86% (2) Phantom Lady 87 min, Not Rated, [Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Mystery] [Robert Siodmak] [28 Jan 1944]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 73%, Rotten Tomatoes: 100%, External Reviews
Actors: Alan Curtis, Aurora Miranda, Ella Raines, Franchot Tone
Writer: Bernard C. Schoenfeld (screenplay), Cornell Woolrich (based on the novel by)
External Links: Wikipedia Rotten Tomatoes IMDb Language: English, Portuguese Country: USA
Plot: Unhappily married Scott Henderson spends the evening on a no-name basis with a hat-wearing woman he picked up in a bar. Returning home, he finds his wife strangled and becomes the prime suspect in her murder. Every effort to establish his alibi fails; oddly no one seems to remember seeing the phantom lady (or her hat). In prison, Scott gives up hope but his faithful secretary, "Kansas," doggedly follows evanescent clues through shadowy nocturnal streets. Can she save Scott in time?
Rotten Tomatoes: Engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is at a seedy midtown Manhattan bar early one evening, drowning his sorrows over a failed marriage, when he strikes up a conversation with a woman (Fay Helm). She's well dressed, with a very ornate hat topping off her ensemble, and also seems even sadder and more lost than he is. Henderson persuades her to join him in taking advantage of the two theater tickets he has. They attend the show -- a song-and-dance showcase by a Brazilian artist (Aurora) -- and then part company without ever exchanging names. He returns home to find three detectives in his apartment and his wife strangled. Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) questions Henderson and tries to verify his alibi, but no one -- not the bartender, the cabbie who hauled them to the theater, or the drummer in the band who was watching her -- admits to remembering the woman. Henderson can't prove that he was elsewhere when his wife was strangled and is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His assistant, Carol Richman (Ella Raines), who has watched all of this happen, can't sit by while Scott is destroyed, and decides to get at the truth, joined by Inspector Burgess, who now believes Henderson to be innocent. Carol hounds the bartender (Andrew Tombes) until he seems ready to crack, but before he talks, he tries to get away from her and dies in an accident. The drummer, Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr.), proves more talkative and reveals that someone paid him 500 dollars to forget about the woman, but before Burgess can question him, he's strangled. It seems as though there's no hope left, even with the added help of Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), Scott's best friend, newly returned from Brazil, when Carol gets a line on the unusual hat the woman was wearing. She traces the hat to its owner in a mansion on Long Island, where she is recovering from a breakdown over the death of her fiancé -- that was her trouble on the night she crossed paths with Scott Henderson. It is only on returning to New York, while awaiting Burgess' arrival, that she realizes that Jack Marlow is the murderer -- that he returned after having dinner with them, following their fight, and strangled Henderson's wife; paid off the bartender, the cab driver, and Cliff Milburn to keep them from revealing the existence of the woman that Scott was with; and killed Milburn to prevent him from talking; and he plans to kill Carol before she can talk to Burgess. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi
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85% (2) High Sierra 100 min, Passed, [Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller] [Raoul Walsh] [25 Jan 1941]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 76%, Rotten Tomatoes: 94%, External Reviews
Awards: 3 wins.
Actors: Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino
Writer: John Huston (screen play), W.R. Burnett (screen play), W.R. Burnett (from a novel by)
External Links: Wikipedia Rotten Tomatoes IMDb Language: English Country: USA
Plot: Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle is broken out of prison by an old associate who wants him to help with an upcoming robbery. When the robbery goes wrong and a man is shot and killed Earle is forced to go on the run, and with the police and an angry press hot on his tail he eventually takes refuge among the peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, where a tense siege ensues. But will the Police make him regret the attachments he formed with two women during the brief planning of the robbery.
Rotten Tomatoes: This is the tale of a tough-guy gunman-turned-Good-Samaritan and his much wiser moll who stands by her man.
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75% (1) The Naughty Nineties 76 min, APPROVED, [Comedy, Crime, Romance] [Jean Yarbrough] [06 Jul 1945]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 75%, External Reviews
Actors: Alan Curtis, Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Rita Johnson
Writer: Edmund L. Hartmann (original screenplay), John Grant (original screenplay), Edmund Joseph (original screenplay), Hal Fimberg (original screenplay), Felix Adler (additional comedy sequences)
External Links: Wikipedia Rotten Tomatoes IMDb Language: English Country: USA
Plot: In the gay '90s, cardsharps take over a Mississippi riverboat from a kindly captain. Their first act is to change the showboat into a floating gambling house. A ham actor and his bumbling sidekick try to devise a way to help the captain regain ownership of the vessel.
Rotten Tomatoes: Abbott and Costello's The Naughty Nineties offers a million laughs and a nickel's worth of plot. Most of the film takes place aboard a 19th century showboat, owned by kindly Captain Sam (Henry Travers). Bud Abbott plays the showboat's leading man Dexter Broadhurst, while Lou Costello is handyman Sebastian Dinwiddie. A group of slick gamblers (Alan Curtis, Rita Johnson and Joe Sawyer) cheat Captain Sam out of his boat, turning the place into a floating gambling palace, but Dexter and Sebastian foil the villains and save the day. The film is a virtual encyclopedia of wheezy but still hilarious comedy routines, many of them devised by veteran Laurel & Hardy and Three Stooges gagman Felix Adler. The film's highlight is a full-length performance of Abbott and Costello's verbal classic "Who's on First?"-and if one listens very closely, one can hear the cameramen and crew members laughing!
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66% (1) Hollywood Cavalcade 97 min, Passed, [Comedy, Drama, History] [Irving Cummings, Buster Keaton, Malcolm St. Clair] [13 Oct 1939]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 66%, External Reviews
Actors: Alan Curtis, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, J. Edward Bromberg
Writer: Ernest Pascal (screenplay), Hilary Lynn (story), Brown Holmes (story), Lou Breslow (based upon an original idea by)
External Links: Wikipedia Rotten Tomatoes IMDb Language: English Country: USA
Plot: Michael Linnett Connors takes Molly Adair from Broadway understudy to 1913 Hollywood star. Although she is in love with him, she marries her co-star reckoning wrongly Connors thinks of her only in terms of movies. He fires her in pique, apparently terminally damaging his career.
Rotten Tomatoes: Hollywood Cavalcade was a fictionalized history of silent films and the growth of the movie industry. Don Ameche portrays a character based on equal portions of Mack Sennett and D. W. Griffith, while Alice Faye's silent star is an amalgam of Mabel Normand and Gloria Swanson. Ameche breaks into pictures with slapstick comedies, initiating the first "pie throwing" scene, with Buster Keaton the thrower and Alice Faye the throw-ee. Thanks to Ameche, Faye becomes a major comedy star, appearing in wild Keystone Kops chase comedies. But success goes to Ameche's head, and soon he's staging elaborate Intolerance-like historical spectacles. As Ameche's artistic aspirations climb, his relationship with the faithful Alice deteriorates. She finds solace with her young leading man (Alan Curtis) and becomes a top dramatic star. Having made and lost several fortunes, Ameche talks Alice into appearing in his "comeback" picture, but shortly before filming ends, she and her husband are in a serious auto accident. The husband is killed, and as Faye recuperates, Ameche agonizes over how he'll save his uncompleted masterpiece. He witnesses the premiere of Al Jolson's part-talking The Jazz Singer and decides to risk everything by scrapping his film and remaking it as a talkie. Faye, who's never really stopped loving Ameche, agrees to star in this new project. On a level of accuracy, Hollywood Cavalcade is for the birds, but it scores on its energetic performances and nostalgic appeal. As a bonus, several past movie greats appear in cameos: Al Jolson, Buster Keaton, Mack Sennett, Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Finlayson, Hank Mann and even Rin Tin Tin Jr.
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63% (1) Mannequin 95 min, [Drama] [Frank Borzage] [21 Jan 1938]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 63%, External Reviews
Actors: Alan Curtis, Joan Crawford, Ralph Morgan, Spencer Tracy
Writer: Lawrence Hazard (screen play), Katharine Brush (based on the story by)
External Links: Rotten Tomatoes IMDb Language: English Country: USA
Plot: Rags-to-riches Hennessey meets newlyweds Jessie and Eddie from his old neighborhood. Eddie plots to have Jessie divorce him, marry Hennessey, divorce Hennessey, then bring Hennessey's money into remarriage with Eddie. His plan goes awry at several points.
Rotten Tomatoes: A poor young girl (Joan Crawford) marries a con artist (Alan Curtis), but then falls for a shipping magnate (Spencer Tracy) after leaving her husband to enter the work-a-day world as a store-window model. The two are happy together, but must face a scheme from the con man, who resurfaces with plans for blackmail. The song "Always and Always" received an Oscar-nomination.
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63% (1) Four Sons 89 min, APPROVED, [Drama, History, War] [Archie Mayo] [14 Jun 1940]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 63%, External Reviews
Actors: Alan Curtis, Don Ameche, Eugenie Leontovich, Mary Beth Hughes
Writer: John Howard Lawson (original screenplay), I.A.R. Wylie (suggested by a story by), Milton Sperling (additional dialogue)
External Links: Wikipedia IMDb Language: English Country: USA
Plot: When the Germans invade Czechoslovakia the four sons of a Czecho-German family follow different paths: Czech patriot, Nazi supporter, artist in America, and heroic German soldier.
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62% (1) 'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders 88 min, Approved, [Drama, History, War] [Ray Enright] [20 Dec 1943]Ratings & Reviews: IMDb Reviews: 62%, External Reviews
Actors: Alan Curtis, J. Carrol Naish, Noah Beery Jr., Randolph Scott
Writer: Lucien Hubbard (screenplay), W.S. LeFrançois (based on the factual story "GUNG HO" by), Joseph Hoffman (additional dialogue)
External Links: Rotten Tomatoes IMDb Language: English, Japanese Country: USA
Plot: Seven weeks after Pearl Harbor, volunteers form the new 2nd Marine Raider Battalion whose purpose is to raid Japanese-held islands. The men selected come from different walks of life but have toughness in common. Under command of Colonel 'Thorwald', they're trained in all imaginable forms of combat. Then, after a perilous submarine journey, they face a daunting first mission: to annihilate the much larger Japanese garrison on Makin Island, in a lengthy battle sequence.
Rotten Tomatoes: Raymond Enright's patriotic World War II adventure details a Marine unit's attack on the Japanese-occupied Makim Island.
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