Elisabeth Fraser Movies

Based on the play by Arthur Miller, All My Sons is a drama of man's duty to man that retains a potent impact. Edward G. Robinson plays a manufacturer of parts for World War II airplanes who lives a full, satisfied life in a small town. But his idyll is shattered by the arrival of the fiancée of the manufacturer's oldest son, who is missing in action. The younger son begins to fall in love with the girl, but her own brother is against the relationship because, he claims, the manufacturer and his partner delivered defective parts to the war effort. The younger son (Burt Lancaster) investigates, even going as far as visit his father's former partner in jail, and discovers the awful truth -- that his father's corrupt actions were responsible for both the partner's incarceration and the deaths of 21 U.S. pilots. The tale ends with a bitter and tragic confrontation that drives home the message that we are all our brother's keepers, and we cannot push aside that responsibility for personal gain. Thoughtful and intense performances by Robinson and Lancaster bring humanity and life to this powerful theme. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Endora gives Darren a magical statue which forces everyone in its vicinity to speak the unvarnished truth. Trouble ensues when Darren and Samantha entertain Larry Tate's new client, Ed Hotchkiss (Charles Lane), and Ed's wife, Frances (Elisabeth Fraser). Needless to say, on this particular occasion the truth really hurts. Written by Paul David and John L. Greene, "Speak the Truth" made its first network appearance on December 16, 1965. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Callaway Went Thataway is an amiable spoof of early television's "Hopalong Cassidy" craze. Fred MacMurray and Dorothy McGuire star as Mike Frye and Deborah Patterson, advertising copywriters who have pulled off quite a coup by purchasing the old "Smokey Callaway" Westerns for TV. Trouble begins when the sponsor wants to meet up with Callaway (Howard Keel) and sign him to a long-term contract. But Smokey, a notorious boozer and womanizer, has dropped out of sight and left for parts unknown. In desperation, Mike and Debbie hire a Callaway look-alike named Stretch Barnes (also Howard Keel), whom they give a crash course in the art of being a boyhood idol ("You're a cowboy star. You have two expressions: hat on and hat off"). Barnes not only pulls off the ruse with the greatest of ease, but also takes his responsibilities to his young fans quite seriously. The plot thickens when the real Smoky Callaway emerges from a ten-year bender to demand a piece of the action. Callaway Went Thataway is full of wonderful moments, not least of which is a climactic fistfight between Callaway and Barnes, adroitly edited and photographed so as to make it appear that Howard Keel is actually punching out himself! The supporting cast includes future TV favorites Jesse White, Stan Freberg, and Hugh Beaumont (unbilled), while several MGM stars make surprise cameo appearances. Perhaps to avoid potential lawsuits, the film ends with a timorous disclaimer, stating that most Western stars are generous, upstanding individuals -- and not at all like the bibulous, mercenary Smoky Callaway. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

It was considered a serious coup at Columbia Pictures when producer Stanley Kramer landed the rights to Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and got most of the key members of the Broadway cast for the movie, plus Kevin McCarthy from the original London cast. The one exception was Lee J. Cobb, who'd done the part of Willy Loman on Broadway but, because of his alleged past left-wing political associations, couldn't do the movie -- so Kramer and Columbia went with a proven box office star, Fredric March. He plays Willy Loman, who has spent a lifetime pursuing success, only to find himself a failure at age 60, a victim of poor choices, lost opportunities, and unreasonable expectations, especially for his two sons, and in particular the older one, Biff (Kevin McCarthy). Despite the support of his loving, patient wife Linda (Mildred Dunnock, in the performance of a lifetime), Willy's life comes apart along with his hold on reality, as he increasingly slips between the present and the past, reliving incidents in a desperate search for what went wrong. March brings a good deal of dignity to the role, and McCarthy and Cameron Mitchell are superb as his two sons, but the movie was a failure at the time of its release, partly owing to its difficult subject matter -- the failure of the American dream was not the first item on every moviegoer's list in 1951, no matter how successful the play had been on Broadway or how many awards it won -- and also to March's performance, which was just as likely the fault of director Laslo Benedek; he's sympathetic but too externalized, without Cobb's seething energy (represented in the 1960's television portrayal), and in the second half is too over-the-top in his madness. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Author Hartzell Spence's popular biography of his preacher father was the source for One Foot in Heaven. Fredric March stars as Methodist cleric William Spence, whose calling requires him to move his family from parish to parish on a near-monthly basis. The children resent the fact that they're never able to sustain friendships, while Reverend Spence is equally upset by what he perceives to be encroaching immorality in the early 20th century. Spence's stubbornness loses him as many parishioners as he gains, but he is gradually humanized by a series of random events. In the best of these, the Reverend, who has railed against movies from the pulpit, attends a "scandalous" picture show--and as the picture reaches its climax, he finds himself cheering on the good guys as loudly as everyone else! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Althhough she is on her deathbed, wealthy Be Be Brent (Anne Barton) is sufficiently hale and hearty to enrage her relatives by leaving the bulk of her estate--one million dollars--to her nurse Hetty Randall (Anne Seymour). The family members hire Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) to contest the will, but instead he ends up with another murder case on his hands. This time, the victim is Justin Grover, and the accused is a girl named Madeline (Sherry Jackson)...whose last name is also Randall. Former "beefcake" leading man Jon Hall, who hadn't appeared on TV since 1958, came out of retirement to play a major role in this episode. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The saga of the Hatfield-and-McCoy feud is romanticized in Samuel Goldwyn's Roseanna McCoy. Newcomer Joan Evans stars as the title character, whose elopement with Johnse Hatfield (Farley Granger) serves to further fuel the flames of the deadly mountain feud. The opposing patriarches, Devil Anse Hatfield and Old Randall McCoy, are vividly realized by Charles Bickford and Raymond Massey. In West Virginia and Kentucky, the debate still rages over what started the hostilities, but there's no question that the end result was tragedy for all concerned. In Goldwyn's version, the feud comes to a halt because Roseanna and Johnse demand it; would that real life were this simple and clear-cut. Based on a novel by Alberta Hannum, Roseanna McCoy was released through the distribution channels of RKO Radio. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is a listless Manhattan businessman who lives with his wife in the New York suburbs. One day, he runs into an old friend (Murray Hamilton) whom he thought had died. The friend leads him to The Company, a secretive operation run by The Old Man (Will Geer). The Company is a high-tech service which, for a price, provides older men with plastic surgery, a beefed-up body, and a fresh start in life. To cover the "disappearance," a middle-aged male cadaver is "killed" in a hotel fire. Hamilton submits to the operation that will turn him into a "Second," and when the bandages are removed, he's shed twenty years, renamed Tony Wilson and is portrayed by Rock Hudson. The Company creates a new identity for Hamilton, relocating him in a hedonistic California beach community with an identity as a painter. Celebrating during a local wine festival, Hamilton has his revelry cut short when he learns that all his new young friends are Seconds like himself and suddenly feels trapped in these surroundings. Unfortunately, finding a way out isn't nearly as easy as it was to find a way in. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Doris Day peers through layers of camera gauze to star in The Ballad of Josie, a second-rate variation of Cat Ballou. For openers, Day is arrested for the billiard-cue bludgeoning of her late husband. Upon her acquittal, she takes up sheep ranching in Wyoming. To prove herself as good as any man, Day organizes the other frontier wives into a woman's suffrage movement. She succeeds in establishing her equality, winning good-guy Peter Graves in the process. Ballad of Josie was produced by Norman MacDonnell, who was on firmer Western ground when he was producer of the radio and TV series Gunsmoke. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After he is robbed and beaten by a gang of punks, Richard Kimble (David Janssen)--or as he is currently identifying himself, "Richard Taylor"--falls under the scrutiny of ambitious policewoman Jane Washburn (Shirley Knight). Her suspicions aroused by the fact that Kimble refuses to report the mugging to the authorities, Jane handcuffs herself to the fugitive, determined not to let him leave her side until she finds out his whole story. This fascinating gender-bending variation on the 1957 "chase" film The Defiant Ones) reaches a nailbiting climax when both Kimble and his lovely captor find themselves at the mercy of a gun-wielding backwoodsman. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

