Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed this exquisite version of William Shakespeare's play. Louis Calhern is Julius Caesar, whose conquests have enabled him to rise to the status of Roman dictator. But his ascent to almost God-like status has given pause to influential members of the Roman Senate. Chief among them is Cassius (John Gielgud), who is ...
Like Pontius Pilate, director John Ford asks "What is truth?" in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--but unlike Pilate, Ford waits for an answer. The film opens in 1910, with distinguished and influential U.S. senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) returning to the dusty little frontier town where they met and ...
Adapted by Rod Serling from the best-selling novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II, Seven Days in May was allegedly inspired by the far-right ramblings of one General Edwin Walker. Burt Lancaster plays General James M. Scott, who, convinced that liberal President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) is soft on America's enemies, plots a ...
In later years, James Cagney regarded White Heat with a combination of pride and regret; while satisfied with his own performance, he tended to dismiss the picture as a "cheap melodrama." Seen today, White Heat stands as one of the classic crime films of the 1940s, containing perhaps Cagney's best bad-guy portrayal. The star plays criminal ...
Lt. (jg) Ken Braden (James Garner) is a US Navy frogman and underwater demolitions expert who is assigned to a vital mission, and to a submarine captained by Commander Stevenson Edmond O'Brien. But Stevenson is a CO who may have seen too many men die -- the two immediately come into conflict over Braden's presence on the boat and his mission, a ...
"If they move, kill 'em!" Beginning and ending with two of the bloodiest battles in screen history, Sam Peckinpah's classic revisionist Western ruthlessly takes apart the myths of the West. Released in the late '60s discord over Vietnam, in the wake of the controversial Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the brutal "spaghetti westerns" of Sergio Leone, ...
Moon Pilot is an engaging Disney sci-fi comedy that manages to shoot off a few neat and surprisingly satirical barbs at the hypertense US/Russia "space race" of the era. Tom Tryon plays an astronaut who is ordered to keep his upcoming moon flight a secret, even from his family. While on a plane, Tryon is approached by lovely Dany Saval, who seems ...
Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are Cliff and Laurie Henderson, a married couple on a vacation with their young daughter (Tammy Marihugh), taking their first sea voyage aboard the aging ocean liner Claridon. All is well for them, but not for the ship below decks, where a fire has broken out. The engine room crew, led by Chief Engineer Steven ...
Daniel Mainwaring took this story right out of the headlines of the day, penning this true story of a mass murderer who was eventually executed in San Quentin's gas chamber. Released during McCarthy's witch-hunt, Mainwaring was not given credit because Howard R. Hughes, who produced it under RKO, refused to give credit to any "radicals." The story ...
Few will argue with the contention that RKO Radio's 1939 adaptation of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame was the best of the many screen versions of the Hugo classic. We say this even allowing for certain liberties taken with the source material-liberties calculated by scenarists Sonya Levien and Bruno Frank to draw parallels between 15th ...
The Barefoot Contessa begins at the funeral of Ava Gardner, a former Spanish peasant, cabaret dancer and movie star, who at the time of her death was a full-fledged contessa. Her life story unfolds in flashback recollections from her mourners. Film director Humphrey Bogart recalls how his career was saved when he discovered Gardner on behalf of ...
In this uneven comedy, Abner (Don Knotts) is the editor of a bird-watching magazine who is the victim of a hostile corporate takeover by Osborn Tremaine (Edmond O'Brien). When Abner returns from a bird-watching excursion to Brazil, he finds his publication has been purchased for the fourth-class mailing permit. Osborn turns the publication into a ...
Wanda Hendrix is awfully cute as a WAVE officer who is endlessly pursued by lascivious men. Ex-airmen Edmond O'Brien, Johnny Sands and Steve Brodie spend most of their time chasing Wanda about, but she manages to keep them at arms' length. You see, she only has eyes for her boyfriend Dick Erdman, who is on the lam from vengeful millionaire Rudy ...
Pete Kelly's Blues is arguably the most stylish of director/star Jack Webb's theatrical features. Beginning with a brilliantly evocative pre-credits prologue, wherein we see how WWI vet Pete Kelly (Webb) came into possession of his precious trumpet, the film traces Kelly to his 1927 gig at a Kansas City speakeasy. Most of the film concerns Kelly's ...
Stephen Boyd heads a team of scientists sent on a bizarre experimental mission. Through a revolutionary and as-yet untested process, the scientists and their special motorized vehicle are miniaturized, then injected into the blood stream of a near-death scientist (Jean del Val). Their mission is to relieve a blood clot caused by an assassination ...
John Frankenheimer's bizarre, satirical gangster film is not for all tastes but has acquired a minor cult following. Elderly mobster Edmond O'Brien hires a hitman (Richard Harris) to eliminate his rival (Bradford Dillman) in a dystopic setting of not-quite reality. There are albino alligators, skillful chase scenes, and Chuck Connors as a one ...
The girl is stenographer Dot Duncan (Lucille Ball); the guy is her boss, stuffy young shipping magnate Stephen Herrick (Edmond O'Brien); and the gob is a brash sailor known as Coffee Cup (George Murphy). Not surprisingly, the plot involves the efforts by the self-effacing Stephen and the self-confident Coffee Cup to woo and win the lovely Dot. And ...
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 ...
A prosaic filmization of George Orwell's cautionary novel, 1984 is set in a futuristic totalitarian society where individuality is forbidden. The ruler is the never-seen "Big Brother," whose minions have monitored and bugged the activities of the populace so that no one can harbor any "subversive" thoughts. Edmond O'Brien plays Winston Smith, a ...
We don't see much of Omaha Beach in D-Day, the Sixth of June. Instead, the film concentrates on a romantic triangle involving American officer Robert Taylor, British officer Richard Todd and the lovely Dana Wynter. Taylor and Todd spend the last hours before D-Day reminiscing about Wynter. The romantic dilemma is eventually solved shortly after ...
The Killers uses Ernest Hemingway's short story as a springboard for a complex film noir. Two mysterious men (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) muscle their way into a small town and kill an aging boxer (Burt Lancaster, making his screen debut), who offers no resistance and seems to be welcoming his death. An insurance investigator (Edmond O ...
"I want to report a murder...mine." So begins D.O.A. Told in flashback, the story tells of how vacationing CPA Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) becomes the recipient of a deadly poison known as iridium. Told by a doctor that he hasn't long to live, Bigelow desperately retraces his movements of the previous 24 hours, trying to locate his murderer. ...
Ronald Colman won an Academy Award for his portrayal of an off-the-beam actor in A Double Life. A beloved stage star, Anthony John (Colman), has problems with his private life due to his unpredictable outbursts of temper. This trait has already cost him his wife, Brita (Signe Hasso), and threatens to sabotage his career. Nonetheless, Anthony makes ...
The title character is Edmond O'Brien, a lonely travelling salesman who ends up married to two women, Eve (Joan Fontaine)--and Phyllis (Ida Lupino). Eventually, of course, the truth comes out. Directed by costar Ida Lupino, The Bigamist manages to evoke a certain amount of sympathy for Edmond O'Brien, without in any way advocating or excusing his ...
Novelist John P. Marquand's soft-spoken Japanese detective Mr. Moto was brought to the screen in an entertaining 1930s B-picture series by 20th Century-Fox. But when the same studio purchased Marquand's novel Stopover Tokyo in 1957, Mr. Moto was totally excised from the screenplay. The film's main character is an American intelligence agent, ...
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