White Christmas, Paramount's belated follow-up to the 1942 hit Holiday Inn, was the studio's first VistaVision production. A veritable warehouse full of oldie-but-goodie Irving Berlin tunes are woven into the film's simplistic plotline, along with a handful of new songs, of which "What Can You Do With a General?" is the least memorable. Bing ...
Audrey Hepburn stars in The Nun's Story as Sister Luke, postulant of a Belgian order of nuns. Though frequently disillusioned in her efforts to spread good will -- at one point she is nearly killed by a mental patient (Colleen Dewhurst) -- Sister Luke perseveres. Sent as a nurse to the Belgian Congo, an assignment she'd been hoping for, Sister ...
In this routine business-story-cum-romantic-comedy, James Garner is Cash McCall, a wheeling and dealing tycoon, and Natalie Wood is Lory Austen, the daughter of failing businessman Grant (Dean Jagger). McCall's expertise lies in acquiring businesses about to go belly up, attaching them to successful enterprises and then taking a large tax ...
A scenic, tobacco-road soap opera by director Delmar Daves, known more for his westerns, Parrish features Troy Donahue in the eponymous title role. Parrish's mother Ellen (Claudette Colbert in her last movie role) happens to marry one of two competing tobacco growers in the Connecticut River Valley. Her new husband and Parrish's stepfather Judd ...
A gentler but no less resourceful Alan Ladd stars in The Proud Rebel. Ladd is cast as civil war veteran John Chandler, while the star's son David (who grew up to become a powerful Hollywood producer) plays Chandler's emotionally disturbed son David. Since suffering a traumatic shock during the war, David has not spoken a single word. With his son ...
Inasmuch as the spectacular Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart Broadway musical Jumbo was written in 1935, this 1962 film version can't help but seem a little quaint. Still, the film features the original production's star Jimmy Durante, energetically recreating his stage role as circus owner Pop Wonder; it is Durante's bravura performance that saves ...
This powerfully tense, fast-paced suspense drama also yields a grim social message about racial prejudice. Spencer Tracy is John J. MacReedy, a one-armed stranger who comes to the tiny town of Black Rock one hot summer day in 1945, the first time the train has stopped there in years. He looks for both a hotel room and a local Japanese farmer named ...
20th Century-Fox's Western Union was loosely based on a story by Zane Grey. The basic historical facts behind the connecting of telegraph wires between Omaha and Salt Lake City serve as a backdrop for a fictional story straight out of Manhattan Melodrama. Randolph Scott and Barton MacLane are cast as brothers who pursue wildly divergent paths in ...
How much can a man give? When the U.S. 8th Army Air Force 918th Bombardment group is ordered on their fourth harrowing mission in four hard days, Brigadier General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck) demands "maximum effort." The bombers are forced to fly lower, to fly farther, and to test themselves -- overspent and fatigued -- right up until death's ...
Richard Sarafian directed this minimalist chase film, starring Barry Newman as ex-marine, ex-race car driver and cop named Kowalski. He drives into Denver to deliver a car and pick up another vehicle to drive to San Francisco. To make the fifteen-hour drive to San Francisco bearable he pops a load of pep pills and drives off. Almost immediately, ...
Elvis Presley delivers one of his finest early performances in King Creole. Elvis plays a teenager named Danny Fisher, who is forced to drop out of school to help support his ineffective father (Dean Jagger). Drawn to trouble like a magnet, Danny is saved from a jail term by New Orleans salloonkeeper Charlie Le Grand (Paul Stewart), who gives the ...
Just a few years before The Great Escape would catapult Steve McQueen to stardom, the charismatic actor played the lead, Lt. Fergie Howard, in this light romantic farce involving the computers on a Navy ship. Lt. Howard is playing poker on the good ship El Mira when he gets a brilliant idea. Why not use the ship's computer "Max" to figure out ...
Elmer Gantry (Burt Lancaster), a drunken, dishonest street preacher allegedly patterned on Billy Sunday, wrangles a job with the travelling tent ministry conducted by Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons). Thanks to Gantry's enthusiastic hellfire-and-brimstone sermons, Sister Sharon's operation rises to fame and fortune, enough so that Sharon ...
Inspired by the true story of the leader of the Mormon Church, this film features Dean Jagger in the title role. The members of the Church of Latter Day Saints are subjected to religious persecution by the people of Nauvoo, Illinois, where they've settled; so under the leadership of Brigham Young, the Mormons head west, facing tremendous adversity ...
In this WW II drama, a tough-as-steel Medal of Honor-winning Marine finds himself training recruits on a stateside base and waiting for his wife to bear their first child. Unfortunately, he feels bad about being home when so many other soldiers are dying in the Pacific Theater and so asks to be sent there. He becomes an officer and is assigned to ...
Rawhide is a westernized remake of the 1936 crime melodrama Show Them No Mercy. Tyrone Power stars as Tom Owens, the assistant manager of a remote stagecoach way station. A coach arrives, bearing Vinnie Holt (Susan Hayward), who carries her baby niece in her arms. Having learned that an outlaw gang is in the vicinity, Owens advises Vinnie to hold ...
We prefer Rosalind Russell when she's making us laugh; judging by such films as Mourning Becomes Electra and The Velvet Touch, Russell preferred herself in heavy dramatics. In Sister Kenny, Rosalind Russell is all grim determination and pursed lips as Elizabeth Kenny, tireless battler of infantile paralysis. It is in the Australian outback that ...
Private Hell 36 was one of the last feature-length efforts by Filmmakers, a company created by producer Collier Young and his then-wife Ida Lupino. Young and Lupino also wrote the script for this grim crime melodrama, wherein two detectives Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) and Jack Farnham (Howard Duff Lupino's future husband) are assigned to track down ...
Audiences got their money's worth and then some from Byron Haskin's The Denver and Rio Grande. Edmond O'Brien plays Jim Vesser, a former U.S. Cavalry officer and hero, now the man in charge of getting the D&RG's tracks across the Rockies first to secure a right-of-way -- he revels in the job, chosen for it by General Palmer (Dean Jagger), his ...
Chased by a posse to a remote cabin, Jeb (Robert Mitchum) is joined by his fearful wife Thorley (Teresa Wright), awaiting the arrival of the men tracking them, as they try to reason out what has gone wrong in their lives. Jeb can't remember anything about his early childhood except for a horrible incident in which the people around him were killed ...
Star Bruce Lee died before this film was completed, thus the producers were forced to pad out the running time with outtakes and alternate shots. They also lifted chunks of footage from Enter the Dragon and Return of the Dragon. The finished product finally hit the screens in 1978, five years after Lee's death. The film's finale pits Lee against ...
Lewis Teague directed this sly horror-comedy from a script by John Sayles, which plays off the old urban legend about the dangers of flushing one's pet alligator down the toilet. One such unlucky reptile is "Ramon," who survives in the subterranean cesspool by feeding on the steroid-saturated carcasses of dogs dumped there by chemical company ...
Cult hero Samuel Fuller wrote and directed this visually inventive western, which didn't fare well with American audiences but earned a potent reputation with European cineastes. Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) is a despotic landowner who, with a posse of hired guns, has made herself the law of Cochise County, Arizona, with the weak-willed ...
Exiled to Shanghai uses the then-waging wars in Spain and China as backdrops for a familiar "rival reporters" yarn. Wallace Ford plays Ted Young, a brash newsreel cameraman who is fired by his dyspeptic editor Fred Sears (Dean Jagger) for photographing the wrong general during the Spanish Civil War. Down but not out, Ted embraces a new form of ...
In this pastoral drama, a ruthless gang of fugitives, hide from the law on a remote farm. There they find themselves profoundly affected by the old blind man and his loyal dog that lives there. They also gradually begin to respect the honest toil and simple rewards of country life. When the gang leader finally asks them to come out of hiding, the ...
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