Elaine Edwards Movies

This futuristic fantasy is set in the year 2117. Times have really changed. Sex for it's own sake is now the social norm. It is illegal to do it or even think about doing it with love. Trouble ensues when people begin watching a film about three students who stand against loveless lovemaking. Anyone caught viewing the film is arrested. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This is a competently put-together "B"-grade film starring Craig Hill as a doctor who in the process of trying to save a man badly beaten by two gangsters, identifies the culprits to the police. When their victim dies and the charge becomes murder, the doctor hightails it to the far woods where he finds a job as a clerk in a sporting-goods store. His plan is to lay low until the hoodlums forget about him. But complications arise from two different sectors. First, the doctor falls in love with a local woman and second, the murderers find out where he is hiding. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Although this story of the making of a gangland hoodlum reflects only some of the real history of the Detroit Purple Gang in it, the violence portrayed is completely truthful. The sense of reality here is increased by the use of newsreel footage. Robert Blake is "Honeyboy" Willard, a juvenile delinquent always in trouble for petty thefts and similar deeds. (The actual Purple Gang started that way just before 1920, led by the youthful Bernstein brothers.) Cop Bill Harley (Barry Sullivan) is convinced that Willard's violent side can only be tamed by a stint behind bars. Opposing him is a social worker who wants to use modern methods of therapy to correct the teen's problems. When the social worker is found brutally murdered, the cop knows that Willard is responsible. He decides to stick with the case -- in spite of the fact that the gang eventually has a lot of city and union brass in its pocket. Just as a note, the gang got their name because one citizen commented that they were tainted, like the purple color of bad meat. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Thanks to the notorious gangland conference in Appalachian, New York, the word "Mafia" was on everyone's lips in 1959. Rushing to capitalize on this fact was the low-budget expose Inside the Mafia. Grant Richards plays a Lucky Luciano type who is about to return to the US after several years' deportation. Richards arranges for an upstate New York gangland meeting, where minor mob functionary Cameron Mitchell plans to depose big boss Ted DeCorsia. Mitchell also intends to murder Richards so that he can rule the Mafia unfettered. But Richards is still master of his own fate, and he guns down his competition during the gang conference before surrendering to the police. Inside the Mafia told the public little that wasn't already known, but the film served its purpose of cashing in on a "hot" title. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This fourth film version of the Mary Roberts Rinehart-Avery Hopwood stage chestnut The Bat is so old-fashioned in its execution that one might suspect it was intended as "camp" (though that phrase wasn't in common usage in 1959). Agnes Moorehead plays mystery novelist Cornelia Van Gorder, whose remote mansion is the scene for all sorts of diabolical goings-on. The "maguffin" is a million dollars' worth of securities, hidden away somewhere in the huge and foreboding estate. Vincent Price is seen committing a murder early on-but he's not the film's principal villain. Others in the cast include Gavin Gordon as an overly diligent detective, and former Our Gang star Darla Hood as a murder victim. The Bat was adapted for the screen by its director Crane Wilbur, himself a prolific "old dark house" scenarist and playright. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Archeologists excavating the ruins of Pompeii discover what seems to be a perfectly preserved human figure, encased in lava. A scientific team led by Dr. Paul Mallon (Richard Anderson) begins to piece together the history and identity of the stone figure. Using surviving records from the city and the location where the figure was found as a starting point, the archeologists uncover the story of Quintilus, an Etruscan gladiator-slave who was tortured and sentenced to death for daring to love a noblewoman. He vowed to kill anyone who kept him from the woman he loved, and was in the process of being executed when the eruption of Vesuvius destroyed the city and buried Quintilus in molten lava. Their research takes on tremendous urgency when evidence -- in the form of a rising number of dead bodies -- begins to show that Quintilus may not only still be alive, in some impossible-to-fathom manner, but bent on carrying out his final wish, of rescuing and escaping with his beloved, and that the woman he loved has been reincarnated, in some manner, in the person of Mallon's fiancée, Tina Enright (Elaine Edwards). This all seems like fanciful speculation, especially to the police, until Quintilus breaks out one night and starts stalking Tina through the city, impervious to police bullets and a danger to everyone around him. When Quintilus takes the unconscious Tina, Mallon must try to anticipate his movements around the city by finding the modern locations of ancient streets that Quintilus seems able to navigate. He heads for the Cove of the Blind Fisherman, hoping to save his fiancée and put an end to this ancient curse. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Rex Allen, his horse Koko, and his sidekick Slim Pickens play themselves in Old Oklahoma Plains. Set in the 1920s, the film finds Allen trying to convince local ranchers to allow the army room for their tank maneuvers. Rabble-rouser Roy Barcroft, certain that the tank will make horses obsolete, organizes mob resistance against the military. At first glance, the film's finale -- a race between tanks and mounted cavalry -- seems like a novelty. At closer glance, however, most of the climactic sequence consists of stock footage lifted from the 1938 Republic production Army Girl. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide