1940s

‘A married woman shelters her former lover in her London home after he has escaped from prison. Discontented with her dull marriage, she begins to rediscover her former love for him.’
– ScreenonlineRead More »

Plot Synopsis from BritMovie
Bored BBC backroom boy Arthur Pilbeam (Arthur Askey) transmits timekeeping ‘pips’ over the radio in Morse code, and finds himself banished to Scotland to set up a new weather station at an Orkney island lighthouse. To his delight a boatload of models are shipwrecked – then the girls start to vanish one by one. Nazi spies are behind it, but Arthur gets the better of them, also posing as a mermaid to lure an enemy battleship into a minefield. Another flag-waving wartime comedy with a plot not dissimilar to Will Hay’s The Ghost of St Michael’s or Oh, Mr Porter! The similarity is further enhanced by the presence of regular Hay sidekicks Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriott.Read More »

Plot: A San Francisco librarian (Greer Garson) falls for a roguish seaman (Clark Gable), who loves her and leaves her pregnant.Read More »

IMDB Review.
Ellery Queen is about to leave for San Francisco, where his new book will be set, when he is visited by a woman who asks him to find out if her husband is alive or dead; supposedly he drowned in a boat accident a few years ago, but someone who looks a lot like him was recently seen in SF. Ellery takes Nikki Porter with him and has her impersonating the missing man’s wife, to bring him out into the open. The plan works, but a case of embezzlement and a murder bring Inspector Queen to SF as well, and guess who the chief suspect for both crimes is: the man Ellery was looking for! “A Desperate Chance For Ellery Queen” had the potential to be one of the best entries in the series, but it’s a little too messily put together to achieve that. Kudos, however, to Lilian Bond for her sexy femme fatale. I think it’s the first time in the series where another woman steals the show from Margaret Lindsay.Read More »

Summary:
An old woman’s poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school, the happy moments and the sad, and her tragic love for a Garibaldian.Read More »

by Hal Erickson
This adaptation of Vera Caspary’s suspense novel was begun by director Rouben Mamoulien and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, but thanks to a complex series of backstage intrigues and hostilities, the film was ultimately credited to director Otto Preminger and cameraman Joseph LaShelle (who won an Oscar for his efforts). At the outset of the film, it is established that the title character, Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), has been murdered. Tough New York detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) investigates the killing, methodically questioning the chief suspects: Waspish columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), wastrel socialite Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), and Carpenter’s wealthy “patroness” Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson). Read More »

This western begins with St. Louis resident Lutie Cameron (Katharine Hepburn) marrying New Mexico cattleman Col. James B. ‘Jim’ Brewton (Spencer Tracy) after a short courtship. When she arrives in “Salt Fork, NM” she finds that her new husband is considered by the locals to be a tyrant who uses force to keep homesteaders off the government owned land he uses for grazing his cattle–the so-called Sea of Grass. Lutie, has difficulty reconciling her husband’s beliefs and passions with her own. Written by kzmckeownRead More »

Quote:
One of Hitchcock’s finest films of the ’40s, using its espionage plot about Nazis hiding out in South America as a mere MacGuffin, in order to focus on a perverse, cruel love affair between US agent Grant and alcoholic Bergman, whom he blackmails into providing sexual favours for the German Rains as a means of getting information. Suspense there is, but what really distinguishes the film is the way its smooth, polished surface illuminates a sickening tangle of self-sacrifice, exploitation, suspicion, and emotional dependence. Grant, in fact, is the least sympathetic character in the dark, ever-shifting relationships on view, while Rains, oppressed by a cigar-chewing, possessive mother and deceived by all around him, is treated with great generosity. Less war thriller than black romance, it in fact looks forward to the misanthropic portrait of manipulation in Vertigo. — GA, Time Out Film Guide 13Read More »

Story
A gangster decides to mend his ways and go straight.Read More »