Dolores Hart Movies

The lives and loves of a trio of airline hostesses is the whole story in this piece of fluff from MGM. Each of these perky women have cute and cuddly romances from an assortment of wealthy men as they offer coffee or tea on a flight from New York to Paris. Dolores Hart is searching for a rich sugar-daddy and thinks she's found one in a well-to-do baron (Karl Boehm). Lois Nettleton, on the other hand, opts for hooking a multi-millionaire Texan (Karl Malden). Pamela Tiffin, unluckier than the other two, finally flies starry-eyed for handsome pilot Hugh O'Brien. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

This penultimate film by director Michael Curtiz, perhaps best known for his 1942 Casablanca, is a verbose, routine religious drama on the life of St. Francis of Assisi. After quickly passing over St. Francis' early life as the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, the story notes his talents in and out of battle. St. Francis hears the call to the cloth (in his hagiography, the call was repeated several times before he finally responded completely), and gives up all his worldly goods to dedicate himself to God. The main focus of attention is then on his relationship to Clare (Dolores Hart) a young aristocratic woman who was so taken with St. Francis that she left her family and became a nun. St. Francis by this time (1212 A.D.) had a well-established reputation for his vows of poverty, and aside from the dubious aspersions cast on his interest in Clare, the drama goes on to note miracles and other aspects of his life, up to and including his death on October 3, 1226. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

The Plunderers is a fairly slow-paced, uneven western about a group of young toughs who run amok until they are brought up short by a one-armed Civil War vet. The leader Jeb (Ray Strickland) is accompanied by his three cohorts, Mule (Roger Torrey) a hulking Paul Bunyan type, Rondo (John Saxon), and Davy (Dee Pollack), the most innocent of the quartet. When the young men arrive in the small town, they take it over and rule the roost like four despots. Sam (Jeff Chandler), a shell-shocked veteran of the Civil War, slowly gets his act together and begins to take the four down, one at a time. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

For his film directorial debut, producer Dore Schary selected a longtime pet property: Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaniel West's trenchant 1933 novel. Montgomery Clift delivers a haunting performance as journalist Adam White, assigned by his cynical editor Adam Shrike (Robert Ryan) to take over a newspaper advice column. Signing himself Miss Lonelyhearts, White is appalled by the human misery pouring out of the letters sent to him (one of his correspndents was born without a nose), but Shrike insists that anyone who'd write to such a column is fake. To find out for himself, White looks up one of the correspondents, unhappily married Fay Doyle (Oscar-nominated Maureen Stapleton). His pity for the seriously disturbed Fay nearly leads to tragedy (in the novel, there's no "nearly"). Meanwhile, Shrike tries to contend with his own tottering marriage to his wife Florence (Myrna Loy). In additional to shortening the title to Lonelyhearts, Dore Schary made a number of radical changes in the original, adding an overabundance of "meaningful" dialogue and softening the character of Florence Shrike. Purists were enraged by Schary's liberties, while critics carped at his perfunctory direction; audiences, however, seemed to like the film. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Loving You was the most autobiographical of all Elvis Presley's movies, and, not coincidentally, features the most naturalistic, easygoing performance of his early career. He plays Deke Rivers, a truck driver with a penchant for singing and a raw animal magnetism where women are concerned. He attracts the business interest of publicity agent Glenda Markle (Lizabeth Scott), who sees a potential gold mine in Deke. She hires him to appear with a band that she handles, fronted by aging country & western singer Tex Warner (Wendell Corey), who used to be romantically involved with Glenda and is now a client. Pretty soon he's pulling in bigger crowds and generating more excitement than Tex did during his best days (which drives the older singer to start drinking again), but also a lot more controversy, too. Deke is so provocatively sexual a presence on-stage that some citizens in the southern and border states where the band is working think that what he does is immoral. Girls can't keep away from him, their boyfriends despise what he symbolizes, and their parents are aghast, even as concert promoter Carl Meade (James Gleason) smells a fortune to be made from this boy. Glenda parlays these disputes and a ban on one of Deke's performances into a national television event. Amid all of this, Deke reveals the private, vulnerable side that no one ever knew -- that he's not even Deke Rivers (it was a name he took off a gravestone), but an orphan named Jimmy Tompkins, and that he's never had a home. He also reveals that he's attracted to Glenda, mistaking (with her encouragement) her interest in his talent with a personal involvement, but he's also drawn the the band's female singer, Susan Jessup (Dolores Hart), who could genuinely love him, and offers him a caring family of her own that would accept him. Deke and Glenda's conflicts are eventually straightened out, and Deke gets to say his piece and sing his music on network television. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Although he is married, college professor Donald Mason (Donald Taylor) regularly carries on affairs with his prettier students. Attempting to break off his romance with coed Claudia Powell (Dolores Hart), Mason catches up with Claudia while she is working as a babysitter. One thing leads to another, and Donald ends up killing Claudia. The only witness to the crime is the baby whom the girl was caring for, who begins crying uncontrollably whenever Donald comes anywhere near. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi