Alfred Zeisler Movies

James Cagney signed on to play Captain Flagg in 20th Century Fox's 1952 remake of the 1926 classic What Price Glory after being told that the old property was being converted into a musical. By the time Cagney learned that Fox had no intention of adding songs and dances to the venerable Maxwell Anderson/Laurence Stallings stage piece, it was too late to pull out, so he decided to grin (sometimes) and bear it. Under the direction of John Ford, the potent anti-war message of the original play is blunted, while the drunken rowdiness of Capt. Flagg and his friendly enemy Sergeant Quirt (Dan Dailey) was played for all it was worth and then some. Much of the brawling is over the affections of vivacious barmaid Charmaine, played by Corinne Calvet. Contrasting the rough-hewn hijinks of Flagg, Quirt and their fellow Marines on the fields and in the villages of World War I-era France is the doomed romance between private Robert Wagner and French lass Marisa Pavan. (Why does Wagner get to sing, while Cagney and Dailey do not?) Barry Norton, who played Wagner's role in the original What Price Glory? appears in the remake as a priest. Norton is unbilled, as are such familiar faces as Harry Morgan, Paul Fix, Henry Kulky, and John Ford "regulars" Dan Borzage and Bill Henry. Falling well short of classic status, the Technicolor remake of What Price Glory? is kept alive by the marvelous roughneck rapport between James Cagney and Dan Dailey. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Government agent Richard Hendricks (Michael O'Shea) goes undercover to get goods on a gang responsible for dispensing illegal paroles. Posing as a prisoner, Hendricks links up with the gang's inside man, Barney Rodescu (Turhan Bey). As often happens in real life, several pillars of society are getting rich by manipulating the lives of others. The plot is not always logical, but audience involvement is sustained every step of the way. Parole Inc was one of the "in-between" pictures -- not quite a "B", not expensive enough for "A" -- produced by young-and-hungry Eagle Lion studios in the late 1940s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Peter Cookson, Monogram's answer to Jimmy Stewart, stars in Fear, also known as Black Tower Cookson plays a medical student who becomes involved in a murder. Anne Gwynne is the girl who doesn't completely trust Cookson, but helps him out anyway. Also appearing as one of those oh-too-helpful types is Warren William, who died in 1948, suggested that perhaps Black Tower was lensed a few years before its official 1950 release date. Some sources list Black Tower as a PRC production; this is possible, though PRC was defunct by 1950. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Though the filmmakers claimed they were writing a biography of Nazi minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, this film is actually highly fictionalized and filled with patriotic propaganda. The story attempts to explain Goebbels' madness, blaming it on a love affair gone awry when he was a young aspiring playwright. The love in question was a young actress who spurns him. Goebbels cannot bear the rejection and swears that he will spend his life getting revenge upon her and those around her. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this British gangster movie, a Chicago gang goes to cool their heels in London. There they try to overtake the town. Meanwhile the mob boss searches for the perfect job. He convinces a millionaire, the owner of a department store, to help his gang rob the store blind. The plot fails and the gangsters battle it out with the bobbies. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The German Gold predicts the postwar harnessing of atomic energy for the purposes of scientific progress (funny how the Germans couldn't put together a working A-bomb in World War II). Hans Albers plays the assistant of Friedrich Kayssler, a modern-day alchemist devoted to finding a method of changing lead into gold. Kayssler constructs a gigantic atomic reactor for that purpose, but when crass commercialism rears its ugly head, the two idealists destroy their invention. Gold was filmed simultaneously in a French-language version, with the two leads intact but with many of the supporting actors shifting their roles around. Generous portions of Gold stock footage were utilized in the 1953 American sci-fier The Magnetic Monster. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Coup de Feu a L'Aube was the simultaneously filmed French-language version of the German crime caper Schuss im Morgengrauen (The Shot at Dawn). Both films were based on The Woman and the Emerald, a play by Harry Jenkins. The protagonists are a gang of jewel thieves, who have been successfully able to cover their tracks for a long time. Alas, their winning streak comes to a sudden screeching halt when one of their number makes the mistake of murdering a police detective. The essential difference between the French and German versions is that the police officers depicted on-screen wear different costumes. Otherwise, all the exterior shots, crowd scenes and action highlights in Schuss im Morgengrauen were re-cycled for Coup de Feu a L'Aube. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The comic tenor of this German slapsticker can be assessed by its English-language title, His Grounds for Divorce. The protagonists, a long-married couple, wish to divorce, but they lack the grounds to do so. It is arranged for the husband to be accused of infidelity with a beautiful professional co-respondent. Thanks to the capriciousness of the German legal system, the husband never meets the woman with whom he is supposed to have "fooled around" until after the divorce is granted, by which time the girl is several hundred Deutschmarks richer. Unaware of each other's true identities, the ex-husband and the co-respondent fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after -- maybe! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The UFA movie studios are the setting for this intricate murder mystery. Frequent Fritz Lang leading lady Gerda Maurus stars as The Film Diva (that's how she's billed), who is the primary suspect when a murder is committed on the set of her latest epic. The suspects include "The Leading Role" (Harry Frank), "The Production Manager" (Paul Kemp) and "The Sound Master" (Frederick Franz Stampe). Surprisingly, the identity of the killer is so well hidden that it genuinely takes the audience by surprise -- something that didn't always happen in American whodunits of the era. According to contemporary observers, The Shot in the Talker Studio painted a remarkably accurate portrayal of the German moviemaking process (though one hopes that murder was not always part of that process!) ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide