Jules Buck Movies

If you're looking for revisionism, Man Friday has it in abundance. Peter O'Toole stars as Daniel Defoe's fabled castaway Robinson Crusoe, while Richard Roundtree plays Crusoe's "man Friday". Crusoe makes it his mission in life to convert Friday to Christianity, but this pales in comparison to the marooned man's strenuous efforts to be accepted by Friday's fellow tribesmen. In fact, due to Friday's superior know-how, it is Crusoe who ends up the slave! This curious turn of events was the basis of Adrian Mitchell's stage play, which used the DeFoe work as a mere launching pad. When screened in Cannes, Man Friday included a bizarre ending in which the crazed Crusoe, failing to come up to Friday's exacting standards, kills himself (perhaps DeFoe rejected this notion back in 1712 because you couldn't have a dead narrator back then). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This film is a faithful rendition of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' last major poem, Under Milk Wood. It affectionately examines the day-to-day life of the inhabitants of a small Welsh fishing village. The poem is narrated by Richard Burton, himself a Welshman and a great aficionado of Thomas' work. The narrative framework comes through the character of Captain Cat (Peter O'Toole), a retired seaman who, though blind, knows the village and its inhabitants so well, it is as if he could see. The colorful characters of the village are delineated in short vignettes by a host of very distinguished British actors. Elizabeth Taylor, Burton's wife at the time, makes a brief appearance as Rosie Probert. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

A British officer must save the Barbary apes on Gibralter at all costs in this WW II farce. He does this, because it is believed that if the apes leave the rock, Britain will fall. The trouble begins when the only male ape dies. To save the rest, the officer and his side-kick sneak in to Zurich and steal an ape from a German circus. This results in a promotion for the officer, and now he and his partner are assigned to protect the ravens in the Tower of London. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Treasure of the Golden Condor is a Technicolor remake of 1942's Son of Fury; both films were based on the same novel by Edison Marshall. Cornel Wilde stars in the old Tyrone Power role as Jean-Paul, a Frenchman cheated of his birthright by his duplicitous uncle (George Macready). Retreating to South America with lovable reprobate MacDougal (Finlay Currie), Jean-Paul searches for buried treasure in the jungles of Guatemala. He also romances MacDougal's comely daughter Clara (Constance Smith). Eventually, Jean-Paul must bid Clara goodbye and return to France, there to settle accounts with his uncle. Clara prays for the day that Jean-Paul will come back for her and as the closing music swells . . . . ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

To filmmaker and war veteran Samuel Fuller, war is about survival. You either kill or be killed. His combat films are not about politics, adventure, or home. They are about killing and staying alive. Fixed Bayonets, Fuller's second study of the Korean War, focuses on a neophyte corporal, Denno (Richard Basehart), who is afraid to take a life. When his division is forced down Korea's snowbound mountains, Denno's unit stays behind to cover its retreat. Entrenched in an icy cave, Denno watches his superiors get picked off one by one until he must take command. He soon learns of what he is truly capable and what he will do to survive: Denno learns to kill. Filmed and released during the Korean War, Fixed Bayonets offered audiences no respite from the harrowing, difficult combat. It also introduced a new arena into modern American combat films -- freezing, icy terrain. The actors were so unaccustomed to the ice (that Fuller had actually frozen onto the set), that several men injured themselves within the first week of shooting. Many of the wounded in the film are simply ailing performers who Fuller kept on set so they could still receive their paychecks! ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, All Movie Guide

Young model Jean Dexter is knocked unconscious and drowned in her own bathtub in her Manhattan apartment, and a lot of jewelry that she supposedly owned is missing. The Naked City is actually about six days in the life of New York City that coincide with the murder and the subsequent investigation by Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Detective James Halloran (Don Taylor). The account of their work, and the workings of the New York City police department, is interspersed with brief vignettes about the life of the city around them, and, especially, the reaction of residents to the murder and the newspaper reports of the progress of the case. Muldoon and Halloran first must determine why she was killed, which may (or may not) have to do with how a woman with a minimal income came by the jewelry -- was it a love affair gone bad (and if so, with whom?), or something more complex and sinister? Retracing the final 18 months of the victim's life, their investigation reaches out to a mysterious "Philip Henderson" with whom she was supposedly linked romantically, and to Frank Niles (Howard Duff), who's a little too fast-and-loose with the truth when he doesn't have to be to make Muldoon comfortable; to make things more complicated, Muldoon determines that there were at least two men involved with the actual commission of the murder. The victim turns out to have led a wild life, filled with men and parties, and was tied up with several sordid figures. Their investigation carries them into the highest and lowest ends of New York's social strata to find the killer, and it turns out there are a lot of interlocking reasons why at least three men might've wanted her dead. In the process, we get glimpses of the private lives of the detectives, which was something new in movies at this time; in the midst of all of this activity, the writers set up a fascinating contrast, in adjacent scenes, between Halloran, his wife, and their young son looking toward the future, with the parents of the dead woman, looking back with bitter regret and recriminations -- no movie ever presented in more subtle fashion the contrast between the zeitgeist of the 1930s and that of the postwar era. The final chase on the Williamsburg Bridge is one of the classic pieces of suspense cinema, as the armed and desperate killer races up the walkway past children playing and adults strolling, while detectives close in on foot from behind and patrol cars come up from ahead, with crowded subways rolling past, and then into the superstructure of the bridge for a stand-off and shootout. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot future character leads Paul Ford, James Gregory, John Marley, Kathleen Freeman, and Arthur O'Connell as well as familiar faces Tom Pedi, John Randolph, Molly Picon, and Walter Burke in the supporting cast. Cinematographer William Daniels and editor Paul Weatherwax won Oscars for their work, but awards might just as easily have been presented to director Jules Dassin, writers Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, composers Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner, and, most notably, to producer/narrator Mark Hellinger, who intoned the closing monologue, which opens with one of the most famous tag lines in movie history: "There are eight million stories in the Naked City." ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

The Battle of San Pietro was Hollywood filmmaker John Huston's first effort for the U.S. War Department. Scripted by British novelist Eric Ambler, the film, largely comprised of on-the-spot combat footage, concentrates on a grueling battle in the Italian stronghold of San Pietro. The Germans, making full use of the town's natural fortifications, dug in and began defending their position by slaughtering hundreds of Allied troops. The 143rd infantry regiment lost 12 of its 16 tanks in the bloody battle. Huston and Ambler concentrate on the men of the 143rd, sparing the audience nothing in showing the bodies of the victims, intercut with shots of those same unfortunates, grinning and gabbing in the hours before their deaths. The filmmakers fully intended Battle of San Pietro as an anti-war film, but the military brass, concerned that the relatives of the dead soldiers would be subject to undue agony by so uncompromising a film, demanded that the picture be recut, toning down the stench of death and emphasizing the resilience of those who survived. Even in its truncated form, The Battle of San Pietro was strong stuff for a home-front audience weaned on the optimistic propaganda dispensed by newsreels and fictional Hollywood war pictures. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide