Barbara Everest Movies

In this crime drama, a beach-bum who is into scuba diving falls for an enigmatic British woman. They have a wonderful affair, until he finds out that she is the mistress of an infamous drug dealer. The drug lord hires the scuba diver, but the man instead goes to the police. This causes the drug dealer to send two hitmen out to inject him with an overdose of heroin and leave him for the police to find. The cops do find him, but they do not believe the beach bum took the heroin of his own accord. Instead they use him to help them find the criminals. Meanwhile the diver still continues to see the moll on the side. Unfortunately they are caught and the woman is raped and tortured. The beach bum is then forced to do a dive for the drug lord. Before he does it, he manages to kill his two guards. The police move in and arrest the dealer. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this British comedy, a new nurse comes to replace her predecessor, the town pump, in an English country town. Soon, she herself becomes grist for the nasty town rumor mill. Fortunately, she becomes friends with the town doctor, his son, and shop owner. As the nurse is a dreadful driver, she gets into an accident with a wealthy farmer who falls in love with her. Later he attempts to evict a young couple staying on his property, but the nurse argues for the woman who is almost ready to have a baby. It is she that delivers the babe in a field thereby winning her the affection and respect of the villagers and the wealthy farmer. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this drama, set after the end of WW II, a young man returns to his father's small Bavarian village and is dismayed to learn that he died after he married a young woman and escaped from the communists. The young man listens, but he believes there is more to the story, and so begins looking into it himself. He then discovers that an important scientist has exchanged places with his father. The woman and another are planning to sneak the doctor to the east, but the son intervenes and helps the scientist escape the country. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

In this drama, a female ex-con runs a house for other women in her shoes. Someone threatens her with blackmail. She kills him with poison. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Ray Milland doubles up as star and director of The Safecracker. Set during WW II, the film casts Milland as professional cracksman Colley Dawson, who is rescued from prison by Army major Adbury (Ernest Clark). Dawson is offered a deal: if he'll agree to embark upon a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, he'll be given his freedom. The mission, of course, is to break into a Nazi safe and steal a list of German spies operating in England. Before one can say "Robert Wagner", Dawson is trained as a commando and parachuted into Belgium for the "caper" of his life. Supposedly based on a true story, The Safecracker was lensed in Europe and released stateside by MGM. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This lightweight British satire on Freudianism stars Cecil Parker as a prominent doctor and Anne Crawford as his psychiatrist wife. Parker and Crawford are taken aback when their innocent young son Anthony Lang draws a picture of a horse, with all necessary reproductive equipment lovingly detailed. While Parker is all for paddling his precocious offspring, Crawford decides that the boy should be rewarded for so freely expressing his subconscious. This minor misunderstanding brews into a major brouhaha involving split-ups, supposed infidelity and tearful reconciliations. Tony Draws a Horse was adapted (and somewhat toned down) from a play by Lesley Storm. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this drama, set at the end of WW II, two Italian prostitutes ply their trade with American soldiers. When the war ends, they go back home to spend their money which is used by a local priest to create a home for illegitimate war children. Director Luigi Zampa shot this film at the same time as an Italian version with different actors, including Gina Lollobridgida in the lead role. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Anne Fielding (Dulcie Gray), a shop clerk, meets Jack Williams (Derek Farr), a bus conductor, on the London Underground. She's delayed by the train for a meeting with her friend Victor Colebrooke (Eric Portman) at Hampstead Heath; the two of them take a liking to each other while she's trying to find Victor. She finally locates him and they leave at virtually the same moment that a young woman is found strangled -- the latest in a series of six stranglings in London. The police investigate anyone who might have been with the victim -- that includes Jack, who was seen leaving in a fury late in the evening, and Victor, whose handkerchief was found in the vicinity of the body by a derelict. In a neatly Hitchcockian twist, however, the police soon get on to the right man, but between the ineptitude of one officer and sheer bad luck, Scotland Yard is unable to make an arrest or even secure a search warrant. A bizarre cat-and-mouse game ensues as Inspector Conway (Roland Culver) tries to pressure the killer into tipping his hand, which puts Anne in deadly danger. It all comes down to a race against time through London as all of the threads draw together, but around whose neck? ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Based on Marcia Davenport's novel and set in 1870, Valley of Decision details the romance between a housemaid named Mary Rafferty (Greer Garson) and her employer's son, Paul Scott (Gregory Peck). Paul's father, William (Donald Crisp), owns a Pittsburgh steel mill where Mary's father, Pat (Lionel Barrymore), was crippled; Pat believes he wouldn't have suffered his accident if William had taken more safety precautions. Once Mary and Paul fall in love, both fathers fight against their relationship, and soon their romance is plagued by not only familial tensions, but also a worker's strike at the steel mill. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

Director Robert Stevenson collaborated with novelist Aldous Huxley and theatrical-producer John Houseman on the screenplay for this 1944 adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's gothic romance Jane Eyre. After several harrowing years in an orphanage, where she was placed by a supercilious relative for exhibiting the forbidden trait of "willfulness," Jane Eyre (Joan Fontaine) secures work as a governess. Her little charge, French-accented Adele (Margaret O'Brien), is pleasant enough. But Jane's employer, the brooding, tormented Edward Rochester (Orson Welles), terrifies the prim young governess. Under Jane's gentle influence, Rochester drops his forbidding veneer, going so far as to propose marriage to Jane. But they are forbidden connubial happiness when it is revealed that Rochester is still married to a gibbering lunatic whom he is forced to keep locked in his attic. Rochester reluctantly sends Jane away, but she returns, only to find that the insane wife has burned down the mansion and rendered Rochester sightless. In the tradition of Victorian romances, this purges Rochester of any previous sins, making him a worthy mate for the loving Jane. The presence of Orson Welles in the cast (he receives top billing), coupled with the dark, Germanic style of the direction and photography, has led some impressionable cineasts to conclude that Welles, and not Stevenson, was the director. To be sure, Welles contributed ideas throughout the filming; also, the script was heavily influenced by the Mercury Theater on the Air radio version of Jane Eyre, on which Welles, John Houseman and musical director Bernard Herrmann all collaborated. But Jane Eyre was made at 20th Century-Fox, a studio disinclined to promote the auteur theory; like most Fox productions, this is a work by committee rather than the product of one man. This in no way detracts from the overall excellence of the film; of all adaptations of Jane Eyre (it had previously been filmed in 1913, 1915 and 1921, and has been remade several times since), this 1943 version is one of the best. Keep an eye out for an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor as the consumptive orphanage friend of young Jane Eyre (played as child by Peggy Ann Gardner). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The 80-star cast of Forever and a Day would certainly not have been feasible had not most of the actors and production people turned over their salaries to British war relief -- a point driven home during the lengthy opening credits by an unseen narrator. The true star of the film is a stately old manor house in London, built in 1804 by a British admiral (C. Aubrey Smith) and blitzed in 1940 by one Adolf Hitler. Through the portals of this house pass a vast array of Britons, from high-born to low. The earliest scenes involve gay blade Lt. William Trimble (Ray Milland), wronged country-girl Susan (Anna Neagle), and wicked landowner Ambrose Pomfret (Claude Rains). We move on to a comic interlude involving dotty Mr. Simpson (Reginald Owen), eternally drunken butler Bellamy (Charles Laughton), and cockney plumbers Mr. Dabb (Cedric Hardwicke) and Wilkins (Buster Keaton). Maidservant Jenny (Ida Lupino) takes over the plot during the Boer War era, while the World War I sequence finds the house converted into a way-station for soldiers (including Robert Cummings) and anxious families (including Roland Young and Gladys Cooper). Finally we arrive in 1940, with American Gates Pomfret (Kent Smith) and lady-of-the-house Lesley Trimble (Ruth Warrick) surveying the bombed-out manor, and exulting over the fact that the portrait of the home's founder, Adm. Eustace Trimble (Smith), has remained intact -- symbolic proof of England's durability in its darkest hours. The huge cast includes Dame May Whitty, Edward Everett Horton, Wendy Barrie, Merle Oberon, Nigel Bruce, Richard Haydn, Donald Crisp, and a host of others -- some appearing in sizeable roles, others (like Arthur Treacher and Patric Knowles) willingly accepting one-scene bits, simply to participate in the undertaking. Seven directors and 21 writers were also swept up in the project. Forever and a Day was supposed to have been withdrawn from circulation after the war and its prints destroyed so that no one could profit from what was supposed to have been an act of industry charity. Happily for future generations, prints have survived and are now safely preserved. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

More so than most wartime films, Mission to Moscow must be viewed within the context of its times. Requested by President Roosevelt to make a film supportive of America's Russian allies, Warner Bros. turned to the memoirs of Ambassador Joseph H. Davies, who spent several years prior to WWII in the Soviet Union. As played by Walter Huston, Davies is a pillar of incorruptable integrity, reporting the facts "as I saw them" (only in later years was Davies revealed to be something less than a paragon of virtue who was willing to alter opinions for political, personal and financial expedience). Sent to Moscow by FDR as a means of finding out if Russia is a potentially trustworthy ally in case of war, Davies and his family are given the royal treatment by the Commissars, who display the social, technological, agricultural and artistic advances made under the Stalin regime. Invariably, the Russian citizens are shown to be singing, smiling, freedom-loving rugged individuals-in contrast to the Nazis, who are depicted as humorless automatons. In its efforts to present the USSR in the best possible light, the film glosses over the notorious Purge Trials of 1937, presenting the trials as scrupulously fair and the defendants as unabashed traitors to the Soviet cause. At one point, Russia's annexation of Finland in 1939 is "justified" by Davies' explanation that the Soviets merely wanted to protect their tiny neighbor from Nazi domination! It is unfair to label Mission to Moscow as Communistic or even left-wing, since it was merely parroting the official party line vis-a-vis US/Soviet relations in 1943. Even so, screenwriter Howard Koch found it very difficult to get film work after the war because of his contributions to this "Pinko" project (conversely, Jack Warner pulled a Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of the matter by insisting that he was strongarmed into making the film). Seen objectively, Mission to Moscow is top-rank entertainment, superbly and excitingly assembled in the manner typical of Warners and director Michael Curtiz. The huge cast includes Gene Lockhart as Molotov, attorney Dudley Field Malone as Winston Churchill, Maynart Kippen as a benign, pipe-smoking Stalin, Charles Trowbridge as Secretary Cordell Hull, Leigh Whipper as Hailie Selassie, Georges Renavent as Anthony Eden and Alex Chirva as Pierre Laval, along with the more familiar faces of Ann Harding (as Mrs. Davies), George Tobias, Eleanor Parker, Moroni Olsen, Minor Watson, Jerome Cowan, Duncan Renaldo, Mike Mazurki, Frank Faylen, Edward van Sloan, Louis-Jean Heydt, Monte Blue, Robert Shayne and even Sid (sic) Charisse. Original prints of Mission to Moscow include a 6-minute prologue delivered by the real Joseph Davies. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Originally released in England in 1941 as This Man is Dangerous, The Patient Vanishes was distributed in the US in 1947 to capitalize on the burgeoning popularity of James Mason. The story concerns the friendly rivalry between private detective Mick Cardby (Mason) and his father, Scotland Yard inspector Cardby (Gordon McLeod). Both father and son work shoulder to shoulder to rescue the kidnapped daughter (Barbara James) of a wealthy industrialist. In "Bulldog Drummond" fashion, the girl had been abducted while a patient at a somewhat shady hospital, leading the detectives to interrogate several suspicious-looking medical types. What romance there is can be found in the bantering relationship between Mick Cardby and his secretary Mollie (Margaret Vyner). Though no evidence exists to support this theory, it's possible that The Patient Vanishes had been intended as the first in a series of "Ellery Queen"-style mysteries starring Mason and McLeod. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi