Don DeFore Movies

Unlike the typical Bob Hope and Lucille Ball vehicles, The Facts of Life is essentially a domestic drama with comic undertones. Hope is married to Ruth Hussey, while Ball is the wife of Don DeFore. All four are old friends, who for many years have taken each other for granted. A series of unforeseen circumstances requires Hope and Ball to spend a great deal of time together without their spouses, and as a result they fall in love. Though the affair is never consummated, Hope and Ball are prepared to run off together, but in the end they decide that adultery at their age just isn't worth the trouble. Long unavailable for viewing due to legal tangles, The Facts of Life has gained legendary status as one of the few Bob Hope films of the 1960s to concentrate on character development rather than silly one-liners. Recent viewings have revealed that, though a far more mature work than one might expect from Hope or Ball, Facts of Life still relies to a great extent on the sort of TV sitcom material that the fans of the two stars had come to expect by 1960. Still, the film was considered offbeat enough to warrant an Oscar nomination for best screenplay (by longtime Hope associates Norman Panama and Melvin Frank). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Battle Hymn was inspired by the true story of American minister Dean Hess, played here with rare sensitivity by Rock Hudson. A bomber pilot during World War II, Hess inadvertently releases a bomb which destroys a German orphanage. Tortured by guilt, Hess relocates in Korea after the war to offer his services as a missionary. Combining the best elements of Christianity and Eastern spiritualism, Hess establishes a large home for orphans. The preacher's efforts are threatened when the Korean "police action" breaks out in 1950. Battle Hymn was one of several collaborations between Rock Hudson and director Douglas Sirk--though Sirk felt that Robert Stack would have been better suited to the role of Rev. Hess. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

She's Working Her Way Through College is a completely depoliticized remake of the liberal-minded comedy The Male Animal (1942). Virginia Mayo plays an exotic dancer, Angela Gardner, who decides to improve her mind; she enrolls in a college where Professor John Palmer (Ronald Reagan) teaches English. In between Angela's lively musical numbers, the film concentrates on an old rivalry between the bookish Palmer and onetime college football jock Shep Slade (Don DeFore, who'd played a bit in The Male Animal). When the college trustees oppose Angela's presence on campus, Palmer staunchly defends her right to an education. In the original Male Animal, the climactic scene involved a controversial public reading of a letter by anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti; in She's Working Her Way Through College, Palmer stands up at a public assembly to convince the populace that exotic dancers have the same rights as anyone else. Of course, Ronald Reagan could take a political stance if he wanted to...but not in this film. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Although The Stooge had been filmed right after Martin and Lewis' Sailor Beware, the film was temporarily shelved so that the team could continue their winning streak of military comedies with Jumping Jacks. This time, Dean Martin plays Chick Allen, a paratrooper-in-training whose commanding officer intends to do away with all camp variety shows. In desperation, Chick sends for his old nightclub partner Hap Smith (Jerry Lewis) to change the CO's mind. In order to gain entry to the military base, Hap is forced to pose as a GI, and thus the plot proper gets under way. Most of the "awkward squad" gags are straight out of Abbott and Costello, with Lewis messing up at each and every turn while Martin lags behind for damage control. The film concludes with a routine from Abbot and Costello's Keep 'Em Flying, wherein Martin and Lewis bail out from a plane in flight, with one parachute between them. Robert Strauss repeats his Sailor Beware duties as Lewis' irascible topkick, while nominal leading lady Mona Freeman does practically nothing magnificently. Dean's songs include the deathless "Do the Parachute Jump". ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The title character (Paul Douglas) is a pro football player of the early 1940s at the end of his career. Douglas is offered a coaching job, but he stubbornly turns it down in hopes of making a comeback. Day after day he sits in his den watching movies of his past gridiron triumph, much to the dismay of his wife (Joan Bennett). When she chews him out for living in the past, Douglas walks out and takes up with a younger woman (Linda Darnell). To prove that he's still in top shape, Douglas takes a job as a professional wrestler. His new girl friend, realizing that Douglas is miserable without his wife, conspires with the other woman to get Douglas back on his old team. The wartime need for warm bodies allows Douglas a few more years in football, but eventually he gets wise to himself and takes the coaching job. Ironically, Guy Who Came Back star Paul Douglas was in his youth an football pro who retired from active play to become a sports announcer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In the tradition of 20th Century Fox's semi-documentary "Now it can be told" films, Monogram Picture's "A" division Allied Artists came up with Southside 1-1000. The U.S. Secret Service goes after a gang of counterfeiters, whose engraver (Morris Ankrum) has covertly constructed his plates while in prison. A federal agent (Don DeFore) poses as the counterfeiters' contact man in order to purchase enough bills to incriminate the gang. The final fight-to-the-death scene was filmed aboard Los Angeles' "Angel's Flight," a cable-car service dangling 40 feet above the ground. Southside 1-1000 was based on a true story, as narrator Gerald Mohr points out on several occasions. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

My Friend Irma was supposed to be a straightforward adaptation of the popular radio sitcom of the same name. The film's focus therefore was supposed to be on air-headed Irma Peterson (Marie Wilson), her levelheaded roommate, Jane Stacy (Diana Lynn, taking over from the radio series' Cathy Lewis), and their various romantic misadventures. But the audience tended to ignore Irma, Jane, and the others in favor of two movie newcomers: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, cast respectively as would-be singer Steve Laird and dumb-dumb restaurant employee Seymour. Having risen to the top of the heap in the nightclub world, Martin and Lewis were discovered for films by producer Hal Wallis, who decided to test the boys out in secondary roles in an established property. Wallis felt that while Martin had potential as a singing star, Lewis was hopelessly inept as an actor. As the whole world knows by now, it was Lewis who ended up as the team's main attraction with his own inimitable brand of wacko humor. Even as early as Irma, Lewis manages to dominate every scene he's in, often by sheer force of will. Pretty soon, the viewer has forgotten the gossamer-thin plot (Irma's Runyonesque boyfriend, Al, played by John Lund, tries to promote Dino into stardom) and is waiting anxiously to get back to Jerry. When time came for the 1950 sequel, My Friend Irma Goes West, virtually the entire plot revolved around Martin and Lewis, with the official "stars" relegated to supporting roles. Like Marie Wilson, several of the My Friend Irma cast members were holdovers from the radio series, including Hans Conried as Professor Kropotkin. Felix Bressart had originally been slated to play Kropotkin on film, but when he died during shooting, Conried was brought in to complete his scenes (Bressart can still be glimpsed in a few medium and long shots). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This third film version of James Hagan's stage play One Sunday Afternoon was directed by Raoul Walsh, who helmed the second adaptation (1941's Strawberry Blonde). This time around, songs have been added to accommodate the talents of Dennis Morgan and Janis Paige. Morgan stars as turn-of-the-century dentist Biff Grimes, who has spent the last ten years regretting that he hadn't married Amy Lind (Dorothy Malone), the girl of his dreams. Biff also harbors a grudge against Amy's husband Hugo Barnstead (Don DeFore), who was instrumental in getting Biff sent to prison on a fraud charge. Unbeknownst to his ever-loving wife Virginia (Janis Paige), who has stood by him through thick and thin, Biff schemes to exact an awful revenge on the two-faced Barnstead-only to discover in the nick of time that he's been better off all along because he didn't wed the avaricious Amy. Though consistently pretty to look at, One Sunday Afternoon pales in comparision to the earlier movie adaptations of the Hagan play, especially Strawberry Blonde, which had the added benefit of Jimmy Cagney in the lead. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

It Happened On Fifth Avenue was easily the most ambitious movie made by the then-newly-organized Allied Artists for at least a decade after its release -- actually, as a "Roy Del Ruth Production," it was made through rather than by Allied Artists, which may explain why it stands so far apart from the Bowery Boys movies and other productions normally associated with Allied during this period. And amazingly, it works, mostly thanks to a genial cast and a reasonably light touch by director/producer Roy Del Ruth, and in spite of a script that needed at least one more editorial pass. Victor Moore is the star and dominant personality -- if there is one in what is, basically, an ensemble cast -- as Aloyisius T. McKeever, a genial hobo whose annual routine for finding winter quarters is to wait for multi-millionaire Michael O'Connor (Charlie Ruggles) to lock up his Fifth Avenue mansion and head to Virginia, and move in during the man's absence. He chances to meet Jim Bullock, a homeless WWII veteran (displaced, ironically, by one of O'Connor's development projects), and gives him shelter in the mansion. They become a trio when O'Connor's free-spirited daughter Trudy (Gale Storm) shows up, fleeing her finishing school, and the two men -- thinking she's an impoverished runaway from an abusive father -- take her in. She goes along with the masquerade and gradually falls in love with Jim, who also chances to meet two former army buddies (Alan Hale, Jr., Edward Ryan) who -- you guessed it -- are also desperately trying to find homes, in their cases for their wives and growing families. Now there are nine people living in the shelter of O'Connor's Fifth Avenue mansion, and in between setting up housekeeping, Jim and his two buddies manage to come up with an idea about how to build homes for veterans and their families. Trudy, her identity still a secret to the other, gets her father to meet the "squatters" incognito, in hope that he'll take to Jim, but a series of misunderstandings and his own impatience and lack-of-faith leads him to reject everything decent he sees about Trudy's friends. In desperation, to keep them from being evicted and arrested, she calls in reinforcements in the person of her mother (Ann Harding), long estranged from her father. O'Connor is still not convinced of Jim's worth, and definitely doesn't see him as a potential husband for Trudy -- and, in a comic mix-up, he ends up going head-to-head with Jim for the property where he plans to build those houses for veterans, causing them to lock horns once more. Matters do eventually fall into place, as they usually do in Christmas movies of this sort, which more closely resembles The Bells of St. Mary's or One More Spring -- to name another movie about displaced New Yorkers -- than It's A Wonderful Life (with which it is usually compared). It Happened On Fifth Avenue is usually defined as a Christmas movie, in part because of its plot time-line, but more than that, it's a movie that, like George Seaton's Miracle On 34th Street -- made the same year -- sings of the generosity of the human spirit, and the feeling of renewal that was in the air in the immediate post-World War II era, a funny, gentle, warm look at people making their way in a time when, for the first time since the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War, cautious optimism seemed an appropriate approach to life. And not for nothing was this reportedly lead actor Don Defore's personal favorite of all of his movies. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide