Tag Archives: Ian Hunter

Shannon Kelley writes:
The powers and fascinations of director John Ford and playwright Eugene O’Neill are happily met in this 1940 feature dramatizing the lives of men who serve as crew members aboard commercial freighters. Like O’Neill, Ford nursed a lifelong obsession with sailing and the sea, and had spent his early years in Portland, Maine, amid the maritime culture that this picture describes. Adapted and updated by screenwriter Dudley Nichols (Ford’s frequent collaborator) from four of O’Neill’s early plays set aboard the fictional “SS Glencairn,” the film recounts the experiences of the ship’s crew while transporting ammunition from the West Indies to England during World War II. Read More »

Quote:
What will a father do to give his son everything?

Obsessed with the desire to give his only son the best of everything, a man destroys his whole world in this riveting drama starring Spencer Tracy and Deborah Kerr (in an Academy Award-nominated performance*). When the boy is five, his father (Tracy) commits arson to pay for a vital operation. This fateful step launches a rocketlike career of business success. In the process he ruins his partner, destroys his wife’s love for him and then her will to live, and finally faces jail himself for what turns out to have been an empty dream. Based on the play by Robert Morley and Noel Langley. *1949: Best Actress.

— WAC case synopsis Read More »

William Kell, the keeper of a lighthouse a lonely stretch of coastline in New Zealand, marries cabaret dancer Eileen. His young wife, however, goes on to have an affair with Henry Cass, the handsome assistant. Later on she begins to flirt with a stranger from a wreckage. A chain of events is set in motion…

Also filmed by Dupont in German (Menschen im Käfig) and French (Le cap perdu) versions with different casts. Read More »