Henry Berman Movies

"Alice" was the pseudonymous name of the teenaged author who wrote the book upon which this above-average TV movie was based. Jamie Smith-Jackson portrays a shy, slightly overweight high schooler who is so anxious for acceptance that she falls in with the drug crowd. In a methodical, almost casual matter, we see how Alice descends into a nether world of pushers, pimps and prostitution. Perhaps to make the point that this could be the story of any impressionable youth, few of the characters are identified by name: Julie Adams plays "The Mother," William Shatner "The Professor," Andy Griffith "The Priest," and so on. Filmed in a cinema-verite fashion, Go Ask Alice makes excellent use of relatively unfamiliar Los Angeles locations. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Great American Tragedy is a melodrama about an aerospace engineer and his family who struggle to survive after he suddenly loses his job. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

Elvis: That's the Way It Is offers a candid look at Elvis Presley at a point when he decided to permanently abandon movie roles and return triumphantly to concert gigs. It shows him strutting around Vegas with his entourage, Elvis painstakingly preparing for his stage show, Elvis relaxing backstage and trading jokes with his vocal accompanists, and, of course, Elvis before a live, loud audience. Photographed by Lucien Ballard the film was directed by Denis Sanders of Shock Treatment fame. This film was hugely reedited and reissued in 2001, with around 40% new material that replaced preexistent fan footage with musical performances and revelations; it also works in a a version of 'Love Me Tender' that finds The King strutting through the audience. That cut of the film - which received heightened critical kudos - rates 4 stars, and qualifies as more of a performance film than a documentary. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Upon completing Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a tearful Liza Minnelli declared publicly that she would never, ever work with tyrannical director Otto Preminger again. Worse luck for her: Junie Moon contains what may well be Minnelli's best non-musical performance. Based on the novel by Marjorie Kellogg, the film surprisingly manages to evoke humor and pathos from some of the least promising material in movie history. Minnelli plays an emotionally imbalanced young girl whose face is horribly disfigured by her psycho boy friend Ben Piazza. Ken Howard is cast as an epileptic who has wrongly been diagnosed as mentally retarded. And Robert Moore (future director of such films as The Cheap Detective and Murder by Death) portrays a homosexual, confined to a wheelchair after a hunting accident. After meeting one another in a hospital, these three social outcasts decide to move in together, forming a united front against a cold, judgmental world. The devastating events that follow might have lapsed into the grotesque and exploitational, but director Preminger is extremely careful to depict his protagonists as three-dimensional human beings rather than "freaks." Unfortunately, some filmgoers, assuming that any film with a title like Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon just had to be a campy laff riot, were turned off by the repellant aspects of the early scenes and refused to give the rest of this fascinating film a chance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

John Frankenheimer directed this intense film adaptation of the Bernard Malamud novel. During the days of Czarist Russia, a poor but educated Jew, Yakov Bok (Alan Bates) is abandoned by his wife Raisl (Carol White). Yakov decides to leave his small village and travel to Kiev. Since it is the time of the pogroms, Yakov poses as a gentile and takes a job as a handyman for Lebedev (Hugh Griffith), a drunken anti-Semitic merchant. Yakov rises up the ladder in Lebedev's establishment, and he is eventually promoted to factory overseer-accountant. But when a neighborhood boy is murdered, Yakov's true identity is discovered. Yakov is unjustly accused of the murder and arrested. Bibikov (Dirk Bogarde), a government attorney, believes Yakov to be innocent and attempts to discover the true killer -- realizing that if a confession is forced out of Yakov, the entire Jewish population could be in dire trouble. Bravely, Yakov puts up with the brutal prison life, refusing to confess, hoping Bibikov may discover some new evidence to re-open his case. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there. In his first American feature, Boorman transforms a stripped-down revenge plot into a surreal meditation on the gangster's spiritual demise, using flashbacks and startling shifts in setting to interweave Walker's fractured memories with his extraordinarily photographed odyssey through L.A. Marvin's chillingly stoic presence further hints at the ambiguities in Chris's observation that Walker "died at Alcatraz, all right." Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

One of Our Spies is Missing was cobbled together from a two-part episode of the American TV series Man From UNCLE, then shipped overseas as a feature film. Robert Vaughn and David McCallum head the cast as Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin, U.N.C.L.E's top agents. The original two-parter, "The Bridge of Lions Affair" (telecast February 4 and 11, 1966), concerns a biochemist who develops a rejuvenation process. The chemist disappears, so it's up to Solo and Kuryakin to recover or destroy the process before it falls into the hands of the enemy spy organization THRUSH. Padding out the proceedings in One of Our Spies is Missing is a newly-filmed subplot concerning the niece (Yvonne Craig) of U.N.C.L.E. head honcho Alexander Waverly (Leo G. Carroll). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This film is essentially the original pilot for the popular 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It was expanded to 92 minutes and shot in color for theatrical release. Robert Vaughn plays the master spy and adept action hero Napoleon Solo. He works for a shadowy supra-governmental enforcement agency called U.N.C.L.E. His partner is the suave Russian secret agent Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum). In this pilot, a sinister organization called W.A.S.P. assassinates the president of an African republic and his assistants. Solo is enlisted to stop W.A.S.P.'s plans to take over the country and turn it into a dictatorship. The plot and action proceed at lightning speed against the backdrop of a brewing Cold War superpower confrontation. Through a series of mishaps, a housewife, Elaine May Donaldson (Pat Crowley) is dragged into the fight and helps Solo thwart the coup attempt. Also released as a film in 1966 was another expanded episode from the TV series, The Spy with My Face. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

Tom Ewell plays a busy attorney who wishes to be closer to his son. To do this, he becomes manager of the boy's little league team, much to the dismay of his wife (Anne Francis), who can't stand baseball. Ewell finds that he must contend with pushy and ambitious parents who hope to live their own sports fantasies vicariously through their ballplaying children. The single mother of one of the kids (Ann Miller) goes to Ewell to plead for her boy's advancement, but the purpose of the meeting is misinterpreted by Ewell's jealous wife. Fed up with sacrificing sportsmanship to the whims of the parents, Ewell encourages his team to play for the love of the game rather than "winning at any cost." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The narrator of Herman Hoffman's film is a bull terrier named Wildfire, who rises from life in the slums to status as a pampered pet of a wealthy home. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Leave it to MGM to turn the Korean War into a splashy, big-budget, all-star extravaganza. Men of the Fighting Lady is set on the US aircraft career of the same name. Van Johnson stars as Lt. Howard Thayer, while other MGM stalwarts in the cast include Walter Pidgeon, Kennan Wynn and Louis Calhern. The film's highlight is the famous fact-based scene wherein Lt. Thayer "talks in" blinded pilot Kenneth Schechter (Dewey Martin), assuring a safe landing for the incapacitated flyer. As a novelty, no concessions are made to the "love stuff" addicts in the audience: there is no contrived romantic subplot in the film, nor are there any women in the cast. Men of the Fighting Lady was based on two literary works: "The Case of the Blinded Pilot" by Cmdr. Harry A. Burns, and "The Forgotten Heroes of Korea" by James A. Michener (who is impersonated in the film by Louis Calhern). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide