In this star-studded black-hearted spy thriller directed and co-written by the legendary John Huston (The Maltese Falcon The African Queen) a potentially catastrophic diplomatic letter from the CIA must be recovered at all costs. Drafted in is Rone (Patrick O'Neal) a young agent with a photographic memory to make his way through a treacherous maze of shadowy cities and shady characters. Based on the acclaimed novel by Noel Behn drawn from his work within the U. S. Army Counterintelligence Corps The Kremlin Letter is a brutal level-headed examination of espionage leaving behind any trace of gadgetry or glamour.
James Mason delivers a strong performance in the title role of this sympathetic study of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.In the early 40's, Rommel's juggernaut Afrika Korps dominated North Africa. But as the tide turned and he came to the painful realisation that his Fuhrer, to whom he had sworn allegiance, was destroying Germany, his ingrained sense of duty pushed him into a conspiracy against Hitler. Focusing on the latter part of Rommel's career, the flm portrays him as a dedicated soldier, sympathetic to his men and devoted to the art of waging war in a dignified, disciplined manner.Co-starring Jessica Tandy as Rommel's wife and Cedric Hardwicke as another anti-Hitler conspirator, The Desert Fox is an intimate look at one of the most respected tacticians of modern times, openly admitted by those who followed him into combat and those who faced him in the field of battle.
Off-beat horror about a group of college friends who go on holiday in the forest and catch a flesh-eating virus.
Dragnet, one of the TV s most famous and innovative series from the 1950s, comes to colourful life in a classic full-length feature. As Sgt. Joe Friday, Jack Webb re-creates his memorable portrayal of a Los Angeles cop Just the facts, Ma am in this action packed tale. A mysterious gangland slaying has taken place and it is up to Joe Friday and the Los Angeles Police Department to put together the pieces. With the help of this partner, Officer Frank Smith (Ben Alexander), they enlist the services of a pretty and daring policewoman to trap the devious mobsters and bring them to justice.
Although Lewis Milestone had been American cinema's premier maker of war films for three decades, 1951's The Halls of Montezuma is one of his more marginal pictures. Milestone had already won an Academy Award for the single most honoured film about WWI, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and made one of the most distinctive contemporaneous films of WWII, A Walk in the Sun (1945)--a notable influence on Saving Private Ryan, by the way--but by the time of Montezuma the hallmarks of his directorial style--such as his syncopated tracking shots--were becoming mannerisms, and the screenplay's rhythms of personal crises set against the bigger picture of the military campaign are pretty mechanical. That still leaves room to accord the picture a marginal recommendation: it's well-cast, competently made, and free of "Hollywood heroics". Richard Widmark stars as a Marine platoon leader who, having brought only seven of his men through Guadalcanal, is determined to see them safely through the next island conquest. The lieutenant was a schoolteacher in civilian life--as we see in flashbacks--and one member of his command is a former student (Richard Hylton) he helped overcome fear. Other platoon members include ex-boxer Jack Palance, trigger-happy bad boy Skip Homeier, hardcase veterans Neville Brand and Bert Freed, and Karl Malden as a philosophical corpsman. However, the most arresting performance is given by Milestone discovery Richard Boone, making his screen debut as a sympathetic colonel stuck with fighting the Japanese and fighting off a miserable cold at the same time. --Richard T Jameson, Amazon.com
The Good The Bad And The Ugly Director Sergio Leone substitutes for the upright puritan Protestant ethos so familiar in Hollywood westerns a seedy cynical standpoint towards death and mortality as a team of brutal bandits battle to unearth a fortune buried beneath an unmarked grave. Joining Clint clearly The Good is the irredeemably Bad Lee and the resolutely Ugly Eli Wallach. The complete plot of bloodshed and betrayal winds its way through the American Civil War filmed to resemble the French battlefields of World War One to end in the climatic Dance Of Death. The Magnificent Seven Yul Brynner stars as one of seven master gunmen who aid the helpless farmers of an isolated village pitted against an army of marauding bandits in this rousing action tale based on Akira Kurosawa's classic 'Seven Samurai'. Released in 1960 John Sturges' masterpiece garnered an Oscar nomination for Elmer Bernstein (for Best Score) and launched the film careers of Steve McQueen Charles Bronson Robert Vaughn and James Coburn. The Alamo At the Alamo a crumbling adobe mission 185 exceptional men joined together in a sacred pact: they would stand firm against an army of 7 000 and willingly give their lives for freedom. Filmed entirely in Texas only a few miles from the site of the actual battle 'The Alamo' is a visually stunning and historically accurate celebration of courage and honour. John Wayne produces directs and stars in this larger than life chronicle of one of the most remarkable events in American history.
Once again returning to the genre to which he was perhaps best-suited director Lewis Milestone traces the fate of a Marine platoon in the Pacific theater during WWII. The film stars Richard Widmark as the no-nonsense Lt. Carl Anderson an officer charged with the responibility of leading his unit on a scouting mission to capture prisoners from an experimental rocket-launching facility and bring them back for interrogation. Among his platoon are veterans Pidgeon Lane (Jack Palance) D
Marlon Brando (Apocalypse Now) and Richard Boone star in this taut psychological thriller that examines the darkest impulses of the human psyche. Set in Northern France a gang of four professional criminals brazenly kidnaps a wealthy teenage girl (Pamela Franklin) from an airport in Paris as part of a meticulous plan to extort a ransom from the girls father. Holding her prisoner in an isolated beach house the gangs scheme runs perfectly until their personal demons surface and lead to a series of betrayals that culminate in an intense climax
19 years after President Timothy Keegan was assassinated his brother Nick discovers a dying man claiming to have been the gunman. While trying to avoid his wealthy and domineering father's attempts to control his actions Nick follows the clues that have been handed to him. As he progresses it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the real trails from the dead ends and increasing dangerous as unknown parties try to stop Nick from uncovering the truth...
In this action-filled Western John Wayne stars as BIG JAKE McCandles a husband who hasn't seen his wife (Maureen O'Hara) in over 18 years. But he returns home after his grandson is kidnapped by a vicious outlaw gang. While the law gives chase in rickety automobiles Jake saddles up with an Indian scout (Bruce Cabot) and a box of money - even though paying a ransom isn't how Jake plans to exact good old frontier justice. Spiced with humour and first-class gunfights this is a vivid depiction of the last days of the wild frontier.BIG JAKE was a family affair for John Wayne. His eldest son produced it and two other sons Patrick and John Ethan appear in it. The film also marks the second time Richard Boone and John Wayne worked together and the fifth time Wayne worked with Maureen O'Hara.
Violence begins when a wild bunch of outlaws hit the town. No mortal man can stop them - but what about the man of God?
This box set contains three MGM films starring 'The Duke'. The Alamo: In 1836 General Santa Anna and the Mexican Army is sweeping across Texas. To be able to stop him General Sam Huston needs time to get his main force into shape. To buy that time he orders Colonel William Travis to defend a small mission on the Mexican's route at all costs. Travis' small troop is swelled by groups accompanying Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett but as the situation becomes ever more desperate Travis makes it clear that there will be no shame if they leave while they can. Red River: Tom Dunson builds a cattle empire with his adopted son Matthew Garth. Together they begin a massive cattle drive north from Texas to the Missouri railhead. But on the way new information and Dunson's tyrannical ways cause Matthew to take the herd away from Dunson and head to a new railhead in Kansas. Dunson swearing vengeance pursues. The Horse Soldiers: A Union Calvary outfit is sent behind confederate lines in strength to destroy a rail / supply centre. Along with them is sent a doctor who causes instant antipathy between him and the commander. The scret plan for the mission is overheard by a southern belle who must be taken along to ensure her silence. The Union officers each have different reason for wanting to be on the mission.
Big Jake is not one of the Duke's classics, but it's a diverting picture 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, who seems to be onscreen just to get shot. --Keith Simanton
The new manager of a cemetery (Richard Boone) begins to question reality when he places black pins instead of white in the cemetery map seemingly causing the owners of the plots to die. As the death count rises the mystery gets deeper and deeper pointing to a resolution almost too strange to face...
The newly appointed chairman of a cemetery discovers that by replacing the white pins on a cemetery map to black he can cause the death of the plot owner...
Violence begins when a wild bunch of outlaws hit the town. No mortal man can stop them - but what about the man of God?
The oldest daughter of a pioneer family is kidnapped by an Indian tribe. Battling all odds her brother searches for the tribe and along the way convinces an old drunken prospector to help him find her. They eventually locate the tribe and to win back his sister's freedom he must risk his own life by passing the test of Crooked Sky a test in which he may die to save his sister from the executioner's arrow.
In a truly outstanding performance Richard Boone stars as Sergeant Bill Disher a 26 year cavalry veteran driven to breaking point when his close friend Little Tom is killed in an accident. Grieving over the death of his military comrade Disher bitterly blames the modernisation and expansion of the West as being the cause of Little Tom's fate. During a drunken wake Disher burns down Cimarron's funeral parlour angering the townspeople who seek vigilantly justice. This forces the hand of Marshal Crown who must bring Disher's military career to an end... one way or another.
The Cult Action Extravaganza three-disc set offers three very different movies that have nothing in common bar residency in Siren's film archive. They are: The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) and Get Christie Love! (1974). The Most Dangerous Game is a classic, one of the first talkies to get pictures moving after five very static years following the birth of sound. The plot finds resourceful hero Joel McCrea and heroine Fay Wray being hunted on the island of the insane Zaroff (Leslie Banks). One of the grandfathers of the summer blockbuster, the film's setup has been reworked many times since, notably in John Woo's Hard Target (1993). By modern standards it's technically primitive, though still gripping stuff, complete with the jungle set built as a test run for King Kong (1933) and graced by Max Steiner's prototype of all Hollywood action scores. Beneath the 12-Mile Reef is another landmark or rather watermark. The third-ever CinemaScope production, this was a prestige release with Technicolor location filming at Key West, Florida of never-before-achieved underwater cinematography and four-channel stereo recording of a superlative Bernard Herrmann score. Even a still-impressive underwater battle with an octopus pre-dates the more famous giant squid of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). The humans aren't bad either, with a young Robert Wagner making a charismatic if ethnically unconvincing Greek lead as sponge fisherman Tony and Terry Moore playing Juliet to his Romeo with real vivacity. Starring Theresa Graves, Get Christie Love! is a tame TV movie imitation of early 1970s female blaxploitation films such Pam Grier's Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Running a standard TVM 73 minutes and with a low budget and content sanitised to US network standards, this is lightweight stuff about an undercover cop determined to smash a drugs ring. Nevertheless the movie was popular enough to spawn a short-lived TV show and is significant for being the first time a black woman took the title role in any American network production. Tarantino completists may be interested, as before he paid homage to Christie Love in the dialogue of Reservoir Dogs (1991). On the DVD: Cult Action Extravaganza presents the films in their original aspect ratio and sound format; The Most Dangerous Game and Get Christie Love! are 4:3, mono. The former is faded b/w with reasonably sturdy sound, though the transfer suffers from compression artefacting. No one would expect great quality from a 1974 TV movie, but Get Christie Love! suffers from both a poor print and a mediocre DVD transfer. Beneath the 12-Mile Reef is presented in the extra wide 2.55:1 of early CinemaScope and though sadly not anamorphic both the seascapes and underwater cinematography are still impressive. The four-channel stereo sound is revelatory, clear, detailed and years ahead of what we have come to expect early 1950s films to sound like. --Gary S Dalkin
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