Jacqueline De Wit Movies

Screenwriter William Goldman has claimed that Paul Newman agreed to do Harper, the film that established the grateful writer's career, only because he was working unhappily on Lady L. (1965) in Europe, and was looking for something as unlike that film as possible. He stars as Lew Harper, a hip L.A. private dick whose business has gotten so bad that he's re-using his coffee grounds. At the suggestion of his friend, attorney Albert Graves (Arthur Hill), the detective takes on the investigation of the disappearance of the wealthy husband of waspish cripple Elaine Sampson (Lauren Bacall). After finding a photograph of former actress Fay Estabrook (Shelley Winters), Harper locates the alcoholic actress in a bar, plies her with booze, and takes her home to search her apartment while she's unconscious. There he takes a call which leads him to another bar to meet Betty Fraley (Julie Harris), a singer with a heroin problem. To curtail his inquisitive behavior, some large and unpleasant gentleman beat him up outside the saloon. Hoping for sympathy from his soon to be ex-wife (Janet Leigh), who has just filed divorce papers, the weary detective is much more successful than he has any right to expect. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide

This three part horror story is taken from the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vincent Price stars in all three tales starting with Dr. Heidegger's Experiment". Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot) attempts to restore the youth of four elderly friends. In a ghastly and ghoulish scene, a bride in her wedding gown returns to life after being dead for forty years. Although her spirit is alive, her body is ravaged by forty years of grave rot. "Rappaccini's Daughter" finds Price as a demented, overprotective father inoculating his daughter with poison so she may never leave her garden of poisonous plants. Part three, "The House of the Seven Gables" has Beverly Garland, Richard Denning, and Jacqueline de Wit accompanying Price, who retains his horror hero status that alternates between villain and victim. The characters portrayed by Price are a natural continuation of the Edgar Allen Poe stories produced by Roger Cormam. Sidney Sallow directed this feature in which the cinematic apple falls far from the literary tree. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

In his first Twilight Zone appearance, Burgess Meredith stars as Henry Bemis, a miopic bank clerk who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone to read his precious books. He unexpectedly gets his wish when, while hiding in a bank vault with a book in his hands, a hydrogen bomb devastates the city around him. The sole survivor of this nuclear attack, Henry is at first stricken with panic, then becomes delighted at the prospect of reading to his heart's content, without being nagged by his wife (Jacqueline De Wit) or his boss (Vaughn Taylor). The episode's ironic payoff is so well known that it does not bear repeating here; suffice to say that the ending was invoked in the first few moments of 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie. First telecast November 20, 1959, "Time Enough at Last" was scripted by Rod Serling from a short story by Lynn Venable. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Toy Tiger was a remake of the 1938 Deanna Durbin film Mad About Music. The adolescent girl of the original becomes a preteen boy in the remake, played with an excess of the cutes by Tim Hovey. A student in a private school, Hovey brags to his classmates about the accomplishments of his father. Actually the boy's dad has been dead for years, thus he's up against it when challenged to produce his fictional papa. Jeff Chandler, businessman friend of Hovey's widowed mother (Laraine Day), is coerced into posing as the boy's father. The "see it coming" ending was at least compensated for in Mad About Music by Deanna Durbin's singing. The banality of Toy Tiger is made bearable only by the gritty performance of Jeff Chandler, who lets us know that he knows he's better than his material. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this musical comedy, a young woman endures the drudgery of working as a charwoman in her aunt's hotel. She is not paid much for her hard work. To make her drab existence a little more exciting, she enrolls in a correspondence charm course, which unbeknownst to her is a scam. Soon the swindlers show up and plan to use her to help them con her aunt and a bank president out of their money. When one of the con men sees the good hearted girl working with the orphans on her family farm, he has a sudden change of heart. Her life takes a sudden turn for the better when oil is discovered under her farm. Suddenly the drab little drudgess finds herself living like a duchess. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Virginia Mayo stars in this unofficial follow-up to her 1952 musical hit She's Working Her Way Through College. Mayo plays movie star Catherine Terris, who after three box-office flops in a row, returns to the Broadway stage whence she came. Her co-star in this endeavor is Rich Sommers (Steve Cochran), who still harbors a grudge against Catherine because of her walkout during her last Broadway appearance. Predictably, Rich and Catherine bury the hatchet by midfilm, and when fadeout time rolls around they're in each other's arms. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Since its lapse into public domain in 1978, First Legion has joined Love Affair and Algiers as the most readily available of Charles Boyer's films. Boyer plays Fr. Marc Arnoux, the head of St. Gregory's seminary, who can never quite shake the feeling that he shouldn't have given up his career as an attorney. His fellow Jesuit priests likewise occasionally question their calling, especially crotchety Msgr. Michael Carey (William Demarest). One by one, however, the priests are won over by various "miracles" visited upon them. Barbara Rush co-stars as a crippled girl who indirectly benefits from the priests' renewed faith. The First Legion was produced and directed with surprising restraint by Douglas Sirk. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In On the Isle of Samoa, beefcake star Jon Hall plays Kenneth Crandall, an unsavory gambler who absconds with his partner's money in a stolen plane. He crashes on an unchartered island, where he comes across a tribe of English-speaking natives, benevolently overseen by selfless missionary Peter Appleton (Raymond Greenleaf). The hard-bitten Crandall comes around to Appleton's way of thinking after a near-cataclysmic volcanic eruption, realizing at long last that money isn't everything. It helps, of course, that native girl Moana (Susan Cabot) has fallen in love with Crandall in the meantime. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Great Jewel Robber is based on the true story of Gerard Dennis, who during a 12-month period managed to steal more than a million dollars' worth of gems. As played by David Brian, Dennis is an incorrigible ladies' man, who uses women to help him pull off his heists. The first of his conquests, played by Claudia Barrett, pays for his escape from the Canadian authorities. The second (Perdita Chandler) is his partner in crime in Buffalo, New York. The third woman in his life, played by Marjorie Reynolds, ultimately brings about his downfall. For the sake of verisimilitude, Mayor Stanley Church of New Rochelle, Connecticut (where Dennis was finally caught) appears in the prologue as himself. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Billy Wilder's future partner I.A.L. Diamond concocted the storyline for this Dennis Morgan/Jack Carson/Doris Day tunefest. Morgan and Carson, Warner Bros.' answer to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, appear as themselves. Attempting to line up a director for their next picture, the boys find themselves unable to do so due to Carson's gigantic ego. Carson decides to direct their next vehicle himself; the next problem is locating a leading lady who'll be willing to put up with Carson. The boys discover Doris Day, a waitress in the Warner Bros. commissary. Carson and Morgan spend their entire shooting schedule vying over Day's affections; she gets fed up with this, and heads back to her home town in Wisconsin, there to marry her childhood sweetheart Jeffrey Bushdinkel--who is revealed in the final shot to be none other than Errol Flynn! Other guest stars popping in and out of It's a Great Feeling include Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Sidney Greenstreet, Danny Kaye, Patricia Neal, Eleanor Parker, Ronald Reagan, Edward G. Robinson and Jane Wyman. Also appearing as themselves are such Warner Bros. directors as David Butler (the real director of It's a Great Feeling), Michael Curtiz, King Vidor and Raoul Walsh. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

"A woman loses her mind and is confined to a mental institution." That's the usual TV-listing encapsulation of The Snake Pit -- and like most such encapsulations, it only scratches the film's surface. Olivia de Havilland stars as an outwardly normal young woman, married to loyal, kindly Mark Stevens. As de Havilland's behavior becomes more and more erratic, however, Stevens comes to the sad conclusion that she needs professional help. She is sent to an overcrowded state hospital for treatment -- a curious set-up, in that, while de Havilland is treated with compassion by soft-spoken psychiatrist Leo Genn, she is sorely abused by resentful matrons and profoundly disturbed patients. Throughout the film, she is threatened with being clapped into "the snake pit" -- an open room where the most severe cases are permitted to roam about and jabber incoherently -- if she doesn't realign her thinking. In retrospect, it seems that de Havilland's biggest "crime" is that she wants to do her own thinking, and that she isn't satisfied with merely being a loving wife. While this subtext may not have been intentional, it's worth noting that de Havilland escapes permanent confinement only when she agrees to march to everyone else's beat. Amazingly, Olivia de Havilland didn't win an Academy Award for her harrowing performance in The Snake Pit (the only Oscar won by the film was for sound recording). While some of the psychological verbiage in this adaptation of Mary Jane Ward's autobiographical novel seems antiquated and overly simplistic today, The Snake Pit was rightly hosannahed as a breakthrough film in 1948. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Deanna Durbin stars in the musical shaggy dog story Something in the Wind. When the wealthy uncle of the Read family dies, he leaves instructions in his will to bequeath a set amount of money to his mistress, one Mary Collins. The family assumes it to be a pretty young female radio personality called Mary Collins (and played by Deanna Durbin), when it is, in fact, her aunt of the same name (Jean Adair). Thus, when the young scion of the Read family, Donald (John Dall), tries to buy "Mary" off, he picks the wrong Mary -- and Durbin rebuffs him. Donald and brother Charlie (Donald O'Connor) then resort to kidnapping Mary from the radio station, but Mary turns the tables by demanding a million dollars as a settlement. Meanwhile, Charlie pines for Donald's fiancée, Clarissa Prentice (Helena Carter), while young Mary and Donald argue constantly and start to fall in love with one another. Amid these soapy events, Durbin finds time to sing five pop songs, as well as the Miserere aria from Verdi's Il Trovatore, on which she duets with Jan Peerce. Durbin's pop numbers include: "The Turntable Song," "You Wanna Keep Your Baby Lookin' Right," and "Happy Go Lucky and Free." ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide