Louis Lettieri Movies

Based on the novel and play by Joseph Hayes, which in turn was inspired by an actual event, The Desperate Hours is the prototypical "family-trapped-by-criminals" drama. Escaped convicts Humphrey Bogart, Robert Middleton and Dewey Martin, seeking an appropriate hideout until they can make contact with their money supply, deliberately choose the suburban home of Fredric March and his family. The cold-blooded Bogart wants no trouble with the police, and he knows he can cower a family with children into cooperating with him. The convict orders March, his wife Martha Scott, and their children Richard Eyer and Mary Murphy, to go about their normal activities so as not to arouse suspicion. Young Eyer, upset that March won't lift a hand against Bogart, assumes that his father is a coward. The authorities are alerted when March, at Bogart's behest, draws money for the convict's getaway from the bank. Pushed to the breaking point, March begins subtly turning the tables on the convicts. Bogart's character in Desperate Hours was originally written for a much younger man, which explains why Paul Newman was able to play the part in the original Broadway production. The film was slated to co-star Bogart with his old pal Spencer Tracy, but this plan fell through when the two actors couldn't agree on who would get top billing. Desperate Hours was remade in 1991 with Mickey Rourke in the Bogart role. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Director Leslie Selander invests the Allied Artists "special" Fighter Attack with the same energy that he'd previously applied to his many westerns. Set during World War II, the film concerns an effort to destroy a Nazi supply depot. Though he's flown enough missions to be sent home, squadron leader Steve (Sterling Hayden) insists upon leading the offensive--and, on cue, is shot down behind enemy lines. Rescued by resistance fighters (Joy Page and J. Carroll Naish), Steve becomes the "inside man" for his squadron, laying the groundwork for the destruction of the German supplies. Fighter Attack was pleasingly filmed in the two-color Cinecolor process, as were many Monogram/Allied Artists "A"s of the period. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Previously filmed in 1938 with Edward G. Robinson in the lead, the Damon Runyon-Howard Lindsay stage farce A Slight Case of Murder was musicalized in 1952 as Stop, You're Killing Me. Broderick Crawford stars as Remy Marko, a soft-hearted Prohibition beer baron who turns honest when the 18th amendment is repealed in 1933. Trouble is, Marko's beer tastes awful and his business plummets. Compounding this headache, Marko's daughter Mary (Virginia Gibson) intends to wed Chance Whitelaw (Billy Hayes), a police officer from a wealthy family. Hoping to put up a respectable front for their prospective in-laws, Marko and his wife Nora (Claire Trevor) rent a fancy mansion-spa in Saratoga -- where, unbeknownst to the ex-bootlegger, four gangster types have been shot to death by a desperado named Innocent (Harry Morgan). The rest of the film finds Remy trying to dispose of the cumbersome corpses while avoiding the baleful stares of both his future in-laws and the police. Not quite as good as its 1938 predecessor, Stop You're Killing Me at least affords viewers the rare opportunity of hearing Broderick Crawford sing! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Humphrey Bogart plays Martin Ferguson, a prosecutor about to put Albert Mendoza (Everett Sloane), the head of a murder-for-hire ring, on trial. But the night before the trial, his key witness, Joe Rico (Ted de Corsia), dies in a fall out of the window of the room in which he's been guarded, part of an abortive escape attempt to keep from testifying. His case in shambles, Ferguson and detective Captain Nelson (Roy Roberts) try to piece the entire four-year investigation back together from square one, trying to find something that might give them another way to prosecute Mendoza. The main body of the movie is told in flashback, starting when a small-time hood named Duke Malloy (Michael Tolan, then billed as Lawrence Tolan) walks into a police station to turn himself in for killing his girlfriend -- and says that someone made him kill her. He babbles to the bewildered detectives about "hits" and "contracts" and men nicknamed Philadelphia, Big Babe, and Smiley. The body isn't found, but they arrest Malloy, who hangs himself in his cell. That dead end leads, almost by accident, to Philadelphia Tom Zaca (Jack Lambert), an asylum inmate who has to be put under sedation at the mention of Malloy's name. They find another suspect's body burning in his building's incinerator, and then Big Babe Lazick (Zero Mostel), a two-bit hood, hiding in a church in mortal fear of his life. He begins weaving a tale of a murder-by-contract ring and its head operator, Joe Rico, of a murder contract that Duke Malloy never filled on a girl who had to change her name, of mistaken identity and the murder of the girl's cab-driver father, and the connection between that and a murder that they both witnessed eight years earlier. In the midst of all of those interlocking stories (spread across ten years), there's something Ferguson missed -- when he had Rico to testify -- that he has to sort out from the reams of testimony and evidence, and he has to figure it out before Mendoza does, or lose the last witness he has. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

A late entry in Columbia's seemingly endless Durango Kid Western series, Cyclone Fury was augmented with a hefty dose of stock footage from an earlier Durango effort, Galloping Thunder (1946), footage that included sidekick Smiley Burnette warbling "Hear the Wind (Singing a Cowboy Song)" accompanied by Merle Travis and his Bronco Busters. The story -- Durango's effort to deliver horses to the U.S. Cavalry -- was not much but the film benefited from an unusually villainous turn by Clayton Moore, on salary strike from his Lone Ranger television show. Charles Starrett, as the Robin Hood-like Durango, was doubled in the stock footage by Jock Mahoney and supported in the new scenes by child actor Louis Lettieri. The latter went on to play Allan Lane's young sidekick, Little Beaver, in a failed Red Ryder television pilot. Former Durango series director Fred F. Sears, who directed Galloping Thunder, turned up in a supporting role this time around. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi