Harry Ellerbe Movies

Arriving in San Pedro Harbor, Richard Kimble (David Janssen)--alias "Tony Carter"--goes to work for two-fisted salvage boss Joe Steelman (Murray Hamilton). When one of Steelman's divers perishes beneath the waves, the locals fix the blame on the dead man's girlfriend Coralee (Antoinette Bower), who is widely regarded as a jinx. But Kimble knows that the diver's death was due to faulty equipment--and Steelman knows this as well, but doesn't intend to let anyone else find out. This is the last episode of The Fugitive's third season, and the final one filmed in black and white. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Receiving a tip from a reliable source in St. Louis, Inspector Erskine (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) dispatches his agents to arrest Harry Castle (John Milford) for passing over $500,000 in forged checks. Before long, however, Erskine begins to suspect that Castle is innocent--even though the tip was provided by an old friend of the Inspector. Meanwhile, the relationship between Erskine and his girlfriend Joanna (Lee Meriwether) reaches another impasse. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The first of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films, Fall of the House of Usher was originally released as simply House of Usher. Vincent Price stars as the foredoomed Roderick Usher. Living in his decaying family mansion with his young sister Madeline (Myrna Fahey), Roderick does his best to shoo away Madeline's fiance Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon). He tells the young swain that Madeline suffers from the family curse of encroaching madness, and thus cannot be permitted to bear children. After a series of suspicious, near-fatal accidents, Phillip insists that Madeline be allowed to leave with him at once. But Roderick sadly announces that this is impossible: Madeline has died, and is slated to be entombed. Informed by the family butler that Madeline has previously been prone to near-catatonic spells, Phillip angrily insists that the girl may very well have been buried alive. The climactic conflagration would be recycled as stock footage in future Corman/Poe efforts, as would the set representing the Usher home. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

After making Man Who Understood Women and seeing that the result was an ill-realized, uneven combination of Hollywood satire and tear-jerking melodrama, star Henry Fonda did not make another film until almost three years later. The story centers on a Hollywood producer who becomes so obsessed with turning his wife Leslie Caron into the sexiest star in Hollywood that he neglects her real needs. Feeling lonely and tired of Tinseltown, Caron returns to her native France and finds herself attracted to the handsome and very attentive pilot Cesare Danova. When Fonda hears about the budding affair, he flies into a rage and hires assassins to kill his rival. Unfortunately for him, the killers are romantics and decide that Caron and Danova are so in love that both must die so they can be together always. When Fonda finds out, he rushes over to France to try and save his wife. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Though several concessions to the censors and the box-office were made in adapting Irwin Shaw's bestseller The Young Lions to the screen, the end result is generally effective and satisfying. Set during World War 2, the film concentrates on three individuals, one German, two American. Marlon Brando plays an idealistic German whose early fascination with Nazism leads to doubt and disillusionment. American entertainer Dean Martin, on the verge of the Big Time, does his best to dodge the draft but ends up in uniform all the same. And American Jew Montgomery Clift, so sensitive that he's practically breakable, must come to grips with anti-Semitism, not only from the Germans but also from his fellow soldiers. Romance enters the picture in the form of Hope Lange as Clift's gentile girlfrind, Barbara Rush as the socialite who shames Martin into joining up, and May Britt as Brando's vis-a-vis. Screenwriter Edward Anhalt was obliged to shoehorn in a boot-camp sequence indicating that the Brass disapproved of the bigoted behavior of Clift's topkick Lee van Cleef (as if racism was a mere aberration during the 1940s), and to "slightly" alter the ending of the book, in which the embittered but still patriotic Brando character, shouting "Welcome to Germany!," machine-guns the Martin and Clift characters (in the film, it is Brando who bites the dust, symbolically dying for Hitler's sins). Maximillian Schell offers a starmaking turn as Brando's cynical comrade, while an uncredited John Banner, "Sergeant Schultz" on Hogan's Heroes, shows up as a pompous burgomeister who feigns ignorance of the hellish concentration camp in his community. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Curt Siodmak's The Magnetic Monster (1953) is a truly novel science fiction film, in terms of its rather cerebral plot and low-key, quietly intense execution. As much a mystery and, in its first half, a manhunt, as it is a sci-fi-thriller, the movie pushed lots of suspense buttons for viewers in 1953 and still holds up more than a half century later. Richard Carlson (who also co-produced) plays Dr. Jeff Stewart, an agent for the Office of Scientific Investigation. Stewart and his colleague, Dr. Dan Forbes (King Donovan), begin searching for a dangerously radioactive element, which they have good reason to believe is somewhere in the Los Angeles area. They soon learn that this is no ordinary investigation -- among its other attributes, the unknown element generates enough radiation to kill, and also manifests a powerful magnetic field. The trail leads them to Dr. Howard Denker (Leonard Mudie), a rogue scientist who, working on his own, has created a new isotope of an element called serranium, which proves to be not only highly radioactive, but dangerously unstable in ways that science has never seen before. Every 11 hours, the serranium mass enters a growth cycle requiring massive amounts of energy, which it obtains by absorbing the energy from the atomic structure of any matter around it, releasing huge amounts of radiation in the process. The serranium mass doubles in size with each cycle, doubling its energy needs in the process, as well as the potential destructiveness of the next cycle. The danger lies not only in the potential for destruction in the serranium's rapidly increasing energy absorbtion, but its ever-increasing mass, which, at some point, will threaten to unbalance the Earth itself, in its rotation and orbit. Long before that, however, the resulting radiation is going to start killing large numbers of people, and the destructive force accompanying it will threaten to split the Earth's surface apart. Stewart and Forbes soon recognize that the only hope they have of stopping the process is to get ahead of it, by bombarding the serranium with enough energy to force it to divide into two relatively stable elements. The only possible source of sufficient energy is the world's largest cyclotron, which has been built by the Canadian government in Nove Scotia -- but is even it powerful enough to do the job, and can they get the deadly isotope there in time? ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

So Red the Rose is a Civil War drama that plays like a warm-up for Gone With the Wind--and, unlike Wind, has two genuine Southerners in the leading roles. Margaret Sullavan is the aristocratic mistress of a sprawling Southern plantation, whose sheltered lifestyle is rent asunder by the War. All that sustains her during the conflict's darkest days is her love for her distant cousin, a Confederate officer played by Randolph Scott. Despite the incursions of Yankee troops (most of whom are portrayed as one step above gorillas), Sullavan holds her family together even after her mansion is burned to the ground. She even manages to talk her slaves out of rebelling, in a scene that must have caused embarrassment for everyone concerned in later years. The fact that So Red the Rose died at the box office (industryites dubbed the picture "So Red the Ink") was the principal reason why so many producers turned down Gone with the Wind a few years later. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi