Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, the classic psychological thriller Rebecca was Alfred Hitchcock's first American film. Joan Fontaine plays the unnamed narrator, a young woman who works as a companion to the well-to-do Mrs. Van Hopper (Florence Bates). She meets the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) in Monte Carlo, where ...
Based on the Clare Booth Luce play of the same name, this MGM comedy is justly famous for its all-female cast and deft direction by George Cukor. The plot centers on a group of gossipy high-society women who spend their days at the beauty salon and haunting fashion shows. The sweet, happily wedded Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) finds her marriage in ...
Though Rudyard Kipling's poem Gunga Din makes a swell recital piece, it cannot be said to have much of a plot. It's simply a crude cockney soldier's tribute to a native Indian water boy who remains at his job even after being mortally wounded. Hardly the sort of material upon which to build 118 minutes' worth of screen time-at least, it wasn't ...
Produced by MGM's British facilities, the Technicolor Ivanhoe starred Robert Taylor in the title role. Returning to England from the Third Crusades, Ivanhoe is given a cool but cordial reception by his estranged father Cedric (Finlay Currie), a Saxon who despises the Norman king Richard the Lionhearted. Cedric introduces Ivanhoe's fellow knights ...
Loosely based on a novel by James M. Cain, this romantic drama centers on the struggles of a humble vineyard worker (real-life opera star Mario Lanza) who rises to become a renowned opera star. In the original book, Damon, the protagonist, has a homosexual relationship with the patron who boosts his career, but in the film, the patron is a wealthy ...
Director Hugo Fregonese and writer George Oppenheimer do the unthinkable: they manage to transform Giovanni Boccaccio's bawdy -- and downright raunchy -- medieval tales of martial discontent and infidelity into harmless white-bread treacle. Louis Jourdan plays Boccaccio in a framing story set in a villa in the Florentine hills. With a widowed ...
One of the most oft-revived of the pre-Technicolor Nicholas Ray efforts, Born to Be Bad offers us the spectacle of Joan Fontaine portraying a character described as "a cross between Lucrezia Borgia and Peg O' My Heart". For the benefit of her wealthy husband Zachary Scott and his family, Fontaine adopts a facade of wide-eyed sweetness. Bored with ...
Set in pre-World War I Austria, this relatively sweet and cheerful film marks writer/director Billy Wilder's first and last try at musical comedy. Bing Crosby is Virgil H. Smith, a New Jersey-born phonograph salesman with a fox terrier mutt and orders to sell record players in Austria. Joan Fontaine is Johanna Augusta Franziska von Stoltzenberg ...
Fred Astaire's first RKO musical without his longtime partner Ginger Rogers is one of his best from any period -- even though it's obvious that leading lady Joan Fontaine can't dance a step. Written by P. G. Wodehouse, Damsel in Distress casts Astaire as Jerry, an American entertainer appearing in London. Poor Jerry gets sucked into a wager ...
Director Robert Stevenson collaborated with novelist Aldous Huxley and theatrical-producer John Houseman on the screenplay for this 1944 adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's gothic romance Jane Eyre. After several harrowing years in an orphanage, where she was placed by a supercilious relative for exhibiting the forbidden trait of "willfulness," Jane ...
In this romantic comedy, a wealthy heiress marries hastily and realizes her mistake on her honeymoon in New York. Though it is her wedding night, she decides not to consummate the union and so ends up hiding in the room of a fellow whose airplane cargo company is facing financial ruin. He assumes that the frightened girl is poor and homeless and ...
Adapted by Robert Anderson from a story by James A. Michener, the Robert Wise-directed soaper Until They Sail is set in World-War-II New Zealand. Paul Newman plays been-there-done-that U.S. marine captain Jack Harding, assigned to investigate servicemen's requests to marry local girls. An unemotional cipher, Harding begins to warm up when he meets ...
Wealthy, sheltered Joan Fontaine is swept off her feet by charming ne'er-do-well Cary Grant. Though warned that Grant is little more than a fortune-hunter, Fontaine marries him anyway. She remains loyal to her irresponsible husband as he plows his way from one disreputable business scheme to another. Gradually, Fontaine comes to the conclusion ...
Perhaps the finest American film from the famed European director Max Ophüls, the film stars Joan Fontaine as a young woman who falls in love with a concert pianist. Set in Vienna in 1900, the story is told in a complex flashback structure as the pianist, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), comes upon a letter written to him by Lisa Berndl (Fontaine), a ...
Walter Pidgeon is the nominal star of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, portraying Admiral Harriman Nelson, the designer of the submarine Seaview, a glass-nosed research submarine. The sub embarks on her shakedown cruise under the polar ice cap as the movie begins. Upon surfacing, however, the crew discovers that the entire sky is on fire -- the ...
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 ...
Political intrigue and romantic gamesmanship send an already torrid Caribbean community to the boiling point in this drama. Maxwell Fleury (James Mason) and David Boyeur (Harry Belafonte) are two men running for political office in a British-controlled island in the West Indies. Maxwell is the son of a wealthy and socially prominent white family, ...
This film was a pet project of Joan Fontaine, based on a novel by Peter Curtis. It was her last feature film. Fontaine stars as teacher Gwen Mayfield, who is in charge of a missionary school in Africa. A witch doctor puts a curse on her, and she has a nervous breakdown. Returning to England, she takes a job running a small rural school. In the ...
Puritan Pictures seldom turned out a film that looked most expensive than it really was. The studio's Million to One appears to have been made on a budget of eight dollars and a box lunch, but that doesn't lessen its entertainment value one bit. Herman Brix (later known as Bruce Bennett) stars as Johnny Kent, a hot-shot Olympic athlete who lets ...
Bob Hope tries to capture the comic magic of his 1946 costume farce Monsieur Beaucaire with the splashy Technicolor romp Casanova's Big Night (filmed in 1952, released in 1954). Set in 18th century Venice, the film casts Hope as Pippo, the humble tailor of notorious ladies' man Casanova (an unbilled Vincent Price). When Casanova skips town without ...
Eric Knight's wartime novel This Above All was given the Tiffany treatment in the this 20th Century Fox big-budgeter. Tyrone Power plays Clive Briggs, a conscientious objector from humble origins, who deserts the British Army because he doesn't believe in fighting to preserve his country's oppressive class structure. But Briggs is no coward, and ...
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