Lynn, Diana

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

During World War II, Hollywood's patriotic duty was to shoot stirring dramas and good-hearted comedies that celebrated America's brave soldiers and honored their loyal, virtuous wives and girlfriends. Which goes a long way toward explaining why this delirious Preston Sturges farce, filmed in 1943 at the height of the war effort (and of its director's powers), was delayed for a year while Paramount executives wrestled with Sturges's irreverence: in Morgan's Creek, the writer-director tweaked those stereotypes with his tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl who only wants to send our boys off with a smile. That she does, but she wakes up after an all-night party with vague memories of a dubious wedding and soon finds herself pregnant.

Trudy, played by the ebullient Betty Hutton, is wholesome, sexy, and something of a ditz, in contrast to Sturges's usual savvy heroines (represented instead by Trudy's teenaged younger sister, played by Diana Lynn). Trudy's savior is would-be boyfriend Norval, played to apoplectic perfection by the rubber-faced Eddie Bracken, who was never better than in this wide-eyed, pratfall-happy performance as the weary but loyal draft reject who stands by his girl. As Trudy's father, Sturges regular William Demarest likewise achieves a series of comic peaks as the exasperated and increasingly desperate Officer Kockenlocker.

Like Sturges's other Bracken-Demarest vehicle, the equally fine Hail, the Conquering Hero, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was unique among wartime movies for its satirical sting and unblinking eye for hypocrisy on the home front. It's also enormous fun, a comedic romp that epitomizes Sturges's kinetic, high-speed style. --Sam Sutherland

After a wild farewell party for the troops, Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl with a soft spot for American soldiers, wakes up to find that she married someone and can't remember his name. Even worse, he's disappeared and she learns she's pregnant!

The Kentuckian

As an independent producer-star, circus-tough with charisma to burn, Burt Lancaster could be hard on directors. So it wasn't surprising when he decided he could do the job himself. It was a mistake he made only once (apart from cohelming 1974's The Midnight Man). For all his balletic control as an actor-athlete, Lancaster showed no sense of how a film should move and breathe over an hour and a half, or how to make the characters' growth or changes of mind credible. The Kentuckian has a bedrock American folk tale at its core, but scarcely a clue how to tell it.

It's the early 18th century--Monroe is president--and buckskin-clad Lancaster and his son (Donald MacDonald) are lighting out for Texas: "It ain't we don't like people--we like room more." They plan to briefly visit Lancaster's tobacco-dealer brother (John McIntire) in the river town of Humility, then move on. But there are complications from a long-running feud, and some nasty baiting from a whip-cracking storekeeper (Walter Matthau in his film debut); the need to replace their "Texas money" after buying freedom for a bondservant (Dianne Foster); also the matter of deciding who's prettier, her or the local schoolmarm (Diana Lynn). Lancaster aims for some quaint Americana--a sing-along to the tinkling of a pianoforte, a jaw-dropping riverside production number--and there's one nifty bit of action based on how long it took to reload a flintlock rifle. But mostly this film just lies there in overlit CinemaScope. --Richard T. Jameson

Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry) makes his directorial debut with this superb, action-packed western. Featuring a poignant, unconventional screenplay by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., and a powerful performance by legendary actor Walter Matthau in his first screen role, The Kentuckian is an unforgettable western adventure of the highest caliber. Big Eli Wakefield (Lancaster) and his youngson, Little Eli (Donald MacDonald), are rugged Kentucky adventurers who long for an exciting life on the Texas frontier. They soon learn, however, that the greatest challenge to their progress lies not in the uncharted wilderness but in the people they meet along the way. Thrust into the midst of abitter family feud, Eli confronts both the deadly rage of a madman (Matthau) and the love of a beautiful woman (Diana Lynn). But when he's lured into a brutal final showdown, Eli discovers that the only way to escape with his life is to stay true to his convictions, his honor and his dream.

Bedtime for Bonzo

Track of the Cat (Special Collector's Editon)

You never see the title character in William Wellman's Track of the Cat--a black panther terrorizing the land and herd of a frontier family--which is just one of the many bold strokes of this ambitious movie. The intruder claims not merely cattle but also one family member, so middle son (and unquestioned alpha male) Robert Mitchum goes out in the dead of winter to bag the cat. Meanwhile, the tensions inside the ranch house are distilled from Greek tragedy with a large dollop of Freud: harridan mother Beulah Bondi (good performance) wants her sons to remain unmarried, despite the fact that youngest boy Tab Hunter has fallen for a forward lass played by Diana Lynn. Teresa Wright--almost unrecognizable as the spinster sister--speaks for sanity and modern thinking. Track is the second film Wellman made from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; the first was The Ox-Bow Incident, that equally serious and offbeat Western about lynch violence. For this one, Wellman admitted that one of his motivations was a long-held desire to make a color film that was essentially black-and-white; the snowy backdrops of the exteriors (shot spectacularly around Washington State's Mount Rainier) offered that chance. It's a very exactingly directed movie, both indoors and out, and qualifies as an experiment in mise-en-scene; but experiments in mise-en-scene have rarely translated into box-office success, and Track of the Cat was no exception. One problem: despite Mitchum's robust presence, his solitary journey (which could be covered in interior monologue in a novel) is rather inscrutable. The spiky script is by A.I. Bezzerides, who would do Kiss Me, Deadly a year later. By the way, Wellman later regretted not showing the cat--but he was right the first time. It's an eerie touch in a movie that gets under your skin. --Robert Horton

Tough guy Robert Mitchum stalks a panther that killed his younger brother (William Hopper) while his snowbound family begins to disintegrate. Directed by four-time Oscar nominee William Wellman ("The Ox-Bow Incident," "The High and The Mighty").

My Friend Irma/My Friend Irma Goes West

My Friend Irma
One croons. The other cavorts. Fans couldn't get enough of them! Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made their crowd-pleasing film debuts in My Friend Irma, a 1949 funfest based on the long-running radio show. The guys are juice-bar operators who get a shot at new careers when a self-proclaimed manager discovers that Martin is better at squeezing out a musical "C" than Vitamin C. Their story intersects with the antics of Irma (Marie Wilson), the likable airhead who meddles in the romantic life of her roommate (Diana Lynn). Irma may be a queen of loopiness, but it's Lewis who walks off as America's clown prince. Exclaimed the Los Angeles Examiner: "There just hasn't been anything like him on land, sea or celluloid."

My Friend Irma Goes West
Hilarious sequel to My Friend Irma!

The Alamo/The Kentuckian

Plunder of the Sun (Special Collector's Edition)

Plunder of the Sun plays like a low-budget merging of two Bogart classics, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon. Wiseguy Al Colby (Glenn Ford) finds himself short of funds in Havana, but a mysterious antiquities trader (Francis L. Sullivan, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet) enlists Colby to transport a package from Cuba to Mexico. The package is a piece in a puzzle that could lead to millions in ancient gold, possibly buried in the elaborate ruins of Zapotecan temples--if Colby can survive the other adventurers jockeying to get the stuff. Director John Farrow keeps the story moving and the shadows at a satisfyingly noirish level even if the material never rises to anything like classic status, while Glenn Ford provides a fitting cruel streak for his nobody-makes-a-sucker-out-of-me hero. This was one of two movies Farrow made in Mexico that year for John Wayne's Batjac production company, the other being Hondo. The balled-up plot, international gaggle of eccentric performers (most colorfully Wayne regular Sean McClory), and somewhat chintzy location shooting call to mind another globe-trotting movie of that era, Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, and this movie even shares actress Particia Medina with that picture. --Robert Horton

An American insurance agent gets into trouble when he is hired to smuggle an Aztec artifact from Cuba to Mexico.
No Track Information Available
Media Type: DVD
Artist: PLUNDER OF THE SUN
Title: PLUNDER OF THE SUN
Street Release Date: 06/06/2006
Domestic
Genre: ACTION / ADVENTURE

Texas, Brooklyn and Heaven

In a case of mistaken identity, a handsome young writer is mistaken for a bank-robber.

Texas Brooklyn and Heaven (1948)

An Annapolis Story