George Chandler Movies

David O. Selznick's first production since 1940's Rebecca, Since You Went Away, based on Margaret Buell Wilder's bestselling novel, is a long but rewarding paean to the World War 2 "home front". Claudette Colbert plays the wife of a businessman who, though well past draft age, volunteered to serve his country as an officer (though the husband is never seen, he is "played"-via a photograph-by Neil Hamilton). Fighting back her own fears and anxieties, Colbert does her best to maintain a normal, stable household for the sake of her growing daughters Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple. She is offered moral support by cynical-but-kindly boarder Monty Woolley, by maid Hattie McDaniel (who willing foregoes her salary "for the duration") and by Navy man and friend-of-the-family Joseph Cotten, whose relationship with Claudette remains staunchly platonic. The harsh realities of war hit home several times throughout the film, first when it seems as though Colbert's husband is missing in action, and later when Jennifer's young boyfriend, GI Robert Walker, is killed in combat. From the vantage point of the 1990s, it is easy to see why Since You Went Away scored with its wartime audiences. Though the leading characters are slightly more financially secure than most of the moviegoers of 1944, the various vignettes presented throughout-complaints about rationing and priorities, shoulder-to-shoulder sacrifices, the weekly escape to the local movie house, tender partings, joyous reunions, the returning wounded, the dreaded wire from the war department-all had the ring of truth and topicality. Even today, the film's emotional highlights, particularly the much-imitated farewell scene at the railroad station, are sufficient to bring tears to the eyes of the most jaded viewer. Enhancing the film's heartstring tugging tenfold is Max Steiner's Oscar-winning musical score. If you can remain objective while watching Since You Went Away (it isn't easy), see if you can spot Ruth Roman, Guy Madison and John Derek, making their screen debuts in microscopic roles ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Previously filmed as a so-so Marx Brothers vehicle in 1938, the John Murray-Alan Boretz Broadway hit Room Service was effectively musicalized in 1944 as Step Lively. The plot remains intact: Fly-by-night theatrical producer Gordon Miller (Groucho Marx in the 1938 film, George Murphy in the remake) struggles to keep his production and cast together, despite severe deficiencies in the money department. Hotel-chain supervisor Wagner (Adolphe Menjou) threatens to throw Miller and his actors off the premises, an eventuality Miller hopes to forestall until he can obtain $50,000 from a wealthy backer. Meanwhile, Glen Davis (Frank Sinatra), the author of Miller's play, shows up to see how things are going. Before long, Glen is swept up in a desperate plot hatched by Miller and his underlings Binion (Wally Brown) and Harry (Alan Carney) to stay in the hotel despite Wagner's efforts to oust them. Caught in the middle are hapless hotel manager Gribble (Walter Slezak), potential backer Jenkins (Eugene Pallette), Glen's sweetheart Miss Abboli (Anne Jeffreys) and Miller's leading lady Christine (Gloria DeHaven). This being a musical, the outcome hinges on Glen's hitherto untapped singing ability, which might save the day if he overcomes a bout of psychosomatic laryngitis. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this wartime espionage drama, Nazis open up a covert operation in the US. Outwardly it is a high-class dress shop, but inside it is really a counterfeiting operation in which the leader and his henchman make fake savings stamps in the hope of busting the morale of the good clients who spend their precious money to get the bonus stamps and suddenly discover they are worthless. Eventually some of the Nazi's customers begin to get suspicious. As a result they are murdered and used as mannequins in the store's window displays. Fortunately a sharp eyed reporter and a clever district attorney are able to find enough evidence to expose the evil-doers. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Barbara Stanwyck shines in her second portrayal of a showgirl in less than two years (the first was in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire in 1941). In Lady of Burlesque -- which, at times, has a Hawksian edge to the dialogue -- she portrays Dixie Daisy, a striptease artist at a Broadway theater in New York at the end of the 1930s. In the course of fending off the unwanted advances of brash comic Biff Brannigan (Michael O'Shea), with whom she is teamed in several numbers, and staying clear of the dressing room feuds of her fellow dancers -- including a very nasty dispute between Dolly Baxter (Gloria Dickson) and Lolita La Verne (Victoria Faust) -- she finds herself up to her neck in trouble when one of the women is found strangled with her own G-string. The police don't know what to make of it, especially as the victim was already dying of a fatal dose of poison, which means that there are two murderers somewhere in the theater; and when a second woman turns up strangled inside a prop that Dixie was supposed to be hiding in onstage, she looks like a good suspect. Between the backstage comedy-drama, and the songs, dances, and on-stage comic routines, with the police breathing down both their necks at different times, Dixie and Biff manage to solve the mystery and find each other in this briskly paced, funny, yet amazingly gritty comedy-thriller. Lady of Burlesque was allowed to fall out of copyright in 1971, and since then it was seen in substandard editions until the May 2001 DVD release from Image Entertainment. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Deanna Durbin is all grown up in Hers to Hold, the unofficial sequel to her "Three Smart Girls" films of the 1930s. Durbin plays Penelope Craig, the starry-eyed daughter of wealthy Judson and Dorothy Craig (Charles Winninger, Nella Walker). Developing a crush on much-older playboy Bill Morley (Joseph Cotton), Penelope stops at nothing to land the elusive Morley as her husband. Highlights include Durbin's renditions of "Begin the Beguine" and the "Seguidilla" from Carmen, and a captivating sequence that includes highlights from Durbin's earlier films, presented as home movies! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This now-classic indictment of mob rule was a pet project of both star Henry Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom agreed to work on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for this film. After a hard winter on the range, cowboys Gil Carter (Fonda) and Art Croft (Harry Morgan) ride into a fleabitten small town for a drink. Within minutes, they get mixed up in a barroom brawl, which earns them the animosity of the locals. By and by, word reaches town that a local rancher has been killed by rustlers. With the sheriff out of town, a lynch mob is formed under the leadership of Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), a former Confederate officer who hopes to recapture past glories. Worried that they'll be strung up, Carter and Croft reluctantly join the mob and head out of town. In the dark of night, the group comes across three sleeping transients: a farmer named Martin (Dana Andrews), a Mexican (Anthony Quinn), and a senile old man (Francis Ford). The fact that Martin carries no bill of sale written by the so-called murder victim is evidence enough for Tetley to demand that the three men be hanged on the spot. Carter knows that this is a gross miscarriage of justice, but he's helpless to intervene. Resolving himself to his fate, Martin gives Carter a letter to deliver to his wife. The three unfortunates die at the end of the rope, and the mob rides off, only to discover that there never was a murder of any kind. Based on a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident is not so much a western as a gothic melodrama, with deep, looming shadows and atmospheric underlighting worthy of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Though the film lost a fortune at the box office (a fact that Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck never tired of pointing out to Fonda and Wellman), it gains in stature with each passing year. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In her seventh outing as irrepressible vaudeville entertainer Maisie Revere, Ann Sothern aided the war effort by working the swing shift in an airplane factory. Taking in a seemingly suicidal co-worker, Iris (Jean Rogers), Maisie can only watch as the girl steals her beau, handsome pilot James McLaughlin (James Craig). Promising to be faithful to James, who is going away on a training course, Iris promptly flirts with everyone in pants, much to chaperone Maisie's chagrin. When Maisie catches the selfish Iris in the middle of staging yet another "suicide," the vaudeville trouper turned everyone's favorite riveter threatens to spill the beans to Lieutenant James. In retaliation, Iris accuses Maisie of spying for the Nazis but everything is cleared up before the fadeout. MGM had at first assigned the male lead to newcomer Jim Davis, but he proved too inexperienced and the role eventually went to Craig, the studio's all-purpose Clark Gable lookalike. (As a consolation, Davis played a G.I. instead.) Starlet Jean Rogers, formerly Dale Arden in Flash Gordon (1936), does surprisingly well in her unsympathetic part and, doubled only partially by Jacqueline Wiere, performs a funny acrobatic number with the Wiere Brothers. Sothern leads a rousing chorus of the morale-boosting "There's a Girl Behind the Boy Behind the Gun" and remains her usual delightful self throughout what is one of MGM's better wartime potboilers. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

For the benefit of those who came in late, the John Robert Powers modelling agency was at one time the most famous and powerful enterprise of its kind in New York City. Acknowledging this prominence is the 1942 musical comedy The Powers Girl, with Anne Shirley and Carole Landis starring as sisters Ellen and Kay Evans, who aspire to become high-profile models. Photographer Jimmy Hendricks (George Murphy) takes a fancy to the girls, making a top model out of Kay (Landis) -- but falling deeply and truly in love with Ellen (Shirley). At base, the film is an excuse to show off as many lovely, undraped "Powers Girls" as possible (including future Republic serial heroine Linda Stirling) and to showcase such musical talent as Dennis Day and Benny Goodman's Orchestra. And from time to time, John Robert Powers himself shows up in the person of Alan Mowbray. The Powers Girl was released in Great Britain as Hello Beautiful. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

By Monogram standards, the cast of Isle of Missing Men was Academy Award calibre. John Howard and Gilbert Roland head a group of prisoners who try to escape from an island prison colony. Leading lady Helen Gilbert is willing to wait for her beloved Howard, but looks askance when he participates in the breakout. As was customary in such films, several of the more contentious prisoners are redeemed by sacrificing their lives for the sake of others. Alan Mobray, Bradley Page and George Chandler co-star in this adaptation of Gina Kaus and Ladislas Fodor's White Lady, while the direction is in the hands of German pioneer filmmaker Richard Oswald. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Bob Hope's first starring vehicle for producer Sam Goldwyn borrows the title of Bob's 1942 autobiography They Got Me Covered and very little else. Co-scripted by Leonard Q. Ross (aka Leo Rosten), Leonard Spigelgass and Harry Kurnitz (among many others!), the film casts Hope as Robert Kittredge, the Moscow correspondent for a major American news service, who is fired when he neglects to file a report about Hitler's invasion of Russia. Hoping to get back in the good graces of his boss Norman Mason (Donald MacBride), Kittredge steals another reporter's story about a Nazi spy ring operating in New York. Though officially a comedy, the film is curiously unfunny at times, with Hope playing an unsympathetic, unappealing character who'll step on anyone -- including his long-suffering sweetheart (Dorothy Lamour) and a hysterical kidnap victim (Phyllis Povah) -- to get ahead. Otto Preminger is funnier (perhaps intentionally) as the head Nazi. A few good gags notwithstanding, They Got Me Covered is nowhere near as satisfying as Hope's second Goldwyn effort, The Princess and the Pirate. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This final entry in 20th Century-Fox's "Charlie Chan" series is set in a huge mansion, smack-dab in the middle of the Mojave desert. When snoopy weekend guest Professor Gleason (Lucien Littlefield) is murdered, every member of the household falls under suspicion-none more so than Mr. Manderly (Douglass Dumbrille), the surly and highly secretive master of the household. Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) and number two son Jimmy (Sen Yung) stumble into this nest of vipers and quickly get to work trying to unravel the mystery, which involves a collection of priceless artifacts and an old-fashioned torture chamber. An excellent series entry, Castle in the Desert would have been a worthy screen finale for the inscrutable Mr. Chan; alas, the character would be revived two years later in a much inferior series at Monogram. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A solid Jonathan Latimer screenplay is one of the "plusses" of the medium-budget mystery A Night in New Orleans. Preston S. Foster plays police lieutenant Steve Abbott, at present engrossed in a baffling murder case. As he pieces the clues together, Abbott comes to the sobering conclusion that his own wife Ethel (Patricia Morrison) may be intimately involved in the murder. It gets worse: soon Abbott himself is accused of the crime. The film is full of clever little touches, notably a scene in which the heroine is seen reading a book written by none other than Jonathan Latimer! Featured in the cast of A Night in New Orleans is Ginger Rogers' former stand-in Jean Phillips, whom Paramount briefly groomed for stardom in the early 1940s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on the Ben Hecht/Charlie McArthur play Chicago, Roxie Hart is a short-but-sweet satire of highly publicized court trials. Ginger Rogers plays showgirl Roxie Hart, whose no-good husband kills a man and insists that Roxie take the blame, since juries seldom send a woman to the chair. She agrees, figuring that the publicity will be beneficial to her career. Roxie's case is taken by grandstanding attorney Adolphe Menjou, who regards the sacred halls of justice as his own three-ring circus. George Montgomery plays the reporter covering the trial, who falls in love with Roxie and eventually marries her after she dumps her cowardly hubby. Roxie Hart plays fast and loose with legal ethics, but is no less hilarious because of it. Some of the best moments belong to Iris Adrian, as an imprisoned "Bonnie Parker"-type killer who's jealous that Roxie is stealing all the headlines. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide