Alexis Smith Movies
Born in Canada, Alexis Smith was brought to Los Angeles in her infancy by her family. At ten, Smith won a dance school scholarship, and at 13 she made her professional dancing debut in a Hollywood Bowl production of Carmen. While attending Hollywood High School, Smith won a statewide acting contest and at Los Angeles City College she enrolled in a rigorous theatrical training program. She was signed by Warner Bros. in 1941, where she was immediately (and reluctantly) tagged by the publicity department as "The Dynamite Girl." After a few B's, Smith received leading roles opposite Errol Flynn (Gentleman Jim), Charles Boyer and Joan Fontaine (The Constant Nymph), Fredric March (The Adventures of Mark Twain), Cary Grant (Night and Day), and even Jack Benny (the estimable The Horn Blows at Midnight). At 5' 9," Smith proved difficult to cast at times, especially opposite certain sensitive leading men of comparatively short stature. In 1944, Smith married fellow Warner contractee Craig Stevens, with their mutual friend Errol Flynn acting as best man. After closing out the first phase of her Hollywood career in 1959, Smith appeared on-stage with her husband in such touring productions as Mary, Mary, Critic's Choice, and Cactus Flower. In the early '70s, Alexis Smith scored a personal triumph (and won a Tony award) in the hit Broadway musical Follies; this led to a brief flurry of activity as a movie character actress, though she seemed far too youthful to be playing the middle-aged aunt of Jodie Foster in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane or the widowed retirement-home resident in the Burt Lancaster/Kirk Douglas vehicle Tough Guys (1986). Alexis Smith died of cancer one day after her 72nd birthday; her last screen appearance was as a bejeweled New York aristocrat in Martin Scorcese's The Age of Innocence (1993). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1941
This Buck Privates knockoff concerns the misadventures of the three Patterson brothers: Charley (Wayne Morris), Eddie (Tom Brown) and Kenneth (William T. Orr). Pampered by their pacifistic mother Margaret (Irene Rich), the Patterson boys do everything they can to avoid being drafted into the Army. Once they've donned unifom, however, our heroes calmly and courageously do their patriotic duty, while their mother at last realizes it's all for the best. Before this happens, however, the audience is subjected to all manner of goofy slapstick setpieces, including a trained-seal bit right out of the Mack Sennett era. Incidentally, Three Sons O' Guns costar William T. Orr was the son-in-law of Jack L. Warner, whose studio produced the film. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Wayne Morris, Marjorie Rambeau, (more)
Lieutenant Commander Joe Blake (Fred MacMurray), Lt. Tim Griffin (Regis Toomey), and Lt. Swede Larson (Louis Jean Heydt) are longtime US Navy flying buddies, about to be transferred to different posts when Larson suffers a blackout during high-altitude maneuvers and cracks up. Navy doctor Douglas Lee (Errol Flynn) insists on trying to save him with an immediate operation, and the mortally injured pilot dies on the table. This sets the stage for a long, lingering, and bitter hatred between Blake and Lee -- which is only exacerbated when Lee chooses to become a flight surgeon so he can help to find a solution to the problem of high altitude blackout. Lee is assigned to medical research with Lt. Cdr. Lance Rogers (Ralph Bellamy), a flight surgeon whose dedication to high-altitude research has left him unfit for further flying. Their work proceeds through small triumphs and terrible tragedy, and Lee and Blake keep crossing paths, unwillingly -- they not only don't like each other personally, but end up competing for the attentions of the same woman (Alexis Smith) at one point. But they're forced to work together for the good of the service, even after Lee grounds Tim Griffin as medically unfit to keep flying. A fresh tragedy shows Blake that Lee has always been looking out for the best interests of the pilots, and they begin working together in earnest, at last. Blake pushes his piloting skills to their limit and beyond, and he soon finds a purpose and dedication that he's never known before -- and then he learns that he may have to be grounded because of his own deteriorating medical condition. While Lee frets over having to give the news to his friend, the only question for Blake is whether he will be able to see the final test of Lee's high-altitude pressure suit through to the end. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Errol Flynn, Fred MacMurray, (more)
- 1941
In this drama, a terminally ill college professor with only three months to live asks some younger colleagues what he should do with the rest of his life. One advises him to murder someone who deserves to die. The professor likes the idea and chooses to off a conniving seductress who really enjoys destroying the lives and loves of other people, including two of his ex-students. After he kills her, he turns himself into the cops. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Geraldine Fitzgerald, Thomas Mitchell, (more)
- 1941
This remake of Dangerous is set in Singapore and chronicles the exploits of a woman who believes herself cursed. To recover, she is taken to the rubber plantation of a handsome young man. There she finds true happiness and love. Suddenly, her abusive ex-husband shows up. She had thought him dead, and his presence terrifies her. Fortunately an auto accident takes care of him and she can resume her happy life. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Brenda Marshall, David Bruce, (more)
- 1941
The Great Mr. Nobody is an easygoing classified ad salesman, appropriately nicknamed Dreamy (Eddie Albert). All Dreamy wants out of life is to own a boat and drift aimlessly across the ocean in the company of his good pal Skipper (played by Alan Hale-ironically the father of Gilligan's Island's "Skipper" Alan Hale Jr.) Only one problem: Dreamy is bereft of cash, and is constantly in danger of losing his job because he continues to reserve the best of the classifieds which cross his desk for his unemployed friends. Our hero's saving grace is that he is a veritable fountain of surefire moneymaking ideas; now all he needs is someone to listen. 16-year-old Joan Leslie was obviously being groomed for bigger things when she costarred with Eddie Albert in this low-pressure B picture. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Eddie Albert, Joan Leslie, (more)
- 1941
The virile Warner Bros. programmer Steel Against the Sky stars Lloyd Nolan and Craig Stevens as steelworkers Rocky and Chuck Evans. Already on the outs due to a few on-the-job mishaps, Chuck gets further in dutch with his family when he falls in love with Rocky's girl Helen (Alexis Smith). The plot is secondary to the film's bridge-building sequences, breathtakingly photographed by Edmund Grainger. Steel Against the Sky was essentially a showcase for two of Warners' newest contractee, Craig Stevens and Alexis Smith. Their professional relationship quickly deepened into something else, and within a few years the two young contractees were husband and wife, which they remained until Smith's death in 1989. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lloyd Nolan, Alexis Smith, (more)
- 1941
Like MGM's Whistling in the Dark, Warner Bros.' The Smiling Ghost was inspired by the success of Paramount's comedy-mystery The Ghost Breakers--even unto the casting of Ghost Breakers' Willie Best in a similar role. During a gloriously oversized thunderstorm, hapless hero Lucky Downing (Wayne Morris) arrives at the mansion of his fiancee, heiress Eleanor B. Fairchild. Lucky hopes to break the jinx that seems to hang over Eleanor, whose last three boyfriends all met with mysterious deaths ("Anyone can be bitten by a snake." "On the fourteenth floor of a New York Hotel?") To do this, he tries to solve the triple mystery himself, aided and abetted by troublesome girl reporter Lil Bastow (Brenda Marshall) and timorous black manservant Clarence (Best). After a night of terror, replete with clutching hands and sliding panels, the murderer is revealed-after which Clarence participates in a closing gag which single-handedly sets race relations back 50 years. The Smiling Ghost was cowritten by Stuart Palmer, the creator of spinster sleuth Hildegarde Withers and a past master of locked-room mysteries with a comic touch. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Wayne Morris, Brenda Marshall, (more)
- 1941
In this comedy, a crime novelist spins a yarn to impress the apple of his eye. He tells her that he has been involved in a murder. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1940
The notoriously temperamental Miriam Hopkins is ideally cast as equally contentious theatrical prima donna Mrs. Leslie Carter in The Lady With Red Hair. As rapidly paced as any Warner Bros. gangster picture, the film charts Caroline Carter's rise to fame on Broadway through the auspices of impresario David Belasco (Claude Rains). The screenwriters take great pains to cast Carter in a sympathetic light, suggesting that she turned to the lucrative world of the theater to regain custody of her son (Johnnie Russell), won by her husband in their acrimonious 1889 divorce settlement. Though at first she meets with nothing but failure, our heroine perseveres, and by 1904 she is the idol of millions throughout the world. Along the way, she marries visionary producer Lou Payne (Richard Ainley), but by film's end she is reunited with her mentor Belasco. A young Cornel Wilde makes his screen debut as an aspiring actor in a boarding-house sequence. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Miriam Hopkins, Claude Rains, (more)
