Elsa Lanchester Movies

In this labor of love, the filmmaker tells the unusual and fascinating story of some older relatives of his who toured the U.S. for nearly seven decades as the Yale Puppeteers, putting on satirical performances which lampooned the public figures of their day. Their claim to theatrical fame comes from their seventeen year tenure at the Turnabout Theater in Hollywood from 1941 to 1956. This is where the folksinger Odetta got her start, and where Elsa Lanchester did much of her live stage work. In addition, two of the ninety-year old men interviewed were gay. However, since they had only recently publicly acknowledged their homosexuality, they were not yet up to speaking freely about their experiences and hardships. The documentary offers a unique window into social and show-business history. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

An air-traffic reporter discovers that his partner--a St. Bernard dog--has accidentally swiped a priceless necklace from a jewel-smuggling gang. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

This by-the-numbers TV movie features an all-star cast in a comedy of marital mix-ups and misunderstandings. Consultants Michael Callan and Ann Prentiss arrange the marriages of several couples, only to discover that all the unions are illegal. Among those affected are a cop (Christopher Connelly) and his hippie spouse (Heather Young); A bachelor at heart (Bill Daily) who thinks he'd be happier without his wife (Elinor Donahue); and a dull missus (Ruth Buzzi) and her "swinger" hubby (Herb Edelman). Whether or not the now-unmarried couples will want to tie the knot legally forms the basis of the comedy. In Name Only has innocently caused resentment among film buffs who've tuned in expecting to see the 1939 film In Name Only, a quite different dramatic opus starring Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Intending to marry Cynthia (Anne Helm), Jay Menlow (Robert Morse) is stranded at the alter on the day of the blessed occasion. Left with a paid Honeymoon vacation in the Caribbean, Jay takes along best man Ross Kingsley (Robert Goulet) to the Boca Boca, a "honeymooners only" resort. Ross soon finds an attractive companion in the resort's social director, Lynn Hope (Nancy Kwan). Jay, on the other hand, shows signs of weakening to Cynthia's telephone apologies and Ross desperately attempts to prevent their reconciliation so he may continue to enjoy the arrangement. When Ross' employer Mr. Sampson (Keenan Wynn) arrives on the scene with his blank-headed mistress, Sherry (Jill St. John), things begin to get a bit crazy. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Sampson's wife (Elvia Allman) arrives looking for her philandering husband. Finally Cynthia appears on the frantic scene to ensure chaos in the proceedings. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide

Out of the beaches and into the boudoirs go Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello and the rest of the gang in Pajama Party. Actually, the whole megillah is as innocent as a newborn babe, but there's plenty of smirking and snickering during a wild 'n' wacky girl's slumber party. Frankie Avalon has only a cameo, relinquishing center stage to Tommy Kirk, playing a teenaged Martian (!) studying the lovemaking rituals of Earthlings. Old-timers Buster Keaton, Dorothy Lamour and Elsa Lanchester also weave in and out of the proceedings, with Keaton the only one who doesn't look as though he wishes he were somewhere else. And of course there's good old Harvey Lembeck as good old Eric "Why Me?" Von Zipper. Director Don Weis took over for Beach Party's William Asher in Pajama Party, remaining in charge for the ill-fated sequel Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In another "on the road" story arc, the Ricardos and the Mertzes prepare to vacation in Florida. When Lucy (Lucille Ball) loses two of the train tickets, she and Ethel (Vivian Vance) advertise for a traveling companion to help drive to Florida and pay expenses. The ad is answered by Mrs. Grundy (Elsa Lanchester), an eccentric health-food fanatic who seems to be in a terrible hurry to get to the Sunshine State. En route to their destination, Lucy and Ethel are confronted with "evidence" suggesting that Mrs. Grundy may be the notorious ax murderer Evelyn Holmby! Also appearing in this episode is a young, clean-shaven, decidedly pre-Cool Hand Luke Strother Martin. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Glass Slipper is a charming retelling of the Cinderella story, eminently suitable for both kids and adults. Leslie Caron plays Ella, the plain-Jane stepsister of beautiful but mean-spirited Birdena (Amanda Blake) and Serafina (Lisa Daniels). While stepmother Widow Sonder (Elsa Lanchester) arranges wealthy marriages for her natural daughters, poor Ella hasn't got a chance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Because of its misleadingly sensual title and the participation of screenwriter/director F. Hugh Herbert (author of the once-notorious "The Moon is Blue"), Girls of Pleasure Island was ballyhooed in 1953 as the ultimate in sex and sin. In truth, the film is an innocent, inconsequential WW II comedy, designed to showcase Paramount's crop of "new faces." Leo Genn plays Roger Halyard, a stiff-upper-lip British gentleman who lives on a South Pacific Island with his three nubile, naïve daughters, Violet (Joan Elan), Hester (Audrey Dalton) and Gloria (Dorothy Bromiley). Hoping to shelter the girls from the lascivious advances of the opposite sex, Halyard is thwarted when 1500 Marines arrive to transform the island into an aircraft landing base. Despite the best efforts of Halyard, his housekeeper Thelma (Elsa Lanchester),and marine colonel Reade (Phil Ober), romance blossoms between the three girls and a trio of handsome leathernecks (one of whom is a young Gene Barry). Top billing in Girls of Pleasure of Island is bestowed upon Don Taylor as Lieutenant Gilmartin, whose warm relationship with Hester Halyard (Dalton) carries most of the plotline. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Not up to the classic 1935 presentation, this is still an excellent adaptation of Victor Hugo's epic novel. The familiar characters of Valjean and Javert and the agonies of injustice are all portrayed convincingly against a backdrop of 18th century France. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide

Though the title role of Frenchie goes to Shelley Winters, top billing in this period actioner is bestowed upon Joel McCrea as sheriff Tom Banning. Hoping to find her father's murderers, New Orleans gambling-house proprietress Frenchie Fontaine (Shelley Winters) sets up shop in the Wild West. With the help of sheriff Banning, Frenchie is able to locate one of the two killers. But after tracking down the second culprit, Banning finds himself facing a murder charge. Though it isn't readily obvious, Frenchie is actually a reworking of 1939's Destry Rides Again, with Joel McCrea and Shelley Winters playing variations of the characters originally essayed by James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Back in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, artist George Petty was famous for his "Petty Girl" illustrations; lovingly detailed renderings of ripe young damsels wearing next to nothing, and sometimes not even that. In The Petty Girl, George Petty is portrayed by Robert Cummings, while Joan Caulfield co-stars as strait-laced college professor Victoria Braymore. The plot contrives to have Petty abandon his nubile creations in favor of avant-garde art, all because he's been told to do so by his new patroness (Audrey Long). Somewhere along the way, Petty and the prim Miss Braymore find themselves in a compromising situation at a Greenwich Village nightclub. Thus it is only a matter of time before Petty goes back to the sort of artwork he does best, and Miss Braymore loosens her inhibitions -- and everything else -- to serve as Petty's latest model. Incredibly, this amusing exercise in old-fashioned male chauvinism was based on a story by novelist Mary McCarthy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A Christmastime TV perennial, Come to the Stable is the gentle saga of two French nuns (Celeste Holm with accent, Loretta Young without) who come to America in hopes of raising funds for a children's hospital. Travelling to a small New England town presciently named Bethlehem, the nuns befriend eccentric painter Elsa Lanchester, who allows them to use her studio (actually a stable) for their base of operations. Utterly ingenuous when it comes to American mores and customs (they tear up a parking ticket, assuming it to be an advertisement), the sisters raise money in a variety of amusing fashions. One of their "agents" is outwardly tough gambler Mike Mazurki, who gets his equally raffish pals to invest in the hospital. And towards the end, the nuns even play a little professional tennis to raise money. Careful not to overwhelm the viewer with sentiment and religiosity, Come to the Stable (based on a story by Clare Booth Luce) is ideal holiday film fare. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

John Farrow's movie adaptation of Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, based on a screenplay by Jonathan Latimer (and produced by future James Bond screenwriter Richard Maibaum), is a near-perfect match for the book, telling in generally superb visual style a tale set against the backdrop of upscale 1940s New York and offering an early (but accurate) depiction of the modern media industry. Told in the back-to-front fashion typical of film noir, it opens with George Stroud (Ray Milland) trapped, his life in danger, his survival measured in the minute-by-minute movements of the huge central clock of the office building where he's hiding. In flashback we learn that Stroud works for media baron Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), loosely based on Henry Luce, as the editor of Crimeways magazine. Janoth is a manipulative, self-centered megalomaniac with various obsessions, including clocks; among other manifestations of the latter fixation, the skyscraper housing his empire's headquarters has as one of its central features a huge clock that reads out the time around the world down to the second.

Twenty-four hours earlier, on the eve of a combined honeymoon/vacation with his wife, Georgia (Maureen O'Sullivan), that has been put off for seven years, Stroud was ordered by Janoth to cancel the trip in order to work on a special project, and he resigned. As the narrative picks up speed, in his depression, Stroud misses the train his wife is on and crosses paths with Pauline York (Rita Johnson), a former model for Janoth's Styleways magazine, who is also Janoth's very unhappy mistress, and the two commiserate by getting drunk together in a night on the town. While hurriedly leaving Pauline's apartment, he glimpses Janoth entering. Janoth and York quarrel, and the publisher kills her in a jealous rage, using a sundial that she and Stroud picked up the night before while wandering around in their revels. Janoth and his general manager, Steve Hagen (George Macready), contrive to pin the murder on the man that Janoth glimpsed leaving York's apartment, whom he thinks was named Jefferson Randolph -- the name Stroud was drunkenly bandying about the night before. He gets Stroud back to Crimeways to lead the magazine's investigators in hunting down "Jefferson Randolph," never realizing that this was Stroud. And Stroud has no choice but to return, desperately trying to gather evidence against Janoth and, in turn, prevent the clues gathered by the Crimeways staff from leading back to him. The two play this clever, disjointed game of cat-and-mouse, Janoth and Hagen planting evidence that will hang "Randolph" (and justify his being shot while trying to escape), while Stroud, knowing what they don't about how close the man they seek to destroy is, arranges to obscure those clues and, in a comical twist, sends the least capable reporters and investigators to follow up on the most substantial clues.

Janoth sometimes seems to be unraveling at the frustrating pace and lack of conclusion to the hunt, but Stroud can't escape the inevitable, or the moments of weakness caused by fear and his own guilt over his near-unfaithfulness to his wife or the inscrutable gaze of Janoth's mute bodyguard Bill Womack (Harry Morgan), a stone-cold killer dedicated to protecting his employer. The trail of proof and guilt winds ever tighter around both men, taking some odd twists courtesy of the eccentric artist (Elsa Lanchester) who has seen the suspect. Milland is perfect in the role of the hapless Stroud, and Laughton is brilliant as the vain, self-centered Janoth, but George Macready is equally good as Hagen, his smooth, upper-crust Waspy smarminess making one's skin crawl. Also worth noting is Harry Morgan's sinister, silent performance as Womack, and sharp-eyed viewers will also recognize such performers as Douglas Spencer, Noel Neill (especially memorable as a tart-tongued elevator operator), Margaret Field (Sally's mother), Ruth Roman, and Lane Chandler in small roles. Additionally, the Janoth Publications building where most of the action takes place is almost a cast member in itself, an art deco wonder, especially the room housing the clock mechanism and the lobby and vestibules, all loosely inspired by such structures as the Empire State Building and the real-life Daily News headquarters on East 42nd Street. This film was later remade as No Way Out. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide