Anna Lee Carroll Movies

Based on the novel by Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter stars Alan Arkin as John Singer, who is deaf. Singer moves from a small town in order to be close to his institutionalized friend Antonapoulos (Chuck McCann), who is deaf and mentally impaired. Singer rents a room with a family whose father, Mr. Kelly (Biff McGuire), is unable to earn a living due to a serious injury. His teen-aged daughter Mick (Sondra Locke, in her film debut) is at first resentful of Singer's presence, but he ingratiates himself by introducing her to classical music (which he can "feel," if not hear). Singer likewise tries to brighten the lives of such unfortunates as alcoholic Blount (Stacy Keach Jr., also making his first film appearance), dying black doctor Copeland (Percy Rodriguez), and Copeland's poverty-stricken daughter (Cicely Tyson). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this mystery, a divorced man begins looking for his ex-wife who married his former business partner. Hal Weston's search leads him to LA where he enlists the aid of Li Sheng and the sneaky Osgood. He is told that his partner died. Investigating further, he discovers that he did not die. Actually he murdered the ex-wife and then had Li Sheng's father, a surgeon, fake his death certificate. He then buries the woman in his coffin and proceeds to use his mistress to collect on his life insurance policy by having her pose as the widow. Osgood then learns that the crook had the doctor change his appearance so he looked just like Osgood. He figures that he is next on the business partner's hit list and so kills him first. In the end, Weston kills Osgood. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

A young woman on a business trip travels by train from L.A. to San Francisco and finds herself implicated in a murder in this crime drama. The trouble begins as she retires to her sleeping compartment and is knocked unconscious. The next day she wakes up beside the dead body of the woman she had been sharing it with. A police detective arrests her and escorts her off the train. She escapes and is picked up by a passing motorist. He takes her to her home where she discovers another corpse, a friend of hers who was an alcoholic writer. She was letting him stay at her apartment while she was gone. The distraught woman tells the motorist all she knows. She then admits that she is a former mental patient. The motorist becomes suspicious and takes the woman back to her boss, who denies that he sent her on the business trip. Trouble ensues until they learn that the boss was behind it all. The first corpse was his wife. He put the body beside the girl so that so she would be suspected of being a homicidal maniac. The boss kidnaps his hapless employee and takes her to the mountains where he plans to kill her and make it look like a suicide. Fortunately, the motorist trails them and saves the day. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Vincent Sherman replaced an uncredited Robert Aldrich as director of this noirish and atypically pro-union film from the 1950's. Tulio Renata (Robert Loggia), an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, campaigns to unionize the employees of dress factory owner Walter Mitchell (Lee J. Cobb). Viscerally opposed to the union, Mitchell has hired Artie Ravidge (Richard Boone) to thwart Renata's efforts. In a complex oedipal sub-plot, Walter's son Alan (Kerwin Matthews) returns home and joins the firm following the suspicious death of his father's partner. Alan is more sympathetic to the union and attempts to persuade his father to sign a contract. Only after Ravidge kills Renata, and the elder Mitchell finally admits to himself that Ravidge is a thug who also killed his partner, does he agree to negotiate with the union. Before he can do so, however, he, too, is murdered by Ravidge's goons. It is then left to Alan, increasingly involved with Renata's widow Theresa (Gia Scala), to run the business, bring Ravidge to justice, and settle with the union. Similar to Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth (1954) in its overt support of the labor movement, The Garment Jungle is clearly a liberal, not a radical, film. Rather than advocate class warfare, it asserts that honest unions and decent capitalists can work together honorably. The film's real fire is found in the personal conflicts between Tulio and Theresa and Walter and Alan. Cobb, Loggia, and Scala perform with intense and multi-dimensional passion. Particularly noteworthy is Theresa's fury at her husband for taking excessive, and ultimately fatal, risks. ~ Steve Press, All Movie Guide

Though running 90 minutes, Road to Denver moves along at a much faster clip than most Republic "A" westerns. John Payne and Skip Homeier star as the Mayhew brothers, Bill and Sam. Tired of pulling his headstrong younger brother Sam out of his various scrapes, Bill heads off to Denver alone. Here he takes a job as a stagecoach driver for livery stable owner John Sutton (Ray Middleton). Meanwhile, Sam falls in with crooked saloonkeeper Jim Donovan (Lee J. Cobb), the secret head of an outlaw gang. Inevitably, Bill and Sam find themselves on opposite ends of the law--not to mention rivals for the affections of Sutton's daughter Elizabeth (Mona Freeman). Andy Clyde, who hadn't been seen in a big-budget film in years, steals the show as a believeably comic stablehand. Also featured is Lee Van Cleef in one of his then-typical "laconic bad guy" roles. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide