Larry Johns Movies

Project Moonbase is a "feature film" cobbled together from several episodes of the unsold TV science fiction series "Ring Around the Moon." Set in the future -- 1970, that is -- the film takes place on a huge space station, where a group of pilots and scientists draw up plans to establish a U.S. military base on the moon. This project is nearly stymied by foreign spy Dr. Wernher (Larry Johns), who is exposed when he cannot answer a few simple questions about the Brooklyn Dodgers (it's that kind of film). The story comes to an abrupt conclusion when female colonel Breiteis (Donna Martell) -- pronounced "Bright Eyes"! -- and male major Moore (Ross Ford) are married on the surface of the moon, with the President of the United States (Ernestine Barrier) presiding via two-way television. Though the sets and special effects are impressive, the storyline is rather infantile. Surprisingly, Project Moonbase was co-scripted by Robert A. Heinlein. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Sealed Cargo was based on The Gaunt Woman, a novel by Edmund Gilligan. Dana Andrews stars as Pat Bannon, a Newfoundland fishing-boat captain during WW II. Coming to the rescue of an endangered vessel, Bannon finds himself in the middle of a nest of Nazi spies. Reasoning that he'll never be able to alert the authorities, Bannon takes it upon himself to scuttle an impending large-scale German submarine attack. Claude Rains is the personification of cultured evil as the head Nazi naval officer, while Carla Balenda co-stars as an innocent bystander who may well lose her life as a result of Bannon's planned heroics. Sealed Cargo was one of several moneymaking films released by RKO Radio during one of the studio's most profitable years. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Westerner Tim Holt and his sidekick Richard Martin are hired to act as border guards on the Rio Grande. This being a modern western (more or less), Holt is obliged to keep insurrectionists from smuggling machine guns into Mexico. The villainy this time around is in the grubby but formidable hands of Douglas Fowley and Tom Tyler; Cleo Moore, voluptuous leading lady of many a Hugo Haas "B" melodrama, is also around to rouse Holt's interest south of the border. A very modest western, Rio Grande Patrol has had its virtues blown all out of proportion by devotees of "cult" director Lesley Selander. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Filmed not long after the actual events, The Beginning or the End is a sober, intelligent account of the development and deployment of the Atom Bomb. Step by step, the film details the progress of The Manhattan Project, from its inception in the early stages of the war through the dawn of the Atomic Age over the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Brian Donlevy stars as Brigadier General Leslie Groves, assigned by President Roosevelt (Godfrey Tearle) to act as military supervisor of the top-secret project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After a grueling trial-and-error period, the first atomic bomb is tested before an assemblage of scientists and military personnel-even though there's the disturbing possibility that the explosion may cause a chain reaction that will wipe out all mankind. Woven into the proceedings is an unnecessary but innocuous romance between idealistic young scientist Matt Cochran (Tom Drake) and his new bride Anne (Beverly Tyler), who cannot understand why she and her husband are forced to live in isolation with scores of other scientists and their families because Matt, like his associates, has been sworn to total secrecy. Though the Cochrans are fictional, many real-life participants in the Manhattan Project are depicted herein, including J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Hume Cronyn), Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia), Albert Einstein (Ludwig Stossel) and Col. Paul Tibbetts (Barry Nelson), pilot of the bomb-bearing Enola Gay. Refreshingly free of propagandizing, Beginning or the End would make an excellent companion feature to Fat Man and Little Boy (1990), a highly politicized retelling of the same events. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi