escape, he meets a girl named Akiko. He hides in her house. Later on, Fumiya and Akiko fall in love and have sex. After that, he finds that the house owner Shin kidnapped Akiko whem she was a little girl and has kept her in the house for over a decade. Fumiya is determined to take her away from Shin's brutal confinement. A battle of wills between jailer, prisoner and accidental savior begins….
A Secret Service Agent is held captive in the trunk of a car and endures high-speed mental and physical torture as terrorists attempt to extract needed information for their sinister plot.
For most of the running time it's business as usual as gamblers Andy Lau and Alan Tam pull scams when they're not exposing them for casinos and incurring the wrath of a family of Japanese gangsters before Tam marries rich girl Idy Chan and Lau, as is the way with all movie hustlers, gets a busted hand, a drink problem and Rosamund Chan (so not entirely a bad shuffle there).
Jack Manfred is an aspiring writer who to make ends meet, takes a job as a croupier. Jack remains an observer, knowing that everything in life is a gamble and that gamblers are born to lose. Inevitably, he gets sucked into the world of the casino which takes its toll on his relationships and the novel he is writing.
Itou Kaiji is a bum who steals car emblems and slashes tires on what seems to be a regular basis. This routine changes one day when he is paid a visit by a man in a trench-coat. Once the two get talking, it seems that the visitor (Calling himself Endou) is a debt collector. The reason for his visit is an unpaid loan which kaiji had previously co-signed for a work-mate (Furuhata Takeshi). The original loan was 30000 yen and once Takeshi had disappeared, the loan then fell on Kaiji. Kaiji is then told of a way to clear the interest compounded debt (which stood at 3,850,000 yen), which involved getting on a boat with others in his position. Once on the boat the debtors would then have to gamble with loaned money, which would end with a few winning, and others getting into deeper debt and having to work to pay of their debts. After some coercing kaiji accepts a position on the boat, in order to clear himself and make a bit of money as well...
A compulsive gambler is forced to take a chance with his own life
State-of-the-art security system creator Jack Stanfield has cemented his reputation as a man who's thought of everything. But when a criminal finds a way into Jack's personal life, everything Jack holds dear is suddenly at stake.
An action movie centered around a group of street racers.
Elderly Italian who immigrated to Canada after killing a famous soccer player in a car accident must pay off his gambling debts by agreeing to become a human prey in a deadly manhunt organized by his debtees.
A stranger mentors a young Reno gambler who weds a hooker and befriends a vulgar casino regular.
March 1945 Asolo, Italy. Livia Mazzion, the attractive wife of a top ministry official, slips into the car of lawyer Ugo Oggiano, Livia's admirer and her husband's informer. Livia must reach Venice and her lover Helmut Schultz, a Wermacht lieutenant, as beautiful and accursed as a pagan god, with whom she is having a burning love affair. During the trip she relives the high points of her devastati
Paramedic Vincentas is a passionate gambler, who is forced to make radical decisions to return the debts. An idea strikes Vincentas to create an illegal game related to his profession. Love, life and death will be at stake.
A British spy is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador's mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife, who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Canal.
A casino security guard is forced into violence from when the Hong Kong mob threatens his friends.
Simon is a sales representative about fifty. When Mickey, his cop friend, is being shot, he leaves everything to find the murderers. Two years before, Marx, an old gambler, met Frederic, a young man that does not look very smart and started to follow him everywhere (as a puppy) and changed his name to Johnny to please Marx. Of course, Simon's story is related with Marx and Johnny's one. But the thriller is only a pretext for a psychological description of the three main characters.
Tara B. True is a flight attendant who makes a weekly swing through New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. In each city, she has a man: Edward, older and wealthy; Johnny, a beach bum with gambling debts; and, Davey, a rock musician on the cusp of success. Tara is a free spirit, faithful to each man in her own way, and so stunning that she dresses in a wig and ill-fitting uniform while she's working so men won't harass her constantly. The low-life whom Johnny is in debt to figures out a way to use Tara to help him execute a daring in-flight robbery. But will Tara stand by helplessly, or is superchick ready for action?
A man [Sean] makes a bet in Las Vegas with some men who want to kill him. He bets he can stay alive for 24 hours, then comes to Cleveland to elude them.
Two Chicago police officers are sent to investigate the brutal murder of a rabbi. As the investigation begins, Shatter and Jackson are summoned to Israel for questioning. Upon arrival they realize that they are, in fact, pursuing a supernatural being.
Two brothers work in their invalid father's repair garage. Johnny is the quiet, reliable one while Ted is younger and wilder. The brothers feud over Lucky, a beautiful band singer. Then their life is complicated: first by a police search for the unknown killer of a man in a dance hall fight, and then by a bookie pressuring Ted to pay his gambling debts.
Silver-screen icons Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney star in this classic drama as Nick and Jack Venizelos, two brothers whose fateful trip to the big city to do a little gambling results in a tragic turn of events. Directed by filmmaker Alfred E. Green, this film marks the only time in Robinson and Cagney's historic careers that the pair would team up on-screen.
A proud strip club owner is forced to come to terms with himself as a man, when his gambling addiction gets him in hot water with the mob, who offer him only one alternative.
Ex-bank robber and gambler, Bob, plans a heist at the Deauville casino.
The story concerns with Danny Lee's character as a manager of one of Macau's casinos battling it out on the card table to settle a gambling score with a Japanese gambler played by Chen Ping. He enlists the help of Tsung Wa's character and the battle of wits escalates.
John Shaft is back as the lady-loved black detective cop on the search for the murderer of a client.
Thai crime-comedy-drama film written and directed by Danny Pang of the Pang Brothers. It is Danny Pang's solo directorial debut, and is part of the loose "Bangkok Trilogy" by the Pangs that also includes Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and One Take Only (2003). Somchai (Pierre Png), a debt-ridden gambling addict, goes to the top of a building to commit suicide and finds a young woman, Go-go (Arisara Wongchalee), standing on the ledge ready to do the same. Rather than going through with the plans for death, the two talk and decide that there's nothing they can't do, since they had decided to die. So they embark on a crime spree, starting out by eating in a restaurant and not paying the bill, then stealing a car and crashing it for fun. They rob a convenience store, and are pursued by the police, and the gangsters Somchai pursue the couple as well.
A vengeful New York transit cop decides to steal a trainload of subway fares; his foster brother, a fellow cop, tries to protect him.
A gambler faces deportation when he gets mixed up with murder.
Nick, an American gambler, arrives in San Paolo and falls in love with Colleen, an American tourist, after she loses all of her money at the casino. Nick flees with Colleen after they are framed for murder and he tries to track down the real killer.
New York City English professor Axel Freed outwardly seems like an upstanding citizen. But privately Freed is in the clutches of a severe gambling addiction that threatens to destroy him. After a heavy loss betting on basketball, he relies on his mother to bail him out to the tune of $44,000. Unfazed, he continues to gamble recklessly, winning big at a casino, only to blow it all just as quickly. When his debts become more than he can handle, the loan sharks begin to circle.
Sex & Fury chronicles Ocho's exploits as she searches for her father's killers, each identified by unique tattoos on their backs (a deer, a boar, and a butterfly). Along the way, she also crosses paths with Shonusuke, a radical set on murdering prominent politician Kurokawa and Christina, an American spy posing as a gambler.
Repeatedly beat to a pulp by gamblers, cops, and gangsters, lone wolf Shoji Yamanaka (Kinya Kitaoji) finally finds a home as a Muraoka family hit man and falls in love with boss Muraoka's niece. Meanwhile, the ambitions of mad dog Katsutoshi Otomo (Sonny Chiba) draws our series' hero, Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) into a new round of bloodshed, culminating with the tragic demise of the young Yamanaka.
Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock hires Marlowe to find an old rare coin, the Brasher Doubloon, that belonged in her deceased husband's collection. Mrs. Murdock insists that her son's wife has stolen the coin. Marlowe begins investigating, but quickly finds himself entangled in a series of unexplained murders.
Ocho is accidentally captured by a drug trafficking cartel who use Chinese women to smuggle drugs into Japan by hiding it in their vaginas. She is tortured, and manages to escape, fighting both the male yakuzas and a gang of female thieves.

© Valossa 2015–2024