Lovejoy, Frank

House of Wax

House of Wax brought Vincent Price into the horror genre, where he fit as snugly as a scalpel in a mad scientist's hand. A remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum, this entertaining Gothic shocker casts Price as a sculptor of wax figures; his unwilling victims--er, "models"--lend their bodies to his lifelike depictions of Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc. The film was one of the top 10 moneymakers of its year, thanks in part to the 3-D gimmick, which explains why so many things are aimed at the camera (why else would the paddleball man be there?). Footnote to history: director Andre De Toth was blind in one eye, and thus could not see in three dimensions.

Not at all a musty relic of the early-sound era, the original Mystery of the Wax Museum (shot in a soft, trial version of Technicolor) is saucy, pre-Code fun. As corpses disappear from the morgue, Lionel Atwill's wax museum adds to its displays. Coincidence, or the work of the hideously deformed fiend stalking the Manhattan night? Most of the snappy dialogue comes courtesy of reporter Glenda Farrell, a vintage wisecracking dame. --Robert Horton

Museum fire turns handsome man into human monster who steals bodies from morgue to create lifelike images in wax.

In a Lonely Place

One of Humphrey Bogart's finest performances dominates this unusual 1950 film noir, which focuses less on the murder mystery at the center of its plot than on the investigation's devastating effect on a fragile romance. For Bogart, already a noir icon, the Andrew Solt script afforded an opportunity to explore a more complex and contradictory role--an antiheroic persona in line with the actor's most accomplished and absorbing triumphs throughout his career.

For maverick director Nicholas Ray, the film posed the challenge of taking crime dramas beyond their usual formulas and into a more mature realm, as well as a chance to cast a jaundiced eye on the film industry itself. Its protagonist is Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with an acerbic wit and a violent temper. Tasked with adapting a bestseller, he meets a hatcheck girl who's read the book, hoping to glean its highlights before writing the script. When she's found murdered, Steele becomes the prime suspect, and a tightening knot of suspicion forms around the writer.

Steele's only, inconclusive witness is a pretty new neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), and the couple fall in love even as the pressure mounts. At first the new relationship is a tonic to the hard-boiled writer, who plunges into his script with a renewed vigor and discipline. But as the police continue to shadow him, Steele's own penchant for violence erupts against friends, strangers, and even Laurel herself, whose feelings are increasingly eclipsed by suspicion that her lover is a murderer, and fear that he'll harm her.

Bogart conveys Steele's world-weariness and underlying vulnerability, and manages the delicate task of making both his romantic yearning and sudden, murderous rages equally convincing. Ultimately, that performance and Grahame's sympathetic work elevate In a Lonely Place into what has been called "an existential love story" more than a crime drama. --Sam Sutherland

A hotheaded Hollywood screenwriter, questioned for murder, is drawn to his neighbor when she confirms his alibi, but his volatile nature eventually threatens to destroy their one last chance for real love.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: UN
Release Date: 1-JAN-2007
Media Type: DVD

I'll See You in My Dreams

Hollywood's tradition of composer biographies is a crowded (and heavily fictionalized) subgenre, but make room for I'll See You in My Dreams, an enjoyably low-key account of the life of lyricist Gus Kahn. Danny Thomas, in one of his rare big-screen leads, plays the scrappy writer, and Doris Day plays wife (and sometime collaborator) Grace LeBoy Kahn. The film has the customary rise-and-fall of a showbiz career and marriage, with a couple of standard-issue conflicts thrown in: Kahn is tempted by the glitz of Broadway and the appeal of a shapely diva (Patrice Wymore), becomes depressed over a dip in his popularity, and is embarrassed by his wife's decision-making (Grace comes across as the Yoko of the era--although the movie endorses her bossy approach). Director Michael Curtiz, who had a lot to do with Day's early movie career, imparts an elegant look to the black-and-white interiors, and he fully embraces the cornpone twists of the story. Doris is Doris, and although Danny Thomas doesn't prove himself a great movie presence here, his offhand style wears well. But there is one huge reason to watch the movie, and that's the soundtrack, which brings home just how much Kahn was the lyric voice of the 1920s, the tunesmith for the F. Scott Fitzgerald age. When you realize that "Ain't We Got Fun," "My Buddy," "Toot Toot Tootsie," and "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" were written by the same lyricist, you can see how Kahn owned the flapper era. The puckish highlight is a fun duet with Thomas and Day on "Makin' Whoopee," which proves that classic doesn't need Michelle Pfeiffer to succeed. --Robert Horton

Doris Day and Danny Thomas romantically collaborate in this affectionate biopic of tunesmith Gun Kahn that's a treasure chest of some of this century's greatest songs. Year: 1952 Director: Michael Curtiz Starring: Doris Day Danny Thomas Frank LovejoyRunning Time: 110 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 085391137214 Manufacturer No: 113721

Ronald Reagan - The Signature Collection (Knute Rockne All American / Kings Row / The Hasty Heart / Storm Warning / The Winning Team)

The movie star who would be president is remembered with his own DVD five-pack, all culled from Warner Bros. titles made between 1940 and 1952. It's a good sampling of Reagan's relatively brief movie-star prime: a second lead in good movies and leading man in lesser properties. Athletic, cornfed, and energetic, Reagan's persona in these movies foreshadows the qualities that voters would later see in the politician. Will this collection convince anybody he was a great actor? Unlikely. But he knew how to embody an idea.

The earliest film here is Knute Rockne, All-American, the 1940 biopic of Notre Dame's legendary football coach. Pat O'Brien has the title role in this boilerplate Hollywoodization, and although Reagan's part is small it is pivotal--and it would follow him for the rest of his life. He plays ill-fated Notre Dame player George Gipp, whose deathbed plea to Rockne--"Win just one for the Gipper"--became a national catchphrase. It's an efficient, cornball picture, and a fond childhood memory for anybody who encountered it at an early age.

Kings Row (1942) is consensus pick for Reagan's finest screen hour. A big, juicy, and really quite weird melodrama, the film cruises through the creepier side of small-town life, with Reagan in a very appealing groove. He plays the more rascally of the two male leads (Robert Cummings is the sensitive hero), a breezy charmer whose talent with the ladies gets him in trouble. The most lurid twist in the movie leads to Reagan's line, "Where's the rest of me?", which became the title of his autobiography. An extremely entertaining movie, with director Sam Wood inestimably aided by James Wong Howe's lush cinematography and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's classic music score.

Reagan's career cooled after the Second World War, and he plays a second lead in 1949's The Hasty Heart, an adaptation of a hit play. Set in a military hospital in Burma just after the war, the story hinges on a group of patients concealing a fatal prognosis from an ailing Scotsman (Richard Todd). The creaking of the play is all too apparent, although Todd's performance is expert. Patricia Neal, still new to movies, plays the nurse in charge. Reagan gets to display his photographic memory by reeling off the books of the Old Testament by rote. This one has the sole commentary track in the package, which has the (possibly unique) feature of having the director, Vincent Sherman, begin weeping as he's talking about the film.

Storm Warning (1951) is an effective but odd hybrid: part film noir, part socially conscious picture. Ginger Rogers witnesses a Ku Klux Klan killing as she's stopping off in a small town to visit younger sis Doris Day; Day's hubby Steve Cochran is one of the killers. In one of his best roles, a laid-back Reagan plays the uncompromising local district attorney. The film has some superb noir shots in it, but the expose of the KKK is truly tame: although the word "lynching" is used, there's no racial angle to the movie at all. It's more like the Klan is a crime syndicate that needs to be cleaned up. In The Winning Team Reagan plays famed baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, whose struggles with illness and alcoholism form the spine of the tepid plot. Doris Day, now top-billed, co-stars as Alexander's supportive wife. The movie pays proper tribute to a legendary baseball moment: Alexander's heroic performance in the 1926 World Series. It's another win for the Gipper. --Robert Horton

Before he became the 40th president of the United States of America or even governor of California Ronald Reagan was a veteran Hollywood actor who though he played mostly in Warner Bros.' films. He was extremely likable as an actor -- handsome charismatic and accessible-- the very ingredients required to be a successful leading man in Hollywood in the 30's and 40's. Now available on DVD are five of Reagan films in Ronald Reagan: The Signature Collection.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/CLASSIC UPC: 012569808072 Manufacturer No: 80807

Beachhead

Oscar® nominee* Tony Curtis "blends hard-hitting toughness with humor" (Los Angeles Times) as a Marine who must battle Japanese soldiers private demons and fellow Marines in this "gripping" (Variety) World War II saga. "Bristling with suspense and rugged action" (The Hollywood Reporter) Beachhead is a classic war drama that delivers plenty of "emotion-stirring heroics" (Boxoffice).Four Marines embark on a hazardous island mission to verify reports about a secret Japanese minefield. The intelligence comes from a French planter who may or may not be an Allied spy and his beautiful daughter. If their story is true can the Marines outgun their enemies make it through the treacherous jungle and rendezvous with American forces in time to prevent disaster?*1958: Best Supporting Actor The Defiant OnesSystem Requirements:Running Time 90 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: NR UPC: 027616921680 Manufacturer No: 1008130

The Hitch-Hiker

Ida Lupino, Hollywood's sole female filmmaker of the 1950s, directs an all-male cast in a taut, 70-minute thriller. Frank Lovejoy and Edmund O'Brien are two war buddies taking a break from the wives for a Mexican fishing trip; a hitchhiker they pick up turns out to be a crazed killer wanted in nine states (William Talman, later the perennially defeated district attorney on Perry Mason) who forces them at gunpoint to drive him through the desert. Talman's Everett Myers is a fascinatingly abstract creation, filmed by Lupino first as a discorporate flurry of hands and feet, then as a satanic figure whose grinning, key-lighted face seems to float by itself in space. With his paralyzed right eye (he sleeps with it wide open), Myers may represent the return of the fascist evil the two men confronted during the war; he may also represent something inherently violent in the American male that, having been liberated by the war, has to be faced down and defeated by the two vets before they can return to a normal life. Lupino's use of the desert setting, rich with associations of nuclear devastation, seems to look forward to the science fiction films that would flourish later in the decade. --Dave Kehr

The Hitch-Hiker

Ida Lupino, Hollywood's sole female filmmaker of the 1950s, directs an all-male cast in a taut, 70-minute thriller. Frank Lovejoy and Edmund O'Brien are two war buddies taking a break from the wives for a Mexican fishing trip; a hitchhiker they pick up turns out to be a crazed killer wanted in nine states (William Talman, later the perennially defeated district attorney on Perry Mason) who forces them at gunpoint to drive him through the desert. Talman's Everett Myers is a fascinatingly abstract creation, filmed by Lupino first as a discorporate flurry of hands and feet, then as a satanic figure whose grinning, key-lighted face seems to float by itself in space. With his paralyzed right eye (he sleeps with it wide open), Myers may represent the return of the fascist evil the two men confronted during the war; he may also represent something inherently violent in the American male that, having been liberated by the war, has to be faced down and defeated by the two vets before they can return to a normal life. Lupino's use of the desert setting, rich with associations of nuclear devastation, seems to look forward to the science fiction films that would flourish later in the decade. --Dave Kehr

House of Wax (1953) / House of Wax

House Of Wax (2005) Thrills and chills ooze all over you in House of Wax from Dark Castle Entertainment and legendary horror producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis (Gothika House on Haunted Hill). When their car breaks down on a road trip six college friends are sidetracked into an eerie backwoods town. Curiosity gets the better of them when they are intrigued by its macabre House of Wax. They soon find out that the town is not what it seems and they must find their way out before they fall victim to its ghoulishly inventive killers.House Of Wax (1953) In the wicked performance that crowned him the movie's master of the macabre Vincent Price plays a renowned wax sculptor plunged into madness when an arsonist destroys his life's work. Unable to use his flame-scarred hands he devises a new - and murderous - way of restocking his House of Wax. The sweet dread and sheer fun of this creepy classic co-starring Phyllis Kirk Carolyn Jones and Charles Bronson and directed by Andre de Toth had its roots in a Warner Bros. chiller from 20 years before: Mystery of the Wax Museum starring Lionel Atwill as the wax-wielding madman and Fay Wray as a potential victim. Directed by Michael Curtiz and shot in a chillingly effective early two-color Technicolor process it and its spooky remake offer you a delicious double-dip in a paraffin bath of terror.System Requirements:Length: 278 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: R UPC: 012569735040

The Hitchhiker

D.O. A Frank Bigelow goes to San Francisco for some fun prior to settling down with fiance Paula Gibson. After a night out, he wakes up and is told he's been poisoned and will soon die. He embarks on a frantic odyssey to find his own murderer. Edmund O'Brien and Pamela Britton The Hitch-Hiker Two young travelers make a huge mistake when they pick up a mysterious, psychotic, hitch-hiker who never closes his right eye- even when he sleeps. A suspenseful tale of terror on the highways.

In a Lonely Place [Region 2]

One of Humphrey Bogart's finest performances dominates this unusual 1950 film noir, which focuses less on the murder mystery at the center of its plot than on the investigation's devastating effect on a fragile romance. For Bogart, already a noir icon, the Andrew Solt script afforded an opportunity to explore a more complex and contradictory role--an antiheroic persona in line with the actor's most accomplished and absorbing triumphs throughout his career.

For maverick director Nicholas Ray, the film posed the challenge of taking crime dramas beyond their usual formulas and into a more mature realm, as well as a chance to cast a jaundiced eye on the film industry itself. Its protagonist is Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with an acerbic wit and a violent temper. Tasked with adapting a bestseller, he meets a hatcheck girl who's read the book, hoping to glean its highlights before writing the script. When she's found murdered, Steele becomes the prime suspect, and a tightening knot of suspicion forms around the writer.

Steele's only, inconclusive witness is a pretty new neighbor, Laurel (Gloria Grahame), and the couple fall in love even as the pressure mounts. At first the new relationship is a tonic to the hard-boiled writer, who plunges into his script with a renewed vigor and discipline. But as the police continue to shadow him, Steele's own penchant for violence erupts against friends, strangers, and even Laurel herself, whose feelings are increasingly eclipsed by suspicion that her lover is a murderer, and fear that he'll harm her.

Bogart conveys Steele's world-weariness and underlying vulnerability, and manages the delicate task of making both his romantic yearning and sudden, murderous rages equally convincing. Ultimately, that performance and Grahame's sympathetic work elevate In a Lonely Place into what has been called "an existential love story" more than a crime drama. --Sam Sutherland