Palmer, Gregg

To Hell and Back

Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier in World War II, enjoyed a Hollywood acting career after the fight. In this 1955 autobiographical film, however, he plays himself re-creating his own actions and movements in key battles. As strange as this project might have seemed to him at the time, the results are pretty impressive. The film, despite a flat script, is really a pretty good war drama about Murphy and his buddies making their way from North Africa to Berlin. --Tom Keogh

The Shootist

The last film of John Wayne could not have been more fitting, full of details that can't help but make one reflect upon his legacy in the movies and his life as a star. Wayne plays a career gunfighter in the autumn of his life, trying to hang up his pistols after he discovers he's dying of cancer. Boarding in the house of an attractive widow (Lauren Bacall) and her son (Ron Howard), Wayne's character opts for peace in his final days but is dogged by his reputation when a handful of killers seeks him out for a final fight. Howard is fine as a fatherless boy who needs the strong mentor the hero represents, and James Stewart--who costarred with Wayne in the great Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--plays the doctor who gives the big man the bad news. Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) thoughtfully directs a very special and sensitive production. --Tom Keogh

Big Jake

Big Jake is not one of the Duke's classics, but a diverting attempt nonetheless. Everyone seems to think that Jacob McCandles is six-feet under ("I thought you was dead" is a running line throughout), so some bad men kidnap his grandson. They want a piece of the family fortune and will kill to get it. Patrick Wayne, the Duke's own son, plays one of Big Jake's kids, and together they start out after the boy's abductors. Richard Boone makes a worthy adversary to Jake's larger than life figure, and the final confrontation between the two contains some great gritted-teeth dialogue. Maureen O'Hara is barely in the feature, sharing the same fate as Bobby Vinton as the boy's father. He seems to be onscreen just to get shot. --Keith Simanton

Hot Lead & Cold Feet

There's magic in the memories as great Disney moments are captured right here for you and your family to enjoy. A two-gun terror and his terrified twin brother turn an old cowtown upside down. A blazing, rip-roaring, riotous saga of brotherly competition in a winner-take-all battle for an inheritance. Jim Dale (PETE'S DRAGON, UNIDENTIFIED FLYING ODDBALL) stars in a triple-header of a role, pulling all the stops out as he plays three different people: Old Jasper Bloodshy and his two sons.

The Rare Breed

A very offbeat subject gives this Western its beefy flavor: English lady Maureen O'Hara brings a prize Hereford bull to the Wild West, where she plans to introduce its hardy bloodline into longhorn country. Cattle puncher James Stewart finds the idea suspect, but he likes this redhead, so he manages to tag along through stampede, gunfight, and blizzard. Director Andrew V. McLaglen generally steers a pleasing course, although the movie occasionally stumbles between brawling comedy and western drama. One stunt sequence, a run of longhorns through a desert canyon, qualifies as a hair-raiser. Brian Keith, wearing a gigantic red beard, does a Scots accent as a cattle baron, and veteran cowhands Ben Johnson and Jack Elam are around to lend atmosphere. The big bull's name is Vindicator, and he obeys whenever Juliet Mills whistles "God Save the Queen"--did we mention this is a very offbeat subject for a Western? --Robert Horton

The Comancheros

Nobody made a fuss about The Comancheros when it came out, yet it has proved to be among the most enduringly entertaining of John Wayne's later Westerns. The Duke, just beginning to crease and thicken toward Rooster Cogburn proportions, plays a veteran Texas Ranger named Jake Cutter. When we first see him (in a tongue-in-cheek delayed entrance), he's catching up with a New Orleans dandy (Stuart Whitman) who killed a judge's son in a duel just after that gentlemanly practice was banned. Monsieur Paul Regret--or "Mon-sooor," as Jake insists on calling him--is not a bad fellow, let alone a badman, and it only follows that, after the requisite number of misunderstandings, he and Jake will join forces to subdue rampaging Indians and the evil white men behind their uprising.

The Comancheros was the last credit for Michael Curtiz, who, ravaged by cancer, ceded much of the direction to Wayne (uncredited) and action specialist Cliff Lyons. With support from Wayne stalwarts James Edward Grant (coscreenplay) and William Clothier (camera), the first of many rousing Elmer Bernstein scores for a Wayne picture, and a big, flavorful cast including Lee Marvin (the once and future Liberty Valance), Nehemiah Persoff, Bruce Cabot, and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams (in his last movie), they made a broad, cheerfully bloodthirsty adventure movie for red-meat-eating audiences of all ages. Even the liberal-pinko Time magazine had to second the salute from leading lady Ina Balin at film's end: "Take care of yourself, Big Jake ... we've sort of gotten used to you." --Richard T. Jameson

John Wayne is Capt. Jake Cutter, a Texas Ranger determined to crush a powerful outlaw gang that's selling guns to the Indians. Cutter is also trying to bring in gambler Paul Regret (Whitman), who's wanted for murder. Both missions get entangled when Cut

Billion Dollar Brain

Secret agent Harry Palmer (OscarÂ(r)-winner Michael Caine - Best Supporting Actor, The Cider House Rules, 1999; Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986) is blackmailed into working for MI5 again on his wildest - and most dangerous - assignment yet. An insane oil billionaire, intent on destroying Communism by starting a new world war, is close to achieving his goal with the help of the world's largest, and mostpowerful, computer. Harry is the only man who may be able to stop him; but as he races from London to Finland to Latvia to Texas and back, he must determine who of his supposed allies (a sexy Russianagent, a Soviet colonel and an American mercenary) is the one he can actually trust!

The Mckenzie Break

McKenzie is a remote, understaffed POW camp in Scotland, where an assortment of German fliers, U-boat men, and soldiers are being held prisoner. The restive POWs stage a well-orchestrated uprising in which they essentially take over the camp. When word of the prisoners' siege gets back to British military higher-ups, they assign rogue Irish officer Captain Connor (Brian Keith) to get to the bottom of things. The Germans have been receiving orders directly from Berlin that call for 28 of the submariners to escape and return to the Deutschland's U-boat fleet. The Germans are led by Schlütter (Helmut Griem), an intelligent, articulate graduate of the Hitler Youth; they have devised an elaborate tunnel and a plot to take them to the Scottish coast, where they will rendezvous with a U-boat to take them back to Germany. The hard-drinking Connor learns of the plan, and stakes his career on letting the Germans escape and tracking them down. Keith is excellent as Connor (though his Irish brogue comes and goes), locked into a three-way battle of wills with the determined Schlütter and the stuffy, by-the-book CO of the camp. The movie's pace and suspense swell as Connor's gambit plays out and the Germans make good their escape plans, all set against the breathtaking scenery of rural Scotland. With intelligent, believable characters and tough direction, this is a sorely neglected World War II POW drama that compares well with better-known films such as Stalag 17 and The Great Escape. --Jerry Renshaw

Brian Keith leads an acclaimed international cast in this poignant and powerful WW II drama fraughtwith action, suspense and the haunting reality of war. Keith stars as Captain Jack Connor,a fast-talking, hard-drinking, tough-as-nails Irishman assigned to investigate an impending escape by a group of German POWs led by the charismatic Kapitan Schleutter (Helmut Griem). The camp commander (Ian Hendry) has been unable to contain the prisoners, but Connor's brash and unusual approach solves the problem...for a while. In a race against timeand with growing animosity from the commanderConnor surpasses even his own previous unorthodox methods when he devises a scheme so daring that it will either make him a hero or prove to be the most fatal mistake of his career.

The Rebel Set

The Redhead From Wyoming