A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Featuring:
Ralph Lewis, Jean Arthur, Hugh Allan
Written by:
F. Oakley Crawford
Edward J. Meagher
Frank O'Connor
Directed by:
Frank O'Connor
Release Date:
September 15, 1926
Original Title:
The Block Signal
Genres:
Drama | Thriller
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 59
Joe Ryan, a veteran train engineer, is demoted to a flagman position after a disastrous crash-- one caused by his cowardly and opportunistic partner. Though Ryan's failing eyesight is named as the cause of the crash, he's undeterred as he designs an automatic braking invention.
This generally historic drama depicts the railroad issue of the day circa 1910-1915, when railroad signals were changing from the moving arm semaphore to simple color lights (red and green) and railroads learned many engineers were red-green color blind. This shows people losing their jobs and even a head-on collision, depicting the effect of these historic railroad improvements.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.