Best Adventure Movies of 1938

Tom Sawyer and his pal Huckleberry Finn have great adventures on the Mississippi River, pretending to be pirates, attending their own funeral and witnessing a murder.

While in Shanghai reporting on the Sino-Japanese war, Chris Hunter, a shrewd news reporter, meets pilot Alma Harding. She does not trust him, but he manages to hire her as his assistant. During an adventurous expedition through the jungles of South America, her opinion of him begins to change.

The Venetian traveler Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan and foils a plotter with fireworks in medieval China.

King Louis XI masquerades as a commoner in Paris, seeking out the treachery he is sure lurks in his kingdom. At a local tavern, he overhears the brash poet François Villon extolling why he would be a better king. Annoyed yet intrigued, the King bestows on Villon the title of Grand Constable. Soon Villon begins work and falls for a lovely lady-in-waiting, but then must flee execution when the King turns on him.

French pirate Jean Lafitte rescues a girl and joins the War of 1812.

While searching the South Pacific for a missing aviator, Bob Mitchell and Jimmy Wallace are caught in a typhoon and crack up on an island, escaping unharmed with the aid of Tura, a beautiful jungle girl who is the only inhabitant of the island and is believed a goddess by the natives of the adjoining islands. The three are about to leave the island on a make-shift raft when a gang of savage tribesman land, headed by Kuasa, a half-mad potentate who informs them that all whites are his mortal enemies because an Englishwoman once spurned his love and he got his revenge by stealing her daughter, who is Tura.

A 15-episode serial starring Buster Crabbe.

Daubeney Carshott, a concert pianist, leaves London to dive for pearls on Thursday Island in the South Seas at the whim of Stella Raff, his fiancée. Once there, he discovers that the life he leads as a pearl diver is better in every way than his former existence as a social-lion pianist. He meets and falls in love with Lorna Quidley, after learning this Stella had send other suitors off in quest of a giant pearl for her.

The sons of a disgraced British officer try to clear his name.

A naval officer is demoted for negligence and put in command of a run-down submarine chaser with a motley crew.

Robert Louis Stevenson's hero David Balfour joins rebel Alan Breck Stewart in 18th-century Scotland.

Cowboy star Ken Maynard is Jim "Trigger" Morton, in town undercover while pursuing the man who framed him for robbery. But a well-placed shot tames a band of scofflaws and gains Morton the sheriff's badge. Now, he's riding on both sides of the law. The line is further blurred when old buddy Chuck (Walter Long) offers evidence of Morton's innocence in exchange for a blind eye to Chuck's impending postal heist in this classic Western.

A lumberman takes on a sleezy corporate giant wanting to move in and do whatever it takes to drive everyone else out of business.

Set in the India of the British Raj, the evil and untrustworthy Prince Guhl (Raymond Massey) plans to wipe out the British troops as they enjoy the hospitality of Guhl's spacious palace. It's up to the loyal young Prince Azim (Sabu) to warn the troops of Guhl's treachery by tapping out a message on his drum.

Dramatization of the first climbing of the Matterhorn in 1865.

The survivors from a plane crash are washed up on an island where the only inhabitants are Mr. Taylor and his servant, Ping. The mismatched group must learn to get along and work together if they are to convince Taylor to let them borrow his boat and return to the main land.

Bob arrives looking for the killer of his uncle. When the Sheriff chases him and his partner Rusty, Reno thinks they are the men he is looking for and takes them into his gang. There Bob finds his uncle's gun and knows he has found the right gang. However he realizes the gang has an unknown leader and he sets out to find him.

Drummond's wedding with Phyllis is interrupted when the inspector guarding their gifts is killed. He tries to trace the killers and uncovers the mystery of diamond counterfeiters.

A spoiled boy sent to the country to grow-up. He has to deal with life, friends and crooks.

In Shanghai amidst Sino-Japanese warfare an adventurer (Sanders) collecting money from gun suppliers falls in loves with a French singer (Del Rio).

Two American-army officers are working on a new type of machine-gun for anti-aircraft warfare, when one of them is murdered. The other vows to get the spies that are after the invention and avenge his friend's death.

Drummond has to leave for Morocco on his wedding day with his fiancee and trusted friends to rescue his friend Nielsen who is kidnapped by an international criminal.

Given the job of training young pilots for important post-war cargo flights, hard-boiled Col. Stockton forces ex-officer Stag Cahill back into the military to be his aide at the academy. Complications arise when Stockton's son Kenneth arrives for training and Stockton, believing his son to be a slackard, looks for an excuse to drop him from the program. Rivalry develops between Stag and Ken as well, as they fall for the same girl.

When a banker is found shot dead with a gun in his hand, his daughter refuses to believe it is a suicide. With the help of a detective, she hopes to get to the bottom of the case.

Agadez is a lonely French outpost baking under the desert sun and commanded by the cruel and oppressive Captain Savatt. To it comes, at his own request, Legionnaire Jim Wilson soon followed by his fiancée, Carla Preston, who has been tracing him from post to post. Legionnaires seize the fort and turn Savitt loose in the Arab-haunted desert with only a fraction of the water and food needed to get back to civilization. But Savitt gets through and returns to the fort at the head of an avenging troop of men. But Arabs surround Savitt and his men, and the mutineers, knowing that to leave the fort and aid them means their own death

A lowly office clerk angers his fiancee and future mother-in-law by spending money intended for marriage furniture on a statue of a pretty girl, which he refuses to part with at any cost.

Death stalked Garou's Landing, in the Canadian frozen north, but who was the killer who murdered two men and left them huddled in the snow. Sergeant Renfrew (James Newill, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, accompanied by his dog, Silver King (Silver King the Dog), and Kay Larkin (Terry Walker) the daughter of the man, Andrew Larkin (Robert Frazer) accused of the crime, sets out to solve the crime and bring the real killer to justice.

A showgirl with a dubious reputation flees the cops and transforms herself into a phony evangelist offering "cures" to the sick and disabled.

This being a Republic picture, it should come as no surprise that Storm Over Bengal was filmed in its entirety in the San Fernando Valley. Within its concise 65 minutes, the film manages to accommodate a Bengal Lancers main plot, a romantic subplot, the obligatory coward who makes good, intrigue aplenty from a villainous Indian potentate, and an outsized climactic battle between the rebels and the British forces. Patric Knowles, previously one of the leads in the British-India epic Charge of the Light Brigade, heads the cast. Worth noting is the presence in the cast of Richard Cromwell as secondary romantic lead Neil Allison and Douglass Dumbrille as the despicable Khan. Three years earlier, Cromwell had been tortured by Dumbrille's minions in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and he undergoes much the same treatment here-"just to make him feel at home" observed film historian Roger Dooley.

Adventuring author Jean Williams is living in the wilds of Alaska alongside the Eskimo people gathering material for her novel. She befriends several animals who become her loyal friends such as a pair of bear cubs whose mother has been killed by hunter Gaston Rogers, a talking raven and the bereaved collie Firefly who will not leave the grave of her master, a game warden killed in the line of duty. The community is imperiled by a pack of wolves and wild dogs, led by a wild dog called Swift Lightning, who are killing all the reindeer. With the supply of fresh meat gone, the Eskimos are migrating to lands with more food. Hunter Gaston agrees to take Jean to Nenana, Alaska, along with his furs by dog sled. Jean, who despises Gaston as being more savage and blood thirsty than the four-legged predators, is followed by her loyal animals.

The wealthy owner of a Pennsylvania steel business travels to New York to break up his son's romance with a showgirl. Director George Marshall's 1938 comedy stars Victor McLaglen, Brian Donlevy, Gypsy Rose Lee, Raymond Walburn, Hattie McDaniel, Lynn Bari, Robert Kellard, Jane Darwell, Andrew Tombes, Esther Muir and Frank Moran.

Comical exploits of two Navy pals, at sea and on shore.

A cocky reporter turns a small town marriage license clerk into a media celebrity.

Tarzan retells the story of a trip to Guatemala in which the ape-man had gone to aid a friend in searching for a very valuable totem pole called the Green Goddess. Second of two feature versions of the 1935 serial film "The New Adventures Of Tarzan", culled from the serial's last 10 episodes.

Two daredevil pilots go after the same girl.

A Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant must mediate a land rights dispute between an advancing railroad construction gang and French Canadian trappers in the rugged Northwest Territory of Canada.

Eleanor and her parents are hunting big game, acompanied by her wimpish fiance.

Tom Turner, a naturalist, comes to the "Topa Topa" district (named for the mountain), and falls in love with widow Margaret Weston...

A two-fisted Canadian Mountie leads lawmen in pursuit of the thieves who stole an Edmonton-bound freighter's cargo.

An expedition arrives on an uncharted jungle island to rescue the local natives, led by a jungle boy, from a volcano that is about to erupt.

The Jones Family heads to Gay Paree in celebration of the 25th wedding anniversary of Pa and Ma Jones. It doesn't take long for the Joneses to be victimized by clever Parisian con artists.

A police detective is caught up in a plot to steal two million dollars in bonds.

A nurse's younger brother is caught in a shootout between a criminal gang and the police, and he is shot and killed. The officer who is accused of shooting the man knows that he didn't do it, and sets out to find the real killer and clear his own name.

During the 16th century the Cossacks and their Ukraine homeland is ruled by Poland. This is the story of the leader of the Cossacks and how his son was sent to study under the Poles to learn how to defeat them in battle. However, the son falls in love with the daughter of a Polish nobleman.

A federal agent goes after a hijacking ring that uses beautiful women to help it hijack the rigs of unsuspecting truckers.

A passenger ship unexpectedly runs into a typhoon.

Knowing that is contains valuable helium gas, a gang of bad guys first tries to purchase the ranch which Gene straw-bosses. When that fails, they lay a hidden pipeline to snag the gas.

New York City fireman Bill O'Connell is assigned to the Arson Sqaud with the job of apprehending the for-profit gang of arsonists who are spreading terror and loss of property, including human life.