If brevity is the soul of wit, it can also be the heart of storytelling. In this age of the TV miniseries that makes great demands on one's time and attention, it can be refreshing to experience a film that spins its story in a little more than hour. So TCM has collected 100 movies that run less than 75 minutes, choosing from a variety of genres and presenting the films (from 1930-1960) in 10 categories. Here's some backstory on a couple of films from each category.

First up is the topic of Romance, which includes Redemption (1930), adapted from a play of the same name by Arthur Hopkins. Leo Tolstoy's The Living Corpse was the play's inspiration. Fred Niblo and an uncredited Lionel Barrymore directed the film starring John Gilbert. The former silent star delivers a rousing performance in his first "talkie" (though it was released after His Glorious Night, 1929), alongside his co-star from The Big Parade (1925), Renée Adorée.

Legend has long had it that Gilbert lost his film career because his voice was unsuited for talkies - a claim disproved by Redemption and his other sound films. (Finances and studio politics were the real cause of his decline.) Another silent star whose voice adapted well to talkies was Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who made the switch in 1928. He stars in Chances (1931), as a WWI officer who falls in live with the same woman as his brother while on furlough.

Romantic Comedies include Rafter Romance (1933), starring Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster as tenants who share an apartment in Greenwich village on a shift basis and are antagonistic, that is until they meet. This pre-Code RKO comedy is part of a package of six films that TCM was instrumental in arranging the first public exhibition of in more than 70 years when they were broadcast on the channel in 2007. Merian C. Cooper, producer of the six movies, had obtained ownership of them from RKO and withdrawn them from circulation.

Ex-Lady (1933), another pre-Code comedy, stars Bette Davis as a New York artist with progressive ideas, who weds her lover (Gene Raymond) to please her Old World father (Alphonse Ethier) but proceeds to enjoy an open marriage. The establishment of the Production Code a year later would have meant restraints on the film's situations and risqué dialogue, as well as some rather revealing negligees worn by Davis.

Among Westerns in the lineup are two Randolph Scott vehicles: Westbound and Ride Lonesome (both 1959). Both are part of a series of seven films known as the "Ranown cycle" - so named because of the production company that blended the names of Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown. Other important collaborators in the cycle were director Budd Boetticher and screenwriter Burt Kennedy.

In Westbound, set during the Civil War, Scott plays an Army captain attempting to ship gold to Union banks despite interference from Southern sympathizers. In Ride Lonesome, he is a bounty hunter on a mission to bring an accused murderer to justice. The other films in the Ranown cycle are Seven Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958) and Comanche Station (1960).

Gangster Films include two starring Joan Blondell, a popular fixture in underworld dramas made by Warner Bros. in the 1930s. In Three on a Match (1932), large-eyed Blondell gets top billing over Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak in a story about a trio of childhood friends who meet again as adults. The ladies then face melodramatic complications involving a gangster called Ace (Edward Arnold). Blondell also takes the title role in Blondie Johnson (1933), playing a hard-luck, Depression dame who falls for a gangster (Chester Morris) and climbs the criminal ladder to become head of a gang.

Our Film Noir choices with economical running times include two critically praised classics of the genre. Detour (1945), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and released through "Poverty Row" distributor Producers Releasing Corporation, packs a powerful punch despite its low budget. It tells the story of a piano player (Tom Neal) who becomes involved with a scheming hitchhiker (Ann Savage). Critic Roger Ebert described Detour as "haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir."

Another hard-hitting noir entry, The Set-Up (1949), was the last film made by master director Robert Wise during his tenure at RKO in the 1930s and '40s. It's the story of a has-been boxer (Robert Ryan) who goes into the ring for a final fight without realizing he has been set up to lose. The New York Times wrote that, in this film, "the great expectations and shattered hopes which are the drama of the dressing room have been brought to vivid, throbbing life."

The Musicals category hosts two relatively obscure but entertaining movies featuring comic duos who first gained fame in vaudeville. Gus Van and Joe Schenck, billed as Van and Schenck, star in They Learned About Women (1930). This was the only feature film made by this team, who had starred in the Ziegfeld Follies and in a series of shorts, performing musical and comedy routines with Schenck on piano. In the movie, they are baseball players in love with the same woman (Bessie Love).

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey star in Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934) as beauty-product salesmen promoting flavored lipstick. Wheeler and Woolsey, who gained fame on Broadway as well as in vaudeville, became a popular pair in RKO movies of the 1930s, when they made some two dozen films together. Songs in Hips, Hips, Hooray! include "Keep Romance Alive" as sung by Ruth Etting, the subject of the 1955 Doris Day biopic Love Me or Leave Me.

Two of our short Comedies marked the beginning of movie series, one a long-running hit and the other the inspiration for only two sequels. A Family Affair (1937) kicked off the cinematic adventures of Mickey Rooney's Andy Hardy, although in this installment he was a secondary character and Rooney was billed fourth among the cast. He would be first-billed as the star of 15 sequels.

This original outing of the Hardy family was based on the play Skidding by Aurania Rouverol and concerns Judge Hardy's problems in facing re-election in his small town. In this edition, Andy's parents (the judge and his wife) are played by Lionel Barrymore and Spring Byington; they would be replaced in future chapters by Lewis Stone and Fay Holden. Margaret Marquis, who plays Polly Benedict here, would lose her role to Ann Rutherford.

Fast Company (1938) saw the introduction of Joel and Garda Stone (Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice), married amateur sleuths in the mold of Nick and Nora Charles. MGM reportedly came up with the idea of this second couple to placate audiences between episodes of the Thin Man series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora. Two 1939 sequels cast other stars as the Stones: Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell in Fast and Loose and Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern in Fast and Furious.

When it comes to characters given to solving Mysteries, you probably remember Nancy Drew, The Saint, Philo Vance, Torchy Blane and the Falcon - all included in our short-film wrap-up. But how about Hildegarde Withers? The inquisitive spinster schoolteacher created by author Stuart Palmer did quite well for herself, appearing in 14 novels, 43 pieces of short fiction, six feature-length films and two TV productions.

We have two of the three Hildegarde movies starring tart-tongued American character actress Edna May Oliver. In The Penguin Pool Murder (1932), Miss Withers witnesses a murder at the New York Aquarium; in Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) she investigates the death of a fellow passenger on a flight to Catalina Island. In these two films, as well as the third in the Oliver trilogy (1934's Murder on the Blackboard), James Gleason costars as Inspector Oscar Piper. Other actresses to play Hildegarde on film and TV include Helen Broderick, Zasu Pitts, Eve Arden and Agnes Moorehead.

Oh, the Horror! It's well-represented in TCM's selection of films with short running times, as we present eight modestly budgeted but expressive and often terrifying classics of the genre. Two of our films are from the impressive collection produced by Val Lewton for RKO in the early 1940s. When Lewton signed on as head of RKO's horror unit, one of the specifications was that each of his films was to run under 75 minutes, with a budget not to exceed $150,000.

Both our Lewton films are directed by Jacques Tourneur, who was noted for the artfulness and subtlety of his horror films, inspiring a sense of suspense and dread through indirection and avoiding overuse of special effects. Cat People (1942) tells of a Serbian woman (Simone Simon) who believes she shape-shifts into a panther when aroused, while I Walked with a Zombie (1943) focuses on a nurse (Frances Dee) who travels to a plantation in the Caribbean where she encounters the undead.

by Roger Fristoe