John Alton
This recently produced behind-the-scenes documentary digs into Gershwin's original work, the genesis of the cinematic adaptation, casting, the shoot, and the eventual reception of the film.
Presents testimony from Patricia King Hanson and Richard Schickel and archival input from cinematographer John Alton.
Film Noir burrows into the mind; it's disorienting, intriguing and enthralling. Noir brings us into a gritty underworld of lush morbidity, providing intimate peeks at its tough, scheming dames, mischievous misfits and flawed men - all caught in the wicked web of a twisted fate.
The history of color photography in motion pictures, in particular the Technicolor company's work.
After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.
When hedonistic but charming con man Elmer Gantry meets the beautiful Sister Sharon Falconer, a roadside revivalist, he feigns piousness to join her act as a passionate preacher. The two make a successful onstage pair, and their chemistry extends to romance. Both the show and their relationship are threatened, however, when one of Gantry's ex-lovers decides that she has a score to settle with the charismatic performer.
A group of twelve international scientists are the first to land on the moon. In their exploration of the surface, they run into all kinds of trouble, including threatening messages from alien life forms residing on the moon. Just a short nine years before the historic moon landing, this film's understanding of the science of space exploration is fantastically simplistic, but this well-made science fiction film holds interest with a strong cast and intriguingly strange events, photographed with great style by John Alton. Ken Clark, Michi Kobi, Tom Conway, John Wengraf, and Robert Montgomery Jr. portray the intrepid scientists.
Eager to land a journalistic position, Adam White goes to work as an advice-giving newspaper columnist. His editor, Shrike, takes pleasure in browbeating his alcoholic wife Florence for her past adultery, and assigning his employees journalistic jobs for which they have little aptitude or interest. Shrike goads Adam into meeting one of his correspondents, Fay Doyle, a teary, self-pitying woman who makes a play for him. Adam is torn between his loyalty to the newspaper and his girl Justy.
Ryevsk, Russia, 1870. Tensions abound in the Karamazov family. Fyodor is a wealthy libertine who holds his purse strings tightly. His four grown sons include Dmitri, the eldest, an elegant officer, always broke and at odds with his father, betrothed to Katya, herself lovely and rich. The other brothers include a sterile aesthete, a factotum who is a bastard, and a monk. Family tensions erupt when Dmitri falls in love with one of his father's mistresses, the coquette Grushenka. Two brothers see Dmitri's jealousy of their father as an opportunity to inherit sooner. Acts of violence lead to the story's conclusion: trials of honor, conscience, forgiveness, and redemption.
A sportswriter who marries a fashion designer discovers that their mutual interests are few, although each has an intriguing past which makes the other jealous.
Kleptomaniac Dorothy Lyons is paroled from prison in custody of her sister June, secretary to "reform" political candidate Frank Jansen. Ben Grace, associate of crime boss Sol Caspar, sees this as a way to smear Jansen's campaign. But after falling out with Caspar, Ben tries to help June, who he begins to fall for. Sexy Dorothy also has a yen for Ben. June is reluctantly forced to go along with Be
An Okinawan translator introduces U.S. occupation forces to the joys of local life.
Tom Lee is more interested in the arts than in sports, something that sits uneasily with both his father and his classmates. Tom's school housemaster Bill Reynolds even gives him a hard time for his "effeminate" interests. However, Bill's wife Laura sympathizes with Tom and tries to help him with her own overtures.
At breakfast, Jane announces that she and Ralph are getting married the next week. All Jane and Ralph want is a small wedding with the immediate family and no reception. This is because Jane's parents are poor and Jane and Ralph can borrow a car for their honeymoon. However, at dinner that night all Ralph's parents talk about are the big weddings they gave their daughters and everything escalates. All of a sudden, it is a big wedding breakfast with hundreds of guests. The problem is that for 12 years, Tom has been saving money to buy his own cab and license, but now that he can, all of his money is going towards a wedding neither he, or Jane or Ralph really want.
Two beachcombers with a yacht join woman-with-a-past Rita on a quest for black pearls on a secret island. Arrived, they find another white man has made himself high priest; but George, the latter's handome son, is fair game for Rita, who lands in the guise of a missionary! The inevitable conflict over the pearls brings violence and corruption to the quiet island.
A fugitive in British Burma hides on a tea plantation, thanks to a mutual attraction with owner Gwen Moore.
Police Lt. Leonard Diamond vies to bring a clever, well connected, and sadistic gangster to justice all the while obsessing over the gangster's girlfriend.
A tough, womanizing high-stakes gambler known only as Tennessee has an uneasy relationship with Duchess, madam of a thinly-disguised bordello, and no other friends at all. But he's saved from murder by a lonesome cowpoke ('My friends call me Cowpoke'), in town to meet his fiancée Goldie on the steamboat. When she arrives, there's a mysterious undercurrent between Goldie and Tennessee, whose newfound friendship with Cowpoke is destined to be severely tried...
San Quentin's new warden crusades for reform and for a framed inmate who loves a nurse.
Dan Ballard, a respected citizen in the western town of Silver Lode, has his wedding interrupted by four men led by Ned McCarty, an old acquaintance who, as a US Marshal, arrests Ballard for the murder of his brother and the theft of $20,000. Ballard seeks to stall McCarty while tracking down evidence that will prove his innocence.
A woman fights to convince the police that she witnessed a murder while looking out her bedroom window.
In old Spanish California, dashing cattleman Juan Obregon returns to the rancho of his friend Gaspar Melo, to find he's fathered a son on Rosa, one of Gaspar's identical twin daughters. Overjoyed, he plans to formalize his "unofficial" marriage. But trouble brews; Melo's land is of unclear title and the new Don Domingo hopes to grab it for his own profit. Violence results. Without even knowing who survived, Juan (accompanied by Rosa's tomboy sister Tonya) rides for revenge, through spectacular pastoral and wilderness scenery.
Sierra Nevada Jones must fight a villainous rancher to regain the land that is rightfully hers.
Sgt. Thorne Ryan, who once fought bravely in Korea, now serves as a hard-nosed drill instructor to new Army recruits at Fort Bliss, Texas. But is he really the man he is often described as? His fellow instructor, and friend helps him to face the ghosts of his past experiences in Korea. One night in a bar across the border in Juarez, Mexico, Sgt. Ryan meets a lady who begins to turn his life around. Will this be enough to help him deal with the past? Or will he continue to be so hard on his troops?
A young Army nurse, Lt Ruth McGara (June Allyson), newly assigned to the 66th MASH during the Korean War, attracts the sexual attention of the unit's commander Dr. (MAJ) Jed Webbe (Humphrey Bogart). Webbe, who has a drinking problem, at first wants a "no strings" relationship. McGara is warned by the other nurses of Webbe's womanizing ways. Despite these initial handicaps, their love flourishes against a background of war, enemy attacks, death and injury. The relationship deepens and uplifts both characters.
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer in his first film adventure. Originally screened in 3D.
An outlaw murders several Apaches and flees to a stagecoach way station with the tribe in hot pursuit. A stagecoach and its passengers have just pulled into the station, as has the stationmaster's father, a former bandit named Peso, and they all find themselves besieged by the Apaches, who want them to turn over the killer to them or they'll take the station and kill everybody. The problem is that the people in the station aren't sure just who among therm is the actual killer.
A reporter (Patricia Neal) suspects the "nice guy" image of a respected Congressman (Van Johnson) is all a facade and sets out to uncover the truth.
Jerry Mulligan is an exuberant American expatriate in Paris trying to make a reputation as a painter. His friend Adam is a struggling concert pianist who's a long time associate of a famous French singer, Henri Baurel. A lonely society woman, Milo Roberts, takes Jerry under her wing and supports him, but is interested in more than his art.
Opera singer Ina Massine tries to win back former husband Dr. Lincoln I. Bartlett.
In this sequel to Father of the Bride, newly married Kay Dunstan announces that she and her husband are going to have a baby, leaving her father having to come to grips with the fact that he will soon be a granddad.
The title character, played by John Payne, is a ship's captain whose embittered behavior after losing his lady love seemingly leads to tragedy. Accused of deliberately scuttling his ship during a typhoon, Captain China hopes to clear himself by signing on as a common seaman on a vessel captain by his former first mate Brendensen. There's no love lost between the two men, and their mutual animosity is intensified when both fall in love with beautiful passenger.
When a young woman's skeletal remains turn up on a Massachusetts beach, Barnstable cop Peter Moralas teams with Boston police and uses forensics, with the help of a Harvard professor, to determine the woman's identity, how she died, and who killed her.
Proud father Stanley Banks remembers the day his daughter, Kay, got married. Starting when she announces her engagement through to the wedding itself, we learn of all the surprises and disasters along the way.
The story concerns two agents, one Mexican (PJF) and one American, who are tasked to stop the smuggling of Mexican migrant workers across the border to California. The two agents go undercover, one as a poor migrant.
This film-noir piece, told in semi-documentary style, follows police on the hunt for a resourceful criminal who shoots and kills a cop.
The French Revolution, 1794. The Marquis de Lafayette asks Charles D'Aubigny to infiltrate the Jacobin Party to overthrow Maximilian Robespierre, who, after gaining supreme power and establishing a reign of terror ruled by death, now intends to become the dictator of France.
A war veteran suffering from amnesia, returns to Los Angeles from a San Francisco veterans hospital hoping to learn who he is and discovers his criminal past.
A film noir drama in which a sophisticated con man, who has just stolen from the mob, is forced to impersonate a psychiatrist who looks just like him, going so far as to cut himself on the cheek to duplicate a similar scar on the doctor. When he takes matters even further, karma arrives, forcing him to pay the debts of his double.
On the beach one night, Christine Faber, two years a widow, thinks she hears her late husband Paul calling out of the surf...then meets a tall dark man, Alexis, who seems to know all about such things. After more ghostly manifestations, Christine and younger sister Janet become enmeshed in the eerie artifices of Alexis; but he in turn finds himself manipulated into deeper deviltry than he had in mind...
Prisoners battle each other -- and the police -- when they escape the Colorado State Penitentiary.
Albert Dekker plays a investment agent who embezzles a large sum from an estate, hoping to cover his crime by marrying the estate's heiress. The girl is already engaged, so Dekker arranges to have the fiance killed. A mix up involving the society section of the newspaper places Dekker in the sights of his own hired gun.
A serviceman returns home at the end of WWII to discover his wife has become the head of her own very successful advertising agency. Comedy.
Four young performers form an act and get a job in a nightclub. Before long, one of them gets the idea that the act is all about him, and his changes to the act, to reflect his own ego, causes the quartet to get fired. Later, all make good in other areas of show business...stage, radio and motion pictures.
A woman (June Lockhart) watches her own funeral, then sets out with her lawyer (Hugh Beaumont) to learn who was in the casket.
Stevie Carson, a newspaper reporter, and Denny Butler, the feature editor on the same newspaper, set out to track down a gang of literary forgers who are making a fortune off of selling fake first editions.
When the wealthy Mrs. Cooper passes away, she divides her estate between her sons, Henry and Wayne, and her only daughter, the tomboyish Geraldine.
The citizens of the small town of Midburg are thrilled when one of their native sons, Dan Flannery, becomes a war hero while serving in the Merchant Marines. But before arriving he is stricken with amnesia and falls in with a gang of crooks...
This drama is an updated version of Ulmer's 1944 film Bluebeard. It is set in New York and follows the exploits of an eccentric Parisian painter who has come to New York to escape a controversy surrounding his work. The trouble stems when the model he has used in all his work is found floating dead in the Seine.
A women's prison provides the setting for this drama that centers around a naive small-town woman framed by a man whom she met in a nightclub in the big city. She is not welcomed by the inmates and immediately the prisoners are divided.
A lawyer's wife walks out on him, then poses as a French nurse to spy on him.
Actress Carol Adams retires from the theater when she becomes engaged to businessman Gregory Davis, but is increasingly frustrated by Greg's unwavering devotion to his business. Tired of being ignored, Carol leaves her engagement ring with Greg's secretary, Sarah Anderson, and flies to Mexico City to repair her broken heart and visit her friends, Anita and Arturo Martinez. On the plane, Carol meets Ramon Carranza, a handsome singer and movie star who is wildly popular in Mexico.
A millionaire's brain is preserved after his death by a scientist and his two assistants, only to create a telepathic monster.
In 1915, Atlantic City is a sleepy seaside resort, but Brad Taylor, son of a small hotel and vaudeville house proprietor, has big plans: he thinks it can be "the playground of the world." Brad's wheeling and dealing proves remarkably successful in attracting big enterprises and big shows, but brings him little success in personal relationships. Full of nostalgic songs and acts, some with the original artists. Reissued in 1950 as "Atlantic City Honeymoon".
On a peaceful, pre-war winter in Czechoslovakia, the genial godfather, Jaroslav Haschek, of Vera Hascheck, presents the young girl with her first pair of ice skates. Soon, she astonished the warm-hearted people of her village with her skill, and she is acclaimed a marvel-on-ice.
A nightclub star helps trap an enemy agent on the trail of an American newsman.
A sultan's lovely daughter finds herself courted by a handsome American.
A grown-up Jane Withers is joined by a whole slew of former child stars in the lightweight Republic musical Johnny Doughboy. Withers capably essays the part of a teenaged movie star who tires of the spotlight and runs away from Hollywood. Adopting an alias, she joins "The Junior Victory Caravan", a group of youthful USO performers. She also pursues a romance with much-older playwright Henry Wilcoxon, only to be (deliberately) disillusioned by the man. Among the juvenile favorites making cameo appearances in Johnny Doughboy are Bobby Breen, Baby Sandy, Butch & Buddy, Cora Sue Collins, Robert Coogan (Jackie's brother) and ex-"Little Rascals" George "Spanky" McFarland and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer.
Two business partners, John Bennett, Sr. and Robert Forrester, are starting to get nervous when the birthday of Victoria, Forrester's daughter, approaches. A long time ago the two men made an arrangement that they would sign over one third of their company to their oldest children when they turned twenty-one, with the condition they married each other within thirty days....
A New York radio personality travels to the small town of Fernville, Indiana in an attempt to uncover a notorious safecracker, believed to be masquerading as one of the town's upstanding citizens.
A former Navy man attempts to redeem his honor by exposing a shipping tycoon's dealings with the enemy.
Dr. Christian takes an interest in a young boy, a violin prodigy, whose mother is a divorced music teacher. His interest isn't just in the boy's music career--he believes it would be best for the boy to have his parents back together, and sets out to do just that.
The story concentrated on a group of test pilots, busily experimenting with a revolutionary all-plastic airplane. Ace flyboy Brad Farrell (Richard Arlen) is determined to prove the practicality of the new aircraft, designed by Professor Blake (Thomas Ross), father of Brad's sweetheart Carol (Jean Parker). Back on solid ground, Brad must vie for Carol's attentions with his own brother, engineer Doug Farrell (Don Castle).
On faraway Mosaque, an American pilot finds that he is in a desperate struggle with a military officer intent on sabotaging a local fort.
The Carter Case was the second and last Republic film based on the popular radio series Mister District Attorney. Like the first entry, this one is played mostly for laughs, with Radio's Mister District Attorney. James Ellison replacing Dennis O'Keefe as feckless assistant DA P. Cadwallader Jones. The publisher of a tony fashion magazine is murdered, requiring Jones to sift through a colorful array of suspects. He is helped (?) along by snoopy girl reporter Terry Parker (Virginia Gilmore), who by default is the brightest character in the picture.
Viennese surgeon Dr. Braun and his daughter Leni come to a small town in North Dakota as refugees from Hitler. When the winds of the Dust Bowl threaten the town, John Phillips leads the townsfolk in moving to greener pastures in Oregon. He falls for Leni, but she is betrothed to the man who helped her and her father escape from the Third Reich. She must make a decision between the two men.
A small town doctor suspects the stranger in town is promoting an oil swindle. The fourth entry in the "Dr. Christian" series of six films.
A conman arrives in town trying to sell his miracle methods of weight loss to the ladies. It's left to the good Dr. Christian to expose this fake and save a fragile young girl's life.
A doctor fights an epidemic that breaks out in the poor section of town and tries to get the rest of the town to help out.
The first of six films in the "Dr. Christian" series, starring Jean Hersholt as a small town doctor trying to convince local officials to approve funds for a new hospital.
A young woman travels with her uncle to the city, there she works with a singer who she will have to replace. Later, she goes blind.
Nina Miranda leaves jail after spending 20 years imprisoned for a murder that she insists she did not commit and recalls the time of her youth.
Based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger, and the Giacomo Puccini opera. The young, tubercular seamstress, Mimi, falls in love with the impoverished playwright, Rodolfo, but poverty takes its toll on their relationship. When Mimi meets a wealthy suitor, Viscount Paul, to ask him for financial help, Rodolfo dumps her.
Juan Pérez is a waiter in a luxurious place where the bachelor party of a man who is going to get married for convenience is done. When a dancer and singer with whom he was entangled, chases him, he uses Perez to get rid of her.
A musical film with a performance by the group that was very fashionable at the time, El Cuarteto Aguilar. It was produced in 1936 but was never released.
A famous singer in love with a woman takes the blame for a crime to save her.
The story follows Jaime Lara, a passenger whose ship makes a stop in Buenos Aires for one day. Lara elopes, leaving his wife on board, and walks around the city at night, coming to meet a beautiful yet frivolous hooker, Isa.
"The members of a Buenos Aires family have three hobbies -'berretines' in Buenos Aires slang- that keep them apart of their duties. Because of that, the family business is going down, and the only one who is concerned is the father, who hopes for his fourth son, an architect, to save the situation."
Film directed and scripted by John Dalton at the beginning of his stay in Argentina. Alton decided to make an independent project under the name of Alton Films, and summoned Luis Sandrini to star it. The result was catastrophic and all copies of the film were destroyed, therefore it is considered to be totally lost.
