William Holden Movies

This lighthearted romantic comedy stars William Holden as working stiff Michael Stewart and Frances Dee as wealthy socialite Candace Goodwin. Falling in love with Michael, Candace agrees to marry him on his terms-namely, that they survive on his salary alone. Inevitably, Candace has trouble adjusting to her new lifestyle and yearns for the luxuries lavished upon her by her family. Meanwhile, Michael begins to suspect that Candace has been keeping company with men from her own social set. It takes the combined efforts of the Stewart and Goodwin families to reunite the quarrelsome couple in the final footage. There's nary an original moment in Meet the Stewarts, but the two leads are so darned atttractive that it doesn't matter at all. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lucille Ball is Miss Grant, an efficient but naïve secretary hired by William Holden. Ostensibly a legit real estate salesman, Holden is actually the brains of a bookie ring. It takes forever for Ball to tumble to what's going on, but when she does she settles matters in the same fashion as her later I Love Lucy character would--by adopting a disguise and a line of snappy patter. The chastened Holden marries Ball and agrees to devote his life to running an honest real-estate firm on behalf of the deserving homeless. Among the contributors to the success of Miss Grant Takes Richmond are producer S. Sylvan Simon, director Lloyd Bacon and scenarist Frank Tashlin, all of whom would later team up again for the zany Lucille Ball vehicle The Fuller Brush Girl. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Though no longer fighting in the war, four deranged Vietnam vets continue to enjoy hunting people down and killing them. This violent exploitation drama tells the story of their latest two victims. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Richard Quine directs George Axelrod's acerbic script (adapted from Julien Duvivier's La Fête à Henriette) in this romantic comedy that reunites William Holden and Audrey Hepburn for the first time since 1954's Sabrina. Holden plays Richard Benson, a Hollywood screenwriter being pressured by movie producer Alexander Meyerheimer (Noël Coward) to finish his script entitled "The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower." Meyerheimer gives Richard a two-day ultimatum to complete his work, unaware that Richard has yet to even start on the script. In an effort to get moving on his project, Richard hires a live-in secretary, Gabrielle Simpson (Audrey Hepburn), to help him. Soon enough, the two fall in love and spend the time enacting various scenes from the unwritten screenplay as the time slips away and Richard's deadline looms. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Shirley Ross plays an innocent young girl convicted for complicity in a crime committed by her boy friend (Lloyd Nolan). The male crook is sentence to six months on a prison farm populated by both men and women (segregated, of course). Ross is also incarcerated, suffering the cruelties of the sadistic male and female guards (including J. Carroll Naish and future "Ma Kettle" Marjorie Main!) Since this film leaves no cliche unturned, an escape attempt is inevitable, but Ross is ultimately rescued from her plight for the obligatory happy ending. Nowhere near as exploitive as the later Linda Blair films of the same ilk, Prison Farm was considered reasonably realistic in 1938, earning back its modest cost and then some. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this biting comedy satirizing Hollywood cynicism from writer-director Blake Edwards, Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a motion picture director whose career is on the skids. Having just completed a family musical that is sure to be a $30 million flop, Felix knows that his days are numbered and tries unsuccessfully to commit suicide. When he recovers, Felix suddenly has a brainstorm and hatches a scheme to buy the film back from his studio and lens new scenes that will turn it into a pornographic movie with big stars, a sure-fire box office winner. In order to pull it off, he'll need to convince his female lead and wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews, not coincidentally the director's real-life wife) to defy her wholesome, squeaky-clean public image by baring her breasts on film. S.O.B. (1981) was the final film of legendary actor William Holden. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Musashi Miyamoto was the first entry in Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Ingaki's Samurai trilogy. Toshiro Mifune is Takezo, a good-for-nothing from the farming village of Miyamoto, who dreams of becoming a samurai in 17th century Japan. Over the course of the first part, Takezo evolves from being a man filled with rage and violence who is looked upon by others as a wild animal to being Musashi Miyamoto, a man yearning for a deeper understanding of himself and what it takes to be a true warrior. When first released in the US, Samurai 1 was "clarified" by the narration of William Holden, an actor with a long-standing fascination and affection for all things Japanese. Based on a mammoth novel by Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi Miyamoto was followed by Duel at Ichijoji Temple and Duel at Ganyru Island . All three films were eventually combined into an epic single entity, Samurai Trilogy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The scene is a German POW camp, sometime during the mid-1940s. Stalag 17, exclusively populated by American sergeants, is overseen by sadistic commandant Oberst Von Schernbach (Otto Preminger) and the deceptively avuncular sergeant Schultz (Sig Ruman). The inmates spend their waking hours circumventing the boredom of prison life; at night, they attempt to arrange escapes. When two of the escapees, Johnson and Manfredi, are shot down like dogs by the Nazi guards, Stalag 17's resident wiseguy Sefton (William Holden) callously collects the bets he'd placed concerning the fugitives' success. No doubt about it: there's a security leak in the barracks, and everybody suspects the enterprising Sefton -- who manages to obtain all the creature comforts he wants -- of being a Nazi infiltrator. Things get particularly dicey when Lt. Dunbar (Don Taylor), temporarily billetted in Stalag 17 before being transferred to an officer's camp, tells his new bunkmates that he was responsible for the destruction of a German ammunition train. Sure enough, this information is leaked to the Commandant, and Dunbar is subjected to a brutal interrogation. Certain by now that Sefton is the "mole", the other inmates beat him to a pulp. But Sefton soon learns who the real spy is, and reveals that information on the night of Dunbar's planned escape. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Stalag 17 is as much comedy as wartime melodrama, with most of the laughs provided by Robert Strauss as the Betty Grable-obsessed "Animal" and Harvey Lembeck as Stosh's best buddy Harry. Other standouts in the all-male cast include Richard Erdman as prisoner spokesman Hoffy, Neville Brand as the scruffy Duke, Peter Graves as blonde-haired, blue-eyed "all American boy" Price, Gil Stratton as Sefton's sidekick Cookie (who also narrates the film) and Robinson Stone as the catatonic, shell-shocked Joey. Writer/producer/director Billy Wilder and coscenarist Edmund Blum remained faithful to the plot and mood the Donald Bevan/Edmund Trzcinski stage play Stalag 17, while changing virtually every line of dialogue-all to the better, as it turned out (Trzcinski, who like Bevan based the play on his own experiences as a POW, appears in the film as the ingenuous prisoner who "really believes" his wife's story about the baby abandoned on her doorstep). William Holden won an Academy Award for his hard-bitten portrayal of Sefton, which despite a hokey "I'm really a swell guy after all" gesture near the end of the film still retains its bite today. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Submarine Command reunites the romantic leads from Sunset Boulevard, William Holden and Nancy Olsen. Holden is cast as Commander White, who during an enemy attack orders that his submarine dive to avoid destruction. Though his action saves his crew, it results in the death of the machine-gunner left topside during the attack. With the exception of vindictive chief torpedo-man Boyer (William Bendix), no one holds White to task for his decision -- save for White himself, who is plagued with guilt and doubt ever afterward. Helping to alleviate White's self-flagellation is his fiancee Carol (Olsen). The thrill-packed climax finds White's submarine engaged in a sabotage action against communist forces off the coast of Korea. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Texas was Columbia Pictures' lighthearted (and frankly more enjoyable) follow-up to its 1940 big-budget western Arizona. William Holden and Glenn Ford, looking collectively 28 years old, play a couple of ex-Confederate soldiers who get into all sorts of trouble in a wide-open Texas town. The two split up, whereupon Ford takes a job on Joseph Crehan's ranch; by and by, he falls in love with Crehan's daughter Clare Trevor. Meanwhile, Holden has joined a gang of rustlers headed by town dentist Edgar Buchanan (in real life, Buchanan had been a practicing dentist, retaining his license well into the sixties just in case things slowed down in Hollywood). Ex-friends Ford and Holden confront each other again when Holden tries to steal the cattle that Ford is driving across the state to Abilene. Complicating matters is the fact that Holden, too, carries a torch for Trevor. Though packed with action and suspense, Texas never loses its subliminal sense of humor, a fact that can be attributed to its director, slapstick comedy veteran George Marshall. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Bridge on the River Kwai opens in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma in 1943, where a battle of wills rages between camp commander Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) and newly arrived British colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness). Saito insists that Nicholson order his men to build a bridge over the river Kwai, which will be used to transport Japanese munitions. Nicholson refuses, despite all the various "persuasive" devices at Saito's disposal. Finally, Nicholson agrees, not so much to cooperate with his captor as to provide a morale-boosting project for the military engineers under his command. The colonel will prove that, by building a better bridge than Saito's men could build, the British soldier is a superior being even when under the thumb of the enemy. As the bridge goes up, Nicholson becomes obsessed with completing it to perfection, eventually losing sight of the fact that it will benefit the Japanese. Meanwhile, American POW Shears (William Holden), having escaped from the camp, agrees to save himself from a court martial by leading a group of British soldiers back to the camp to destroy Nicholson's bridge. Upon his return, Shears realizes that Nicholson's mania to complete his project has driven him mad. Filmed in Ceylon, Bridge on the River Kwai won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for the legendary British filmmaker David Lean, and Best Actor for Guinness. It also won Best Screenplay for Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel on which the film was based, even though the actual writers were blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were given their Oscars under the table. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this tense espionage drama set in 1942, William Holden plays Eric Erickson, an American-born Swede who is put on the Allied blacklist for trading oil with the Nazis. Collins (Hugh Griffith), a British intelligence agent, offers to expunge Erickson's name from the blacklist after the war in return for information on the Nazis. Erickson agrees to the plan and proceeds to make it look as if he is pro-Nazi. This subterfuge causes him to be branded a traitor, and his wife, believing Eric to be a Nazi, walks out on him. Nevertheless, Eric continues with his deceit and makes the Germans think that he is planning to construct an oil refinery in Sweden to serve as a fuel supply for Germany. As a result he is allowed entrance to four German oil refinery, and he passes on the information to Collins. But Eric is being put under surveillance by the Nazis. They discover that Eric's lover, Marianne (Lilli Palmer) is working for the Allies. Suddenly both Marianne and Eric are arrested and thrown into Moabit Prison -- with dire consequences for both of them. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide