When World War I hero Alvin York agreed to sell the movie rights to his life story to Warner Bros., it was on three conditions: (1) That the film contains no phony heroics, (2) that Mrs.York not be played by a Hollywood "glamour girl" and (3) That Gary Cooper portray York on screen. All three conditions were met, and the result is one of the ...
John Wayne -- showing off a darker side to his screen persona than we'd previously seen -- portrays Thomas Dunson, a frontiersman who, with his longtime partner Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan), leaves abandons a westbound wagon train in 1851 to make his future as a rancher in Texas. Doing so forces him to abandon Fen (Colleen Gray), his fiancee -- ...
The town of Vinegaroon, TX, is the home to Judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan), who calls himself "The Only Law West of the Pecos." Bean keeps a saloon, where he also conducts trials, using his office to get fat on fines and the seizure of property, and hanging most of those who get in his way, sometimes more than one a day. Cole Hardin (Gary Cooper) ...
The Gnome-Mobile was Walt Disney's first all-out fantasy since Mary Poppins. Walter Brennan stars in a dual role, as kindly lumber tycoon D. J. Mulrooney and the irascible (and much tinier) 943-year-old gnome Knobby. Mulrooney likes Knobby and his fellow gnomes, but the feeling isn't reciprocal, since Knobby considers Mulrooney a threat to his ...
James Garner is a nothing short of a delight in this western spoof that stands western clichés on their ears. The film takes place in the small western town of Calender, a town that experiences a gold rush when gold is discovered in an open grave by Prudy Perkins (Joan Hackett). As gold prospectors flood in and out of town, the Danby clan, anxious ...
The 1938 version of Adventures of Tom Sawyer appears to be producer David O. Selznick's dry run for Gone with the Wind, what with its similarities in period, costumes, color scheme and production design (both films shared the services of the great Hollywood art director William Cameron Menzies). Selected from hundreds of applicants (a precursor to ...
Kenneth Roberts' fact-based novel Northwest Passage would seem too raw and explicit a book to be considered for an MGM film adaptation-much less one in Technicolor. Amazingly, MGM retained many of the grim episodes from the Roberts' novel, though - thanks to the Hays Code - most are discussed rather than shown. The film is set in 1759, when the ...
Debbie Reynolds stars as Tammy in this romantic comedy of a country girl living in the South who cares for pilot Peter Brent (Leslie Neilsen) after his plane crashes near her home. At the beckoning of mutual admiration, Peter soon invites her to his plantation where she charms the fancy-shmancy attitude out of his family and transforms the whole ...
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 ...
Harry Lucas (Jim Hutton) is a U.S. Mint employee who scrambles to recover $50,000 he accidentally destroyed in this underrated comedy of errors. After he mistakenly throws the money down the garbage disposal, a frantic Harry recruits retired mint employee Pop Gillis (Walter Brennan) to cook up a hot new batch of cold cash. The two have to hire a ...
The focus of this heartfelt family film is Skeeter (Brandon de Wilde), a 14-year-old orphan who lives with his aged Uncle Jesse (Walter Brennan) in the swamps of the deep South. Their lives are brightened by a stray dog that Skeeter discovers and takes in. He makes the basenji his own, but eventually finds out that the dog is missing and its owner ...
Set in Texas during the late 1860s, Rio Bravo is a story of men (and women) and a town under siege. Presidio County Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) is holding Joe Burdette (Claude Akins), a worthless, drunken thug, for the murder of an unarmed man in a fight in a saloon -- the problem is that Joe is the brother of wealthy land baron Nathan ...
It's the wild and woolly waterfront world of San Francisco in the late 1800s in this rambling tale of an outrageous nightclub owner (Edward G. Robinson) and his efforts at wooing lovely Mary Rutledge (Miriam Hopkins), a lovely Eastern lass left to her own devices in the rowdy port city. The innocent babe loses that innocence when she becomes a ...
The first of director Frank Capra's independent productions (in partnership with Robert Riskin), Meet John Doe begins with the end of reporter Ann Mitchell's (Barbara Stanwyck) job. Fired as part of a downsizing move, she ends her last column with an imaginary letter written by "John Doe." Angered at the ill treatment of America's little people, ...
Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Morgan, owner-operator of charter boat in wartime Martinique. Morgan's right-hand man is Eddie (Walter Brennan), a garrulous alky whose pet question to anyone and everyone is "Ever get stung by a dead bee?" While in port, Harry is approached by Free French activist Gerard (Marcel Dalio), who wants to charter Harry's ...
One of the better and more diverting of ABC's first full season of made-for-television movies, The Over-the-Hill Gang was a low-budget Western with a gimmick: Get a bunch of elderly actors, known either for their leading roles in the 1930s, or for playing comic sidekicks (and Walter Brennan was a lot of both categories) through the 1950s, and put ...
In his second film for producer Sam Goldwyn, Bob Hope is felicitously teamed with luscious Goldwyn contractee Virginia Mayo. Hope plays Sylvester the Great, a two-bit entertainer "touring" the West Indies in the 18th century. Mayo is Princess Margaret, who is kidnapped by a rough, tough buccaneer known only as The Hook (Victor McLaglen). Through a ...
Seen on ABC's Friday-night schedule during its first season, The Guns of Will Sonnett firmly establishes its premise in the opening episode "Ride the Long Trail". Ex-Cavalry scout Will Sonnett (Walter Brennan) and his grandson Jeff (Dack Rambo) have left their home and begun wandering through the west, in search of Will's son and Jeff's dad Jim ...
The last of RKO's Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicles, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is also the least typical. At their best playing carefree characters in gossamer-thin musical comedy plotlines, Fred and Ginger seem slightly ill at ease cast as the real-life dancing team of Vernon and Irene Castle. The stripped-to-essentials storyline ...
Set in the woodlands of Wisconsin, Come and Get It stars Edward Arnold as a logger-turned-lumber tycoon. In his rise to the top, Arnold loses out on a chance for lasting happiness by spurning earthy dance hall girl (Frances Farmer), who marries his best pal (Walter Brennan) on the rebound. Marrying for position rather than love, Arnold becomes a ...
One of the greatest movie Westerns, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is hardly the most accurate film version of the Wyatt Earp legend, but it is still one of the most entertaining. Henry Fonda stars as former lawman Wyatt Earp, who, after cleaning up Dodge City, arrives in the outskirts of Tombstone with his brothers Morgan (Ward Bond), Virgil ...
"It's box office poison," producer Samuel Goldwyn is said to have exclaimed when he heard the idea of filming the life story of fabled first baseman Lou Gehrig. "If people want baseball, they go to the ballpark!" The story begins before World War I, when young Lou Gehrig (played as a boy by Douglas Croft) begins dreaming of becoming a professional ...
A mule-stubborn farmer is determined to avoid modern technology and nearly destroys what is left of his family in this moving drama. The farmer is saddled with raising his four kids alone and insists on being ruler of the roost in every way. He steadfastly refuses any talk of modern technology when it comes to farming. When his oldest daughter ...
Most of the 23 episodes in Season Two of the peripatetic western series The Guns of Will Sonnett adhere to the formula established in Season One, with septuagenarian ex-Cavalry scout Will Sonnett (Walter Brennan) travelling throughout the west with his teenaged grandson Jeff (Dack Rambo, in search of Will's son and Jeff's father Jim Sonnett (Jason ...
Raoul Walsh injects his expected artistry in the otherwise journeyman western Along the Great Divide. Feeling responsible for his father's death, marshal Kirk Douglas seeks redemption. He gets his chance when he saves murder suspect Walter Brennan from a lynch mob. The grateful Brennan accompanies Douglas to another town, where he can get a fair ...
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