Ralph Dunn Movies

The Broadway musical Pajama Game was based on Seven and a Half Cents. a comic novel about labor relations written by Richard Bissell. Doris Day stars as an employee at a pajama factory who becomes the spokesperson for her fellow workers when management refuses to give them a 7 1/2 cent raise. Complicating matters is the fact that Management is represented by handsome John Raitt, who happens to be in love with Day. A subplot involves Day's freewheeling co-worker Carol Haney and her insanely jealous boyfriend, factory-manager Eddie Foy Jr. Many of the cast members from the original Broadway production (Raitt, Haney, Foy, Reta Shaw, Peter Gennaro etc.) are retained for the film version, as are most of the Richard Adler/Jerry Ross songs: highlights include "Hey There", "Steam Heat", "Hernando's Hideaway", "There Once Was a Man". and the title song. The choreography is in the capable hands (and feet) of Bob Fosse. Pajama Game performed so well at the box-office that Warners immediately went to work on the filmization of the second (and last) Adler/Ross Broadway collaboration, Damn Yankees. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

All but forgotten today, Crowded Paradise was one of the first in-depth studies of racial tensions in postwar New York City. Mario Alcade plays Juan Figueroa, a Puerto Rican youth who come to Manhattan for the purpose of marrying his sweetheart Felicia Diaz (Enid Rudd). Despite running up against all manner of obstacles--most of them having to do with prejudice and misunderstanding--Juan is determined to make good in the his adopted country. The film veers dangerously towards melodrama at the climax, when a bigoted, sex-obsessed landlord (well played by Hume Cronyn) schemes to sabotage Juan and Felicia's wedding. Nancy Kelly costars as the landlord's sight-impaired wife, one of the few sympathetic Anglo characters in the film. Crowded Paradise was photographed on location by Boris Kaufman, who'd previously lensed the Oscar-winning "reality" drama On the Waterfront; the script was co-authored by Marc Connelly, of Green Pastures fame. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Previously filmed in 1931 under its original title, Theodore Dreiser's bulky but brilliant novel An American Tragedy was remade in 1951 by George Stevens as A Place in the Sun. Montgomery Clift stars as George Eastman, a handsome and charming but basically aimless young man who goes to work in a factory run by a distant, wealthy relative. Feeling lonely one evening, he has a brief rendezvous with assembly-line worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), but he forgets all about her when he falls for dazzling socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). Alice can't forget about him, though: she is pregnant with his child. Just when George's personal and professional futures seem assured, Alice demands that he marry her or she'll expose him to his society friends. This predicament sets in motion a chain of events that will ultimately include George's arrest and numerous other tragedies, including a vicious cross-examination by a D.A. played by future Perry Mason Raymond Burr. A huge improvement over the 1931 An American Tragedy, directed by Josef von Sternberg, A Place in the Sun softens some of the rough edges of Dreiser's naturalism, most notably in the passages pertaining to George's and Angela's romance. Even those 1951 bobbysoxers who wouldn't have been caught dead poring through the Dreiser original were mesmerized by the loving, near-erotic full facial closeups of Clift and Taylor as they pledge eternal devotion. A Place in the Sun won six Oscars, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography, although it lost Best Picture to An American in Paris. ~ 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

The Secret Fury works best if one is willing to suspend one's disbelief from the outset. Claudette Colbert stars as Ellen, a famed concert pianist who, on the day of her wedding, is accosted by a stranger who insists that she's already married to someone else. Ellen is willing to laugh this off, until the stranger produces witnesses, records and the justice of the piece. Has Ellen lost her mind, or is she merely the victim of an elaborate scam. With the help of fiancé David (Robert Ryan), Our Heroine begins her own investigation -- and ends up accused of murder and shunted off to a mental institution. And the story isn't over yet! Featured in a pivotal role is future I Love Lucy co-star Vivian Vance, who'd previously worked in an L.A. theatre company with Secret Fury-director Mel Ferrer. For reasons best known to himself, Willard Parker, a fairly well-known film actor in 1950, appears unbilled. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Taking place during a transcontinental flight, the story of The Great Plane Robbery concerns an airborne robbery (hence the title) and a series of ancillary murders. With no minions of the law on board, it is up to the pilot (Tom Conway) and an eccentric passenger (Margaret Hamilton) to solve the case. The villain's identity is so obvious that it's a wonder he doesn't wear a name-tag reading "I DID IT!" The biggest mystery concerning The Great Plane Robbery is its running time: officially, the film runs 61 minutes; according to the records kept by United Artists, it clocks in at 63 minutes. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Marsha Hunt seems far too mature and intelligent for the pulpish goings-on in Mary Ryan, Detective. Still, Hunt was a pro (for that matter, she still is), and she managed to survive this Columbia "B" without egg on her face. Assigned to get the goods on a notorious fence, detective Mary Ryan (Hunt) poses as a prison inmate to gain the confidence of one of her quarry's confederates. Upon being sprung from jail, Mary goes to work for the fence--and, predictably, nearly gets bumped off when her ruse is revealed. Featured in the cast are such crime-meller habitues as John Dehner, Ben Welden, Paul Bryar and Ralph Dunn. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

"This boy...and this girl...were never properly introduced to the world we live in." With this superimposed opening title, director Nicholas Ray inaugurates his first feature, They Live by Night. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play a "Bonnie and Clyde"-type fugitive couple, who in trying to escape their past are hell-bent down the road to Doom. Despite their criminal activities, Bowie (Granger) and Keechie (O'Donnell) are hopelessly naïve, fabricating their own idyllic dream world as the authorities close in. The entrapment -- both actual and symbolic -- of the young misfit couple can now be seen as a precursor to the dilemma facing James Dean in Ray's 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause. A box-office disappointment upon its first release, They Live by Night has since gained stature as one of the most sensitive and least-predictable entries in the film noir genre. The film was based on a novel by Edward Anderson, and in 1974 was filmed by Robert Altman under its original title, Thieves Like Us. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

John Farrow's movie adaptation of Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock, based on a screenplay by Jonathan Latimer (and produced by future James Bond screenwriter Richard Maibaum), is a near-perfect match for the book, telling in generally superb visual style a tale set against the backdrop of upscale 1940s New York and offering an early (but accurate) depiction of the modern media industry. Told in the back-to-front fashion typical of film noir, it opens with George Stroud (Ray Milland) trapped, his life in danger, his survival measured in the minute-by-minute movements of the huge central clock of the office building where he's hiding. In flashback we learn that Stroud works for media baron Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), loosely based on Henry Luce, as the editor of Crimeways magazine. Janoth is a manipulative, self-centered megalomaniac with various obsessions, including clocks; among other manifestations of the latter fixation, the skyscraper housing his empire's headquarters has as one of its central features a huge clock that reads out the time around the world down to the second.

Twenty-four hours earlier, on the eve of a combined honeymoon/vacation with his wife, Georgia (Maureen O'Sullivan), that has been put off for seven years, Stroud was ordered by Janoth to cancel the trip in order to work on a special project, and he resigned. As the narrative picks up speed, in his depression, Stroud misses the train his wife is on and crosses paths with Pauline York (Rita Johnson), a former model for Janoth's Styleways magazine, who is also Janoth's very unhappy mistress, and the two commiserate by getting drunk together in a night on the town. While hurriedly leaving Pauline's apartment, he glimpses Janoth entering. Janoth and York quarrel, and the publisher kills her in a jealous rage, using a sundial that she and Stroud picked up the night before while wandering around in their revels. Janoth and his general manager, Steve Hagen (George Macready), contrive to pin the murder on the man that Janoth glimpsed leaving York's apartment, whom he thinks was named Jefferson Randolph -- the name Stroud was drunkenly bandying about the night before. He gets Stroud back to Crimeways to lead the magazine's investigators in hunting down "Jefferson Randolph," never realizing that this was Stroud. And Stroud has no choice but to return, desperately trying to gather evidence against Janoth and, in turn, prevent the clues gathered by the Crimeways staff from leading back to him. The two play this clever, disjointed game of cat-and-mouse, Janoth and Hagen planting evidence that will hang "Randolph" (and justify his being shot while trying to escape), while Stroud, knowing what they don't about how close the man they seek to destroy is, arranges to obscure those clues and, in a comical twist, sends the least capable reporters and investigators to follow up on the most substantial clues.

Janoth sometimes seems to be unraveling at the frustrating pace and lack of conclusion to the hunt, but Stroud can't escape the inevitable, or the moments of weakness caused by fear and his own guilt over his near-unfaithfulness to his wife or the inscrutable gaze of Janoth's mute bodyguard Bill Womack (Harry Morgan), a stone-cold killer dedicated to protecting his employer. The trail of proof and guilt winds ever tighter around both men, taking some odd twists courtesy of the eccentric artist (Elsa Lanchester) who has seen the suspect. Milland is perfect in the role of the hapless Stroud, and Laughton is brilliant as the vain, self-centered Janoth, but George Macready is equally good as Hagen, his smooth, upper-crust Waspy smarminess making one's skin crawl. Also worth noting is Harry Morgan's sinister, silent performance as Womack, and sharp-eyed viewers will also recognize such performers as Douglas Spencer, Noel Neill (especially memorable as a tart-tongued elevator operator), Margaret Field (Sally's mother), Ruth Roman, and Lane Chandler in small roles. Additionally, the Janoth Publications building where most of the action takes place is almost a cast member in itself, an art deco wonder, especially the room housing the clock mechanism and the lobby and vestibules, all loosely inspired by such structures as the Empire State Building and the real-life Daily News headquarters on East 42nd Street. This film was later remade as No Way Out. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

An honest football player single-handedly takes on a professional gambler and the crooked publisher of a sports magazine to bust up their game-fixing scheme. Unfortunately, his efforts get him killed. This crime drama chronicles the efforts of a different player and an earnest D.A. to bring the killers to justice. Matters are not helped by the fact that the attorney is publisher's stepson. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

The direction of Lady at Midnight is credited to Sherman Scott, who was really our old friend Sam Newfield, aka Peter Stewart, possibly the most prolific director in "B"-picture history. Radio newscaster Peter Wiggins (Richard Denning) and his wife Ellen Wiggins (Frances Rafferty) hope to adopt little Tina (Lora Lee Michel), the foster child who's lived with them for seven years. The Wiggins' efforts are blocked by a mysterious party who claims to be the child's parent. What starts as a standard legal maneuver quickly degenerates into murder, as private eye Al Garrity (Ralph Dunn) tries to discern the motives behind the unknown killer's behavior. Though no cliché is left unturned, Lady at Midnight is acceptable non-think entertainment. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This prison drama is told via flashback and follows a group of prisoners bound for Alcatraz. En route, the group plans their escape. One of the convicts is innocent and ends up falling in love with a pretty passenger. Later romance really blooms after his name is cleared, but the other would-be escapees all die trying to break out. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi