Gambling on AllMovie

For all his Broadway success, George M. Cohan was never able to "make it" in motion pictures. In 1934, he made another try at movie success with Gambling, a self-produced adaptation of his own stage play. Cohan stars as Al Draper a high-rolling casino operator whose beloved ward Dorothy Kane (Dorothy Burgess) is murdered. With his usual sang-froid smoothness, he dedicates the rest of the picture to tracking down the girl's killer, even though the police have officially closed the case. Cheaply filmed in an abandoned New York warehouse, Gambling disappeared from view not long after its release. Though not technically a "lost" film (copies reportedly exist in the hands of private collectors), it might as well be.