Dorothy McGuire

After serving 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, a mobster is paroled and returns to a New Mexico town to exact his revenge on the woman responsible for his conviction.Read More »

The movie seethes with conflict and bad blood – often unspoken. The conflicts arise over deeply felt divisions in social class, in gender and in generation, and result in unspoken accusations of callousness and cowardice, vanity and selfishness.

In many respects this is a movie of another time – these days, unless a family has a strong military tradition, I can imagine few families now enraged by a son’s expressed wish that a war could be won without his involvement, few families in which an employer would not draft a letter for his decades-long employee’s only child to keep him out of war – and even refuse to write a letter (for which his mother pleads) for his own beloved brother’s draft deferment.Read More »

Grab a box of hankies and curl up for a night of jerked tears and warm fuzzies with Enchanted Cottage, the romantic and melodramatic tale of a horribly disfigured WW II vet who finds love and renewal at the terribly plain, wallflowery hands of a young spinster. Knowing that society is incapable of appreciating the mutually regarded beauty within each of the lovers, they retire to the romantic seclusion of a lonely cottage in New England. The plot is taken from a romantic play by Arthur Pineroi and was filmed before in the mid ’20s.Read More »

Synopsis:
A family in route to New Guinea is shipwrecked on a deserted tropical island. They are forced to remain on the island because of the damage to the ship and the pirates that are roaming the islands. They create a home on the island (centering around a huge tree house) and explore the island and its wildlife. Plenty of adventure ensues as the family deals with issues of survival and pirates, and the brothers must learn how to live on the island with an uncertain future.Read More »

Quote:
The wonderfully suspenseful psychological drama Spiral Staircase is the prototype of the “old dark house, lady in distress” thriller, full of dark corners, flickering candles and featuring a mysterious, menacing killer whose true identity remains hidden until the end. Helen Capel (Dorothy McGuire), mute because of a childhood trauma, cares for the owner of the house, the wealthy Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), a demanding, widowed invalid. Helen has quietly fallen in love with one of Mrs. Warren’s sons, Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), who she believes to be a gentle and understanding man. Helen’s peaceful life is changed forever when three local women, all with physical handicaps, are found murdered. Read More »

From Classic film:
One of the earliest films about anti-Semitism in the U.S.A. (though Oscar Best Picture winner, The Life of Emile Zola (1937) dealt with the subject in France), this Best Picture winner ironically competed against another (better?) film based on the same, Crossfire (1947). The former is a story about a gentile writer who pretends to be Jewish and then experiences the prejudice firsthand, while the latter explores a murder whose anti-Semitic motive is at first unknown. Additionally (even stranger?), these two similar films competed with a Dickens classic & two traditionally Christmastime films The Bishop’s Wife (1947) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947). But Best Actor nominee Gregory Peck & Director Elia Kazan (winning an Oscar with his first nomination) proved a more powerful combination than the three Roberts (Young, Mitchum, Ryan – though Robert Ryan was nominated for Best Supporting Actor) & Director Edward Dmytryk, who received his only Academy Award nomination.Read More »