Incoming MGM production head Dore Schary ramrodded Battleground into the studio's schedule over the virulent protests of MGM boss Louis Mayer. The result was an award-winning box-office hit, as well as the beginning of the end of Mayer's power. This dramatization of the battles of Bastogne and the Bulge in the waning days of World War II ...
John Wayne teaches those dirty Commies yet another lesson in Blood Alley. Wayne plays a veteran seaman who comes to the aid of Lauren Bacall, the daughter of a missionary doctor killed by the Red Chinese. It takes no little persuasion, but Bacall finally convinces Wayne to smuggle a group of villagers past the Communist forces and into the safe ...
William Wellman's landmark gangster movie traces the rise and fall of prohibition-era mobster Tom Powers. We are first shown various episodes of Tom's childhood with the corrupting influences of the beer hall, pool parlor, and false friends like minor-league fence Putty Nose. As young adults, Tom (James Cagney) and his pal, Matt Doyle (Edward ...
"This is New York, Skyscraper Champion of the World...Where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other...And where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye..." With this jaundiced opening title, scripter Ben Hecht introduces his classic comedy Nothing Sacred. Fredric March plays Wally Cook, a hotshot ...
The Next Voice You Hear was a pet project of MGM producer Dore Schary, who lavished more attention on this modestly budgeted drama than he did on some of his "bigger" projects. Though based on characters first introduced in the 1942 film Joe Smith, American, Next Voice was not a sequel to the earlier film. James Whitmore stars as blue-collar ...
Clark Gable is the largely nonheroic hero of the sprawling western Across the Wide Missouri. A cunning trapper who lives purely by his wits, Gable avoids being scalped by the Blackfoot Indians by marrying Maria Elena Marques, the chief's daughter. This marriage of convenience also allows Gable to trap to his heart's content in Blackfoot territory. ...
James Garner stars as WWII hero Major William Darby in this characteristically gusty William Wellman combat film. Darby organizes a highly-trained group of rangers, to be deployed in behind-the-lines activities in Italy and Northern Africa. The first portion of the film details the training, with time out for a few comic and romantic interludes; ...
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 ...
Wings, the first feature film to win an Academy Award, tends to disappoint a little when seen today. Too much time is afforded the wheezy old plotline about two World War I aviators (Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen) in love with the same woman (Jobyna Ralston), while the comedy relief of El Brendel is decidedly not to everyone's taste. But during the ...
Barbara Stanwyck, displayed in all her pre-Code glory, once again plays "damaged goods" in Warner Bros.' The Purchase Price. Hard-boiled nightclub singer Joan Gordon (Stanwyck) gets fed up being the kept woman of her married boss, bootlegger Ed Fields (Lyle Talbot). Fleeing New York City, she ends up in North Dakota as the mail-order bride of ...
This second of three movie versions of P.C. Wren's adventure novel Beau Geste is a virtual scene-for-scene remake of the 1927 silent version. We open on the now-famous scenes of a remote, burning desert fort, manned by the dead Foreign Legionnaires, then flash back to the early lives of the Geste brothers. As children, the Gestes swear eternal ...
During World War II, a Military Air Transport Command DC-3 piloted by a civilian crew is forced down in northern Labrador. The five men, led by Dooley (John Wayne), have barely any food and almost no way to keep warm, and their power supply is fading fast, but they have to find a way of staying alive until search planes find them. At first, even ...
The Story of G.I. Joe was based on the columns of Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith). Though already past 40, Pyle insists upon marching along with an Army infantry unit during the Italian campaign. He befriends several of the soldiers, including commanding officer Lt. Walker (Robert Mitchum in his breakthrough role), ...
Barbara Stanwyck shines in her second portrayal of a showgirl in less than two years (the first was in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire in 1941). In Lady of Burlesque -- which, at times, has a Hawksian edge to the dialogue -- she portrays Dixie Daisy, a striptease artist at a Broadway theater in New York at the end of the 1930s. In the course of fending ...
A real "must see" for devotees of 1950s pop culture, Ring of Fear boasts a script co-written by character actor Paul Fix and a cast which includes the likes of animal trainer Clyde Beatty and pulp-fiction novelist Mickey Spillane. The story takes place in Beatty's travelling circus, where a homicidal maniac named Dublin (Sean McClory) is doing his ...
With Robert Riskin as screenwriter, director William Wellman proved in Magic Town that it was possible to make a Frank Capra-esque picture without Capra himself at the helm. James Stewart plays Rip Smith, a cynical pollster who comes across a small American town named Grandview, which represents a "perfect" balance of ethnic types, professions, ...
Though director William Wellman was attached to the Lafayette Flying Corps during WW1, many people believed that he was actually with the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille, and this 1958 actioner does little to dispel that belief. The film concentrates on a group of courageous young American aviators who, long before the USA's entry into the Great ...
This rambling historical drama covers 109 years in the life of one woman. Encased in convincing old-age makeup, Barbara Stanwyck reminisces on her experiences in the American West. As a young woman, she is squired by gambler Brian Donlevy, but her heart belongs to dreamer Joel McCrea. She chooses McCrea, and the first years of their marriage are ...
What isn't Heroes for Sale about? Within its 71-minute time frame, this film (co-written by "professional cynic" Wilson Mizner) tackles such issues as disenfranchised war veterans, misguided hero worship, drug addiction, the Depression, capitalism, labor relations and communism. Richard Barthelmess plays a wounded war hero whose hospital stay has ...
This now-classic indictment of mob rule was a pet project of both star Henry Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom agreed to work on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for this film. After a hard winter on the range, cowboys Gil Carter (Fonda) and Art Croft (Harry Morgan) ride into a fleabitten small town for a drink. Within ...
A Star is Born came into being when producer David O. Selznick decided to tell a "true behind-the-scenes" story of Hollywood. The truth, of course, was filtered a bit for box-office purposes, although Selznick and an army of screenwriters based much of their script on actual people and events. Janet Gaynor stars as Esther Blodgett, the small-town ...
No slouch himself at rearranging the facts to make a good story, Colonel William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody would probably have enjoyed this Technicolor version of his life and times. Well played by Joel McCrea, Cody is first seen as an army Indian scout, pursuing peaceful coexistence despite the animosity of Chief Yellow Hand (Anthony Quinn) and the ...
For The High and the Mighty, director William Wellman made a point of using Cinemascope to heighten the dramatic content of a confined screen space -- in this instance, the cockpit of a plane in flight. Copilot Dan Roman (John Wayne) seems a lot more in control of things than Captain John Sullivan (Robert Stack) when the plane loses an engine ...
In this experimental 1954 Western, director William Wellman uses black-and-white backgrounds with occasional splatches of color on certain characters' bodies and clothes. On a snowbound ranch in northern California, the Bridges family is trapped by winter weather and its own internal conflicts. It is run by a stern matriarch, Ma Bridges (Beulah ...
Based on the Ben Hecht/Charlie McArthur play Chicago, Roxie Hart is a short-but-sweet satire of highly publicized court trials. Ginger Rogers plays showgirl Roxie Hart, whose no-good husband kills a man and insists that Roxie take the blame, since juries seldom send a woman to the chair. She agrees, figuring that the publicity will be beneficial ...
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
Portions of content provided by All Music Guide or All Movie Guide. © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide and All Movie Guide are registered Trademarks of All Media Guide, LLC.