In order to avoid the material copyrighted by Douglas Fairbanks Sr. for his 1922 Robin Hood, the scripters of this Flynn version relied on several legendary episodes that had never before been filmed, notably the battle between Robin and Little John (Alan Hale Sr., who played this part three times in his long career) and the "piggy-back" episode ...
Of the many film versions of Alfred Lord Tennyson's narrative poem, 1936's Charge of the Light Brigade has the least relationship to the facts concerning the famous 19th century British military blunder in the Crimea. Reflecting the popularity of 1935's Lives of A Bengal Lancer, the film uses the climactic charge as the culmination of events which ...
Based on the autobiographical book by Agnes Newton Keith, Three Came Home stars Claudette Colbert as Mrs. Keith. Trapped in Borneo during the Japanese invasion, Mrs. Keith and her British husband (Patric Knowles) are penned up in a prison camp along with several other subjects. Despite the humanitarian views of camp commander Col. Suga (Sessue ...
The Abbott & Costello vehicle Hit the Ice started life as satire of health clinics, with Lou Costello cast as a hypochondriac who used a streetcar conductor's change-purse to dispense pills to himself. By the time the film hit the screens, it was a standard A&C melange of comedy, music and fast-paced chase scenes, with nary a pill in sight. Bud ...
Based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren, this Southern potboiler stars Yvonne DeCarlo as Amantha Starr, the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana plantation owner. When her father unexpectedly dies, Amantha discovers that her father was deep in debt and the family is penniless, and she is forced to drop out of the exclusive girls' school she was ...
The fifth film in Universal's "Frankenstein" series goes for the box-office gold by combining two--count 'em, two!--of the studio's star monsters. We all thought that Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), alias The Wolf Man, had been shot dead in his own starring film in 1941, but the opening scenes of Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man prove us incorrect. ...
Monsieur Beaucaire, Booth Tarkington's novel about an 18th-century French barber who poses as a swashbuckling aristocrat, was the surprising source for this Grade-A Bob Hope comedy. While in the original novel the tonsorial hero pretended to be someone he wasn't by choice, in this 1946 film Hope is coerced into posturing as a nobleman on the ...
"Even a man who is pure at heart/And says his prayers by night/May become a wolf when the wolf-bane blooms/And the moon is full and bright." Upon first hearing these words, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney) dismisses them as childish folderol. After all, this is the 20th Century; how can a human being turn into a werewolf? Talbot soon learns how when he ...
Director Edward Dmytryk returned from a few unhappy years on the Blacklist in the early 1950s, to direct a handful of programmers before being restored to "A" pictures. Dmytrk's Mutiny is set during the War of 1812. Mark Stevens, captain of the American ship Concord, finds himself at the mercy of mutineer Patric Knowles, who is supposedly loyal to ...
With only a minimal romantic subplot and no music whatsoever, Who Done It? is pure, undiluted Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and a good mystery on its own to boot. Bud and Lou star as Chick Larkin and Mervyn Milgrim, a pair of soda jerks who aspire to become radio detective-show writers (their latest epic is "The Midget Gets the Chair-or, Small Fry" ...
This breezy and unpretentious film noir from director Don Siegel starts off with fireworks. Duke Holliday (Robert Mitchum), an American army lieutenant, is on his way to Mexico by boat when he's confronted in his cabin by Blake (William Bendix), gun in hand, who plans on taking him back to the United States. Holliday gets away, pummeling Blake ...
The resurgence of interest in Jules Verne following the release of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) led to a brief cycle of Verne-based films. Produced in Mexico by Benedict Bogeaus, From the Earth to the Moon stars Joseph Cotten as eccentric Civil War-era scientist Victor Barbicane. Claiming to have invented a source of "infinite energy" ...
Olsen and Johnson's followup to their zany, iconoclastic Hellzapoppin' was the more conventional Crazy House. The premise: Having nearly laid waste to Universal while filming Hellzapoppin', O & J are thrown out of the studio when they arrive with plans for a new picture. Only momentarily daunted, our heroes decide to produce the film themselves, ...
Eminent British stage star George Arliss is a most elegant tramp in The Guv'nor. Though shabby and indigent, Arliss seems to have a lot more financial savvy than most of London's established financiers. Through a fluke, Arliss is mistaken as a member of the Rothschild family (the actor did, after all, star in 1934's House of Rothschild) and is ...
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