"Just one word: plastic." "Are you here for an affair?" These lines and others became cultural touchstones, as 1960s youth rebellion seeped into the California upper middle-class in Mike Nichols' landmark hit. Mentally adrift the summer after graduating from college, suburbanite Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) would rather float in his parents' pool than follow adult advice about his future. But the exhortation of family friend Mr. Robinson (Murray Hamilton) to seize every possible opportunity inspires Ben to accept an offer of sex from icily feline Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). The affair and the pool are all well and good until Ben is pushed to go out with the Robinsons' daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) and he falls in love with her. Mrs. Robinson sabotages the relationship and an understandably disgusted Elaine runs back to college. Determined not to let Elaine get away, Ben follows her to school and then disrupts her family-sanctioned wedding. None too happy about her pre-determined destiny, Elaine flees with Ben -- but to what? Directing his second feature film after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols matched the story's satire of suffocating middle-class shallowness with an anti-Hollywood style influenced by the then-voguish French New Wave. Using odd angles, jittery editing, and evocative widescreen photography, Nichols welded a hip New Wave style and a generation-gap theme to a fairly traditional screwball comedy script by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham from Charles Webb's novel. Adding to the European art film sensibility, the movie offers an unsettling and ambiguous ending with no firm closure. And rather than Robert Redford, Nichols opted for a less glamorous unknown for the pivotal role of Ben, turning Hoffman into a star and opening the door for unconventional leading men throughout the 1970s. With a pop-song score written by Paul Simon and performed by Simon & Garfunkel bolstering its contemporary appeal, The Graduate opened to rave reviews in December 1967 and surpassed all commercial expectations. It became the top-grossing film of 1968 and was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Actor, and Actress, with Nichols winning Best Director. Together with Bonnie and Clyde, it stands as one of the most influential films of the late '60s, as its mordant dissection of the generation gap helped lead the way to the youth-oriented Hollywood artistic "renaissance" of the early '70s. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

The George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner was inspired by the authors' mutual friend, waspish critic/author Alexander Woollcott. Generously bearded ex-Yale professor Monty Woolley, no mean curmudgeon himself, plays the Woollcott character, here rechristened Sheridan Whiteside. While on a lecture tour in Ohio, Whiteside slips on the ice outside his hosts' home; until his broken leg heals, the hosts (Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke) are forced to put up (and put up with) the imperious Whiteside. This means enduring an unending stream of Whiteside's whims, caprices and vitriolic bon mots, as well as his long-distance phone calls, eccentric guests and a variety of critters, ranging from penguins to octopi. Like the real Woollcott, Whiteside insists upon stage-managing the lives of everyone around him. He is particularly keen on discouraging a romance between his faithful secretary Maggie Cutler (top-billed Bette Davis) and local newspaper editor Bert Jefferson (Richard Travis). Once he realizes he's gone too far in this respect, Whiteside is forced to reunite the lovers. That's only one aspect of a three-ring-circus plotline that accommodates a Lizzie Bordenish axe murderess, takeoffs of Woollcott intimates Harpo Marx, Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, and a general practitioner who's willing to let his patients suffer for a chance to pitch his interminable memoirs to Whiteside. Featured in the cast are Jimmy Durante as "Banjo" (the Harpo clone), Reginald Gardiner as the Noel Coward-like Beverly Carlton, Anne Sheridan as the predatory Gertrude Lawrence counterpart Lorraine Sheldon, and Mary Wickes as the long-suffering Nurse Preen ("You have the touch of a love-starved cobra!") The script, by the Epstein brothers, manages to retain most of the play's best lines and situations, even while expanding Bette Davis' role to justify her start status; it's a shame, though, that we are robbed of Sheridan Whiteside's imperishable opening line, "I may vomit!" ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide