Darren McGavin Movies

Rosalind Russell plays yet another independent career woman in She Wouldn't Say Yes. This time she's a psychiatrist who sees no need for a man in her life. Her resolve weakens a bit when she meets Lee Bowman, a dashing combat sketch artist suffering from wartime emotional problems. Bowman falls in love with the shrink and determines to establish a beachhead, while Russell is equally determined to hold her ground. She doesn't say yes for the first 80 minutes of the film, but does in the last six. Even Rosalind Russell made jokes concerning the inordinate number of look-alike films she made in this vein. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Three small-time hoods are sent off into the desert to deliver a supply of drugs to a distributor and get the distributor's cash. Only the place of the transaction and the amounts involved are set. They do not know exactly when their counterparts will be sent by the distributor. In the meantime, they try to kill time in the corrugated shed they find at the site. They drink beer, quarrel, and, in a truly self-destructive mode, use their cellular phone to arrange for some prostitutes to entertain them. In the course of their liaison with the prostitutes, they use up a fair amount of the drug supply they were to deliver. Will they be lucky enough, or ingenious enough to survive their own stupidity and the wrath of their bosses? ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A young widow from Boston travels with her three children to Maine to enjoy their summer vacation. Margaret Carey (Dorothy McGuire) is helped by the friendly Osh Popham (Burl Ives), who finds the family a rent-free house vacated by a vacationing landowner. Daughter Nancy (Hayley Mills) catches the eye of a young schoolteacher, Digby (Michael J. Pollard). The owner of the summer house shows up from Europe unexpectedly, but keeps his identity a secret when he too falls for the young Nancy. The entire family gets to croon with Burl Ives in a folksy front-porch singalong. The townsfolk make the Careys feel at home to the point that they consider making the idyllic coastal town their permanent home. This Walt Disney film is lighthearted entertainment for the entire family. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Social-climbing car thief Philadelphia Harry (Telly Savalas) thinks he's finally hit the big time when he steals a Rolls Royce belonging to millionaire Sheridan Westcott (Darren McGavin). But Harry's delight turns to dismay when he discovers the body of Westcott's wife in the back seat. Though he may be a thief, Harry would rather die than have people think he has stooped to murder -- and as it happens, death may be the only way out of this mess when Westcott, the real murderer, tells the police that his wife was still alive when the car was stolen. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Case Against Brooklyn was based on an "expose" article by Ed Reid. Darren McGavin plays rookie cop Pete Harris, who goes undercover to help smash a Brooklyn bookie ring. The problem here as that the crooks have been bribing other cops to look the other way. As if Harris wasn't courting enough trouble by going up against his "own", he also falls in love with gambler's widow Lil Polombo (Maggie Hayes), even though he's already married to Jane Harris (Peggy McCay). Daniel B. Ullman's screenplay adheres to the facts as recorded by Ed Reid, right down to the semi-unhappy finale. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Completed in 1968, the made-for-TV The Challengers wasn't telecast until one year later. This Grand Prix melodrama top-bills Darren McGavin as a veteran racer whose wife (Juliet Mills) wants him to retire. A secondary plot involves Sean Garrison and Nico Minardos, who carry their on-track rivalry into their private lives. Anne Baxter, Susan Clark, and Sal Mineo are also on hand to urge on the winners, comfort the losers, and spout the cliches. Location footage of the actual Grand Prix is the sole tangible asset of The Challengers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Death of Me Yet opens in a typical American small town that turns out to be in the middle of the Soviet Union. As we all know from those Jack Webb-narrated documentaries of the 1950s, the rascally Russians have set up these ersatz American communities in order to train their agents to subtly infiltrate the good ol' USA. The agent of choice in this TV movie is Doug McClure, who poses as a supposedly respectable newspaper editor in a genuine American small town. Darren McGavin plays the US government agent who arrives in town and shakes things up by asking all sorts of probing questions about the above-suspicion Mr. McClure. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Demon and the Mummy is a jerrybuilt "TV movie" comprised of two episodes from the 1974-75 TV series Night Stalker. As always, reporter Karl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) stumbles onto evidence of the Supernatural. And as always, his editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) refuses to believe Kolchak. The "Demon" of the title is a Succubus, a devil in female form (Carolyn Jones). The "Mummy" is of the Aztec variety, requiring fresh human hearts to stay alive. The original titles of the two Night Stalker episodes included herein were "Demon in Lace" and "Legacy of Terror." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The 48 Hour Mile is a "feature film" in terms of length only. In fact, it is comprised of two hour-long episodes from the 1968 TV series The Outsider. Darren McGavin stars as private eye David Ross, who after serving six years in prison on a trumped-up charge devotes the rest of his life to helping "outsiders" like himself. In the two Outsider installments cobbled together in The 48 Hour Mile, William Windom plays a millionaire with female trouble, and Carrie Snodgress portrays a neurotic young woman who hires Ross to find her missing twin sister. Of the two, the Snodgress episode is the best, by virtue of the actress' outstanding performance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Great Sioux Massacre is an entertaining pack of lies about Custer's Last Stand. General Custer (Philip Carey) is herein depicted as a bastion of tolerance, whose efforts to secure fair treatment for the Indians lead to several confrontations with corrupt government officials. Custer is forced to retire, but is soon approached by a machiavellian senator (Don Haggerty) who convinces the General that he is presidential material. The best way to attain the White House, Custer reasons, is to wrest control of the upcoming Little Big Horn campaign from the officer in charge (Frank Ferguson). This, alas, proves to be "Yellow Hair's" undoing. The Great Sioux Massacre costars Joseph Cotten and Darren McGavin as Custer's fellow officers Reno and Benton. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When Otto Preminger was willing to release his drug-addiction drama Man With the Golden Arm without the sanction of a Production Code seal, it proved to be yet another nail in the coffin of that censorial dinosaur. Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, the film stars Frank Sinatra as Frankie Machine, expert card dealer (hence the title). Recently released from prison, Frankie is determined to set his life in order -- and that means divesting himself of his drug habit. He dreams of becoming a jazz drummer, but his greedy wife Eleanor Parker wants him to continue his lucrative gambling activities. Since Parker is confined to a wheelchair as a result of a car accident caused by Frankie, he's in no position to refuse. Only the audience knows that Parker is not crippled, but is faking her invalid status to keep Frankie under her thumb. Gambling boss Robert Strauss wants Frankie to deal at a high-stakes poker game; terrified that he's lost his touch, Frankie asks dope pusher Darren McGavin to supply him with narcotics. When McGavin discovers that Parker is not an invalid, she kills him, and Frankie (who is elsewhere at the time) is accused of the murder. He is willing to go to the cops, but he doesn't want to show up with drugs in his system. So with the help of sympathetic B-girl Kim Novak, Sinatra locks himself up and goes "cold turkey"-a still-harrowing sequence, despite the glut of "doper" films that followed in the wake of this picture. After Parker herself is killed in a suicidal fall, the path is cleared for Frankie to pursue a clean new life with Novak. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The film version of The Natural pulls off the neat trick of conveying the spirit of the Bernard Malamud novel upon which it is based, even while changing both the outcome and the meaning of Malamud's closing chapters. In his first film appearance in four years, Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a farm boy with a hankering to be a great baseball player. With his faithful homemade bat "Wonderboy" in hand, Roy heads to the big city. En route, he arouses the fascination of the mysterious Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey). Luring the boy to a hotel room, Harriet asks Roy what he wants out of life. Roy brashly responds he wants to be "the best there is," whereupon Harriet whips out a gun and shoots Roy down. Sixteen years later, a humbler Roy Hobbs emerges from the bush leagues to become a 35-year-old "rookie" on the 1939 lineup of the New York Knights. He soon becomes the team's star player, and in so doing once more attracts enigmatic woman Memo Paris (Kim Basinger), the glamorous niece of the Knights' manager Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) and the mistress of Rothstein-like gambler Gus Sands (a curiously unbilled Darren McGavin). Roy's fascination with Memo compromises his ability to play, but this time he finds salvation in the form the angelic Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), his childhood sweetheart. From this point forward, the script for The Natural bears very little resemblance to the Malamud original. Without giving anything away, it can be said that Roy Hobbs is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compensate for the mistakes of his youth, despite the demonic intrusion of inexplicably spiteful sports writer Max Mercy (Robert Duvall). The Natural elevates the art of slow-motion photography to new heights; while this technique would become precious and boring in later baseball films, it works beautifully here, as does the decision by director Barry Levinson and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to convey the symbolism inherent in the story in purely visual rather than blatantly verbal terms. (If the characters told you that the story was a retelling of the Camelot legend in baseball terms, would you have watched?) Another plus is the pastoral theme music by Randy Newman, which has been well utilized on sports broadcasts and "human interest" TV documentaries ever since. The baseball scenes in The Natural were staged at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, New York. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide