James Darren Movies

This tense tale of waterfront corruption was clearly inspired by the success of On the Waterfront; there's even a character named Joe Brindo, played by Michael Granger. Newcomer James Darren plays Jimmy Smigelski, a budding juvenile delinquent who is hired as a "muscle man" for corrupt union leader Brindo. Kicked out of his house by his father, who despises all forms of gangsterism, Smigelski begins regarding Brindo as a surrogate dad. Thus, it takes a lot out of him when Jimmy discovers that his father-figure is a no-good louse. Agreeing to testify before an investigating committee, Jimmy is marked for death by his former benefactor. Once again, producer Sam Katzman uses a timely topic and lurid title to turn a quick profit. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this frantic service comedy, a group of bored-to-tears American GI's stationed at a medical facility in France would like nothing more than to have a big party to let off steam -- except for the possibility of having a big party with some of the nurses they work with. However, it seems that the nurses are officers and the GI's are enlisted men, which means the Army forbids them to socialize, and Capt. Locke (Ernie Kovacs), the camp's Commanding Officer, is not a man to bend the rules. But Private Hogan (Jack Lemmon) is not the sort of guy to let the rules get in the way of a good time, and with the help of Yancy Skibo (Mickey Rooney), a sergeant with a talent for scaring up needed supplies, and Mme. LaFour (Jeanne Manet), a local hotel manager with a soft spot for making money off American servicemen, Hogan hatches a plan to make his dream a reality. Hogan's lady friend, Lt. Betty Bixby (Kathryn Grant), isn't quite as convinced as her beau on the potential success of this scheme. Operation Mad Ball was the first directorial effort from former actor Richard Quine, and afforded Jack Lemmon his first starring role; Blake Edwards also contributed to the screenplay. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The highly variable Tab Hunter delivers his best film performance in the grim western Gunman's Walk. Hunter plays Ed Hackett, the son of gunslinger-turned-land baron Lee Hackett (Van Heflin). Out of respect (and fear) of his father, the hotheaded Ed is given a wide berth by the resentful townsfolk. The elder Hackett doesn't make things any better when he tacitly approves of Ed's violent behavior, all the while giving short shrift to his law-abiding younger son Davy (James Darren). Inevitably, Ed goes one step too far, forcing his father to make a devastating decision. Kathryn Grant, future wife of Bing Crosby, registers well as the half-breed girl with whom Davy falls in love. Gunman's Walk is seen at a disadvantage on television; director Phil Karlson's inventive use of the CinemaScope lens will be largely lost on a 22-inch screen. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sal Mineo, who'd previously registered well as the lead in the TV drama Drummer Man, essays a strikingly similar role in The Gene Krupa Story. The film details Krupa's troubled home life: (he wanted to be a musician; his father wanted him to become a priest), his rise to fame as drummer for the Benny Goodman orchestra, his years on top as a bandleader, and his ongoing problems with drug abuse. A fictional romantic subplot is grafted onto the proceeding involving clearly defined "good" and "bad" girls Ethel Maguire (Susan Kohner) and Dorissa Dinelli (Susan Oliver). Yvonne Craig has an entertaining scene as an anachronistically garbed good-time girl. Craig would later recall that, at the time of shooting The Gene Krupa Story, she weighed more than Sal Mineo, and that in the scene where he's required to lift her off the floor, she virtually had to lift him. Mineo, a drummer of some accomplishment, convincingly wields the sticks during the musical highlights, though the trickier drum solos were dubbed in by Gene Krupa himself. Real-life recording stars Anita O'Day, Red Nichols, Bobby Troup and Shelley Manne make cameo appearances. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Good actors help raise the level of this downbeat drama of drugs and survival by Philip Leacock. The story is set in Chicago's notorious South side and is based on Willard Motley's novel of a mother struggling to raise her son "right" in spite of the odds against her. Nellie (Shelley Winters) herself is battling her dependency on drugs, battling poverty after her husband was executed for crimes he committed, and also fighting to keep her son Nick (James Darren) from following in his father's footsteps. Nick also wants to rise above his environment but even with the help of some friends, the boy and his mother are up against very tough odds. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The guns of Navarone are huge Nazi cannons, installed on an Aegean island behind enemy lines. Anthony Quayle is the officer assigned by the British to lead a task force to put the guns out of commission. When Quayle is injured, the mission winds up in the relatively inexperienced hands of Gregory Peck. There's little love lost between Peck, explosives expert David Niven and Greek patriot Anthony Quinn, especially when it becomes known that there's a traitor in their midst. Resistance leader Irene Papas weeds out the traitor, but there's still those guns to take care of. Filmed on location in Rhodes and distinguished by Oscar-winning special effects, Guns of Navarone (based on Alistair MacLean's best-seller was a major box-office hit of 1961; less successful was the pared-down 1977 sequel, Force Ten From Navarone. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Charlton Heston, portraying swaggering bigot land-baron Richard "King" Howland on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, does a spit take when his sister Sloan (Yvette Mimieux) announces that she plans to marry Paul Kahana, a 100% native Hawaiian (played by 100% native Philadelphian James Darren). But Howland, in the meantime, is having a torrid affair with Mei Chen (France Nuyen). During Sloan and Paul's engagement party, Mei Chen's brother comes at Howland with a knife, but Paul intercedes and is killed. Sloan, bitter at Howland for Paul's death, runs off to Honolulu, where she is taken in by Paul's brother Dean (George Chakiris) and his family. Meanwhile, Mei Chen gives birth to Howland's child but dies during childbirth. Howland, ever the rabid racist, refuses to accept the child and Sloan takes it upon herself to care for it. After an angry fight with Sloan and Dean, Howland is confronted with a personal dilemma -- whether to continue on with his closed-minded ways or to welcome his newborn son into his family. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In this beach movie, a group of teenagers hang out at the Silver Palms everyday after school. Because things can get quite raucous in the club, the protagonist's grandfather wants to shut it down. When the clever kids discover that grandpa used to be a bootlegger, they blackmail him into keeping it open. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this remake of Johnny Dark (1954) an ex-GI and college dropout would rather play with cars than anything else until he meets the lovely Eady with whom he falls passionately in love. They get engaged and go to San Francisco where he begins working on building a prototype car for a millionaire. When the arrogant young man ignores the millionaire's advice and destroys the car, he is immediately fired. The young man, determined to make his engine work, manages to scare up enough cash to get his engine back from the millionaire. He then goes on to enter the Tri-State Endurance Race. After it is all over, the young fellow finds that he has become a serious young man. He then marries his girl, and goes back to college. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this spaghetti western, an undercover gunslinger accidently gets caught in a feud between two families. One of them forces him into a showdown and he kills him. He then must escape from the wrathful family. He is assisted by an old man, who helps him slaughter the rest of the clan. In the end, he takes off with a daughter from the other family. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this sci-fi drama, part of the Time Tunnel TV series, a female scientist is abducted from the Time Tunnel projects' underground complex by an alien time traveler. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The Time Tunnel tells the story of Tony Newman and Doug Philips, two scientists who find themselves lost in time. At the outset of the series, as depicted in the first episode ("Rendezvous With Yesterday") both men are part of a top secret government project, Project Tic-Toc, in the year 1968 (the series was produced in 1966, when that seemed like the "far future"). Project Tic-Toc is devised to open a time portal which would allow people and machines to move through time in the same way that the US space program projected them into space. But it is massively expensive and has thusfar yielded what one inquisitive US Senator, Leroy Clark (Gary Merrill), believes are minimal results. On a visit to the top secret desert base where the Time Tunnel has been built, he reveals that he intends to recommend that the project be shut down. Desperate not to see the work of years abandoned, Dr. Tony Newman (James Darren) takes it upon himself to activate the Time Tunnel and project himself backward in time. He is successful in his gamble, and finds himself alive in the year 1912 -- aboard the Titanic on her doomed maiden voyage. Back in 1968, the team operating the Time Tunnel -- General Heywood Kirk (Whit Bissell), Dr. Anne McGregor (Lee Merriweather), Dr. Raymond Swain (John Zaremba), and Dr. Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert)-- find that they can track Tony, and even observe where he is and what is happening to him, but they can't get him back; and he will almost certainly die aboard the doomed ocean liner, especially as, having realized where he is, and having tried to warn the captain (Michael Rennie), he has been locked in the ship's brig as an apparent lunatic. The only thing they can do is send someone back to help him, and that falls to Doug Phillips, but he is equally unsuccessful in convincing the captain of the threat to the ship from icebergs, or only barely more effective at rescuing Tony from his cell -- and as they discover, the Time Tunnel cannot pull them back to 1968. The two manage to survive, plucked out of time and space at the last possible moment, but now they are lost in the infinity of time. The series, 30 episodes in all, presented stories in which Doug and Tony find themselves in Paris during the Reign of Terror, at Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Japanese attack, at the Alamo just prior to the final Mexican assault on the fort, the impending explosion of Krakatoa, and so on; it was one of the conceits of the series that Doug and Tony always seem to land in a place and at a time of some historical significance (fans of the series do joke about the notion that in one episode, they should have appeared at a time and in a place in which nothing and no one of any historical significance was there to interact with). The Time Tunnel's control over their movements through time and space was problematic, at best, rare instances in which they could actually be directed, to a degree, on specific missions, juxtaposed with situations in which they were scarcely under any control in terms of time travel, and other moments where the operation of the Time Tunnel threatened their lives. Amid the more routine stories in which the two heroes are placed at pivotal moments in history were a smaller, more interesting body of scripts, in which they are moved into the future -- in the second episode, "One Way To the Moon", Tony and Doug find themselves 10 years in their own future, aboard the first manned flight to Mars; in another, they are trapped in a New England town that is under siege from alien invaders. There were also a tiny handful of stories that mixed horror and fantasy with science fiction, in which Merlin the magician forces the Time Tunnel personnel to aid the young future King Arthur; and one tale in which the vengeful spirit of the Emperor Nero manifests itself in World War I Italy, seeking revenge against the descendant of General Galba, that man who deposed him as ruler of Rome. The Time Tunnel was an attempt by producer Irwin Allen to take the concept behind Lost In Space and apply it to fourth dimensional travel. Its existence and chances for success were predicated on the availability of the 20th Century-Fox film library, and his ability to use clips from any number of historical films shot by the studio (and not just films shot in color -- Time Tunnel was the first Irwin Allen series to go into production in color, but even clips from the black-and-white 1953 film Titanic were used successfully in the first episode, tinted and projected through the Time Tunnel itself. The problem with the show lay in its very concept, however -- audiences may not have known what to expect each week, which can be a virtue; but it can also be a stretch, especially as there were no especially charismatic characters or actors (with the possible exception of Lee Meriwether) in the cast -- Darren and Colbert were handsome enough, but the nature of the stories and scripts prevented anything resembling character development in most of the episodes (the one exception was "The Day The Sky Fell In", in which Tony meets his own father shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor in which the man was listed as missing-in-action). The other problem with the series is that many of the costumes and aliens seemed to be leftovers from producer Irwin Allen's other two science fiction series, Lost In Space and Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea -- few could overlook the hand-me-down nature of the props and sets. Still, the series did attract enough viewership to initially get renewed for a second season, though for reasons unclear at this time, that renewal was subsequently rescinded, limiting the program to a single season of 30 episodes. Some viewers, seeing the final episode on the original run of the series lead back to previews of the first episode, interpreted that as indicating that the two heroes had ended up in the time-loop, repeating the same cycle of adventures. According to those involved with the series, however, a handful of second season scripts were written and ready to shoot, with others in the pipeline when the plug was pulled on the program. Those close to the series also say that if there had been a second season, it would have depicted the Project Tic-Toc scientists as gaining more control over the time-travel process, if not the ability to return Tony and Doug home, which would have increased the diversity of stories that could be told. The series did entertain some interesting ideas concerning time paradoxes, though it did avoid the idea that the two heroes could do anything to change already occurred events. Indeed, it often seemed as though Doug and Tony's presence only helped along events to occur in the manner in which we knew them -- this notion was picked up for the short-lived 1980's series Voyagers. More impressive than anything else about this series was the Time Tunnel itself, a huge device that seemed to go back to infinity. And in one of the more intriguing episodes, viewers got double their money's worth -- in "Secret Weapon", are actually sent on a mission of sorts to investigate a top secret enemy project and encounter an early precursor to the Time Tunnel, in Eastern Europe a decade prior to the development of their own time travel apparatus. Like most of Irwin Allen's projects of this period, The Time Tunnel was a very good idea that the producers never had a chance to explore to its (of their) best advantage. There were two attempts to revive the series, both unsuccessful, but a DVD release of the complete run of the show (with the unaired pilot) did prove popular, and airings of the series on the Sci-Fi Channel in the 1990's were also well-received. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide