Hijinks and spyjinks lighten this effective comedy by Richard Murphy, based -- very loosely -- on an actual incident in World War II. The place is somewhere in the Pacific and the not-so-good ship USS Echo, captained by the comic Lt. Rip Crandall (Jack Lemmon), has a very specific assignment. The floating anachronism has to safely carry an ...
This is the story of a chaste young TV-commercial actress (Maggie McNamara) who is romanced by a playboy architect (William Holden). Despite all sorts of temptations, the girl refuses the architect's invitation to become his mistress, holding out for marriage or nothing. Meanwhile, middle-aged rake David Niven tries to move in on the girl himself, ...
A middle-aged Clark Gable returned from active duty in World War II to star in this MGM release that was heavily advertised as his big comeback. Gable is Harry Patterson, the bosun mate on a merchant marine vessel, a tough sailor and fighter with the proverbial girl in every port. But while in a San Francisco library, looking up a book on the ...
This late-40s western features Robert Mitchum as an Indian scout who happens upon an unlikely family cabined up in the Great Northwest. They're unlikely because the widower settler (William Holden) has "purchased" a wife (Loretta Young as wife Rachel) to help raise his son and do the female chores around the farm. The son resents the surrogate mom ...
This second screen adaptation of the Samson Rafaelson play The Jazz Singer is better than the first, though not as historically important (the early Jazz Singer, it will be recalled, sparked the "talkie revolution" way back in 1927). Danny Thomas assumes the old Al Jolson role as the cantor's son-turned-cabaret entertainer. As Jerry Golding ...
Sometimes dismissed as a derivation of Samuel Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives, RKO Radio's superb Till the End of Time was actually based on Niven Busch's novel They Dream of Home, and was completed and released several months before the Goldwyn film. The story concentrates on three ex-marines: Cliff Harper (Guy Madison), Bill Tabeshaw ...
One of the gutsiest movie musicals of the 1950s, Love Me or Leave Me is the true story of 1930s torch-singer Ruth Etting, here played by Doris Day. While working in a dime-a-dance joint, Ruth is discovered by Chicago racketeer Martin "The Gimp" Snyder (fascinatingly played with nary a redeeming quality by James Cagney). The smitten Snyder exerts ...
Robert Montgomery is the director and star of the film noir mystery Lady in the Lake, adapted for the screen by source novelist Raymond Chandler. Montgomery plays detective Philip Marlowe, a private eye who just wants to publish his own crime stories. Kingsby Publications editor Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter) meets with Marlowe, but offers him ...
Jennifer Jones offers a virtual reprise of her sultry performance in Duel in the Sun as the titular heroine of Ruby Gentry. Born into a poor-white-trash Southern family, Ruby intends to improve her lot by marrying into wealth. Her casual beau Boake Tackman (Charlton Heston) considers Ruby unfit for marriage, but prosperous businessman Jim Gentry ...
"Winning isn't everything -- it's the only thing." These words were spoken not by Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi but by Steve Williams, the fictional college athletics instructor played by John Wayne in Trouble Along the Way. Recently divorced, Williams has trouble finding a job due to his inability to get along with his superiors. If he ...
June Bride is based on Feature for June, a play by Eileen Tighe and Graeme Lorimer. Bette Davis plays the businesslike editor of a fashionable woman's magazine, who plans a feature on a "typical" midwestern marriage. She assigns her aide (and former fiance) Robert Montgomery to cover the story, a task he feels is beneath him. Even so, Montgomery ...
Though completed in 1950, Love Is Better Than Ever was held back from release until 1952, due in great part to the "political undesirability" of star Larry Parks, whose career was effectively ruined after he humbled himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Parks plays Broadway talent agent Jud Parker, who takes a fancy to small ...
In this romantic comedy, two warring neighbors are aghast when their respective daughter and son fall in love and plan to marry. Despite their parents' objections they begin planning and getting the legal paper work done; it is then they learn they could be brother and sister. Fortunately, the situation is straightened out and the two find out ...
Dana Andrews is brutal metropolitan police detective Dixon, who despises all criminals because his father had been one. When the cops pick up two-bit gambler Ken Paine (Craig Stevens) as a murder suspect, Dixon subjects Paine to the third degree -- and accidentally kills him. In disposing of the body, Dixon inadvertently places the blame for the ...
In one of his first "adult" roles (he made his last Andy Hardy vehicle only a year earlier), Mickey Rooney plays Tommy McCoy, a dancer who performs in a going-nowhere nightclub act with his alcoholic father, Brian (James Dunn). Johnny Martin (Mickey Knox), a lightweight boxing champ who is headlining the show that Tommy and his Dad are currently ...
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