Larry Gates Movies

Dean Martin plays an easygoing Southern politician, long on charm but short on brains. Susan Hayward, a poor girl with rich ideas, marries Martin and endeavors to engineer him into the governor's chair. Though no saint herself, Hayward is determined to overcome the good-old-boy corruption infesting the state government. She emerges triumphant after a public showdown with crafty politico Wilfred Hyde-White. Based on a novel by Wirt Williams,Ada was produced by the same team that had guided Susan Hayward to an Oscar nomination for I'll Cry Tomorrow. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A skeleton in a museum collection of Native American artifacts catches the eye of a man named Newton Clovis (Myron McCormick). Curator Clay Hollister (Larry Gates) insists that the skeleton is that of an Indian, but Newton suspects otherwise. In flashback, we learn that Newton is absolutely right, and that Hollister had once been on somewhat intimate terms with the skeleton's owner, thanks to a sensational murder case involving Hollister's late son, Ben (Bert Convy). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on the best-selling memoirs of Lillian Rogers Parks, the NBC miniseries Backstairs at the White House traces over five decades of American political history as witnessed from the vantage point of the servants' quarters. Played by Tania Johnson as a teenager and by Leslie Uggams as an adult, Lillian Rogers Parks served for 52 years as a maidservant at the White House. Though crippled early on with polio, Lillian diligently and loyally stuck to her duties -- and her own rock-solid set of principles and ideals -- through eight highly different Presidential administrations, often (and occasionally reluctantly) acting as friend and confidante to the First Lady of the moment. The large and stellar cast included a number of top-rank film and TV actors, obviously having the time of their lives impersonating such presidents as William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and their respective wives. Also in the cast were several African-American veterans from the landmark TV miniseries Roots. Earning 11 Emmy Award nominations, the nine-hour Backstairs at the White House was seen in five installments from January 29 to February 19, 1979. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This dynamic and commanding adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play focuses on a troubled Southern family and the discord over their dying father's millions. Wealthy plantation owner Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives), celebrating his 65th birthday, is visited by his sons, Brick (Paul Newman) and Gooper (Jack Carson). He has cancer, but a doctor has deliberately and falsely declared it in remission. Seemingly perfect son Gooper and his wife, Mae (Madeleine Sherwood), have several children and are anxiously expecting to inherit Daddy's millions. By contrast, Big Daddy's "favorite," Brick, is a has-been football star who's taken to drinking his days away since the suicide of his "best friend" a year earlier. He resents his wife, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), because he believes that she had an affair with his deceased friend. As a result, he refuses to sleep with her, although she remains devoted to him. Since Brick and Maggie have failed to produce any grandchildren, Big Daddy is inclined to leave his estate to Gooper, but Maggie attempts to prevent that by telling him that she is pregnant. Big Daddy knows better, yet he recognizes that Maggie loves Brick so much that she would be willing to do anything for him. Although Brick is self-destructive and resentful, unable to come to terms with his losses, it takes Big Daddy's recognition of his own mortality to make Brick change his perspective. Brick's struggle with his sexual identity, and the nature of his relationship with his "friend," had to be toned down for mass consumption, although this intelligently written and acted film covers such topics as infertility, adultery, and alcoholism that were still considered taboo in the 1950s. Newman brings depth and feeling to the role as Brick, while Taylor succeeds brilliantly in portraying Maggie as a passionate and understanding woman despite her own real-life emotional turmoil over the death of her husband at the time, producer Mike Todd. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Famed anonymous director Alan Smithee (in this case a hybrid of Richard Totten and Don Siegel), directed this turgid western drama concerning Marshal Frank Patch (Richard Widmark), who, even though he has kept the peace in Cottonwood Springs for over twenty years, is now considered a local joke by the town liberals who want some new blood in the Marshall's Office. They get it when Patch shoots the drunken Luke Mills (James Lydon) in self-defense. Now the forces of progress really want Patch out. So much so that the local newspaper editor, Andrew Oxley (Kent Smith) demands his resignation. Patch not only refuses to quit but disgraces Oxley so badly in front of his son Will (Mercer Harris) that Oxley kills himself. Will is now out for blood, but Patch remains stoic, even when his old friend Lou (John Saxon) comes to town to advise him to quit. Patch refuses Lou's suggestion but decides to marry Claire (Lena Horne), the owner of the local saloon and whore house. But an uninvited guest attends the wedding ceremony --Will. And both Will and his gun are loaded. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In this fourth of the "Francis" series, former Army officer Peter Stirling (Donald O'Connor) becomes a reporter for a big city newspaper. His greatest source of news tips is his talking mule Francis (voice by Chill Wills), who has become friendly with all the police horses. When asked how he manages to stay abreast of the news, Peter tries to explain about Francis, and is not unexpectedly labelled a looney-tune. But when Peter is brought to court on a homicide charge, Francis breaks his self-imposed rule of talking only to Peter and testifies on his master's behalf. With Francis' aid, Peter cracks the murder case and is graduated to star reporter. At fadeout time, Francis is seen wooing a female zebra, explaining "Don't let the striped pajamas fool ya." Francis Covers Big Town is harmless fun, bolstered by an expert supporting cast, including the always reliable Gene Lockhart (as Peter's editor) and Gale Gordon (as a flustered D.A.). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Authentic New Orleans locations enhance the overall enjoyment of the prizefight melodrama Glory Alley. A mere few seconds before a championship bout, Socks Barbarrosa (Ralph Meeker) decides to throw in the towel so far as his boxing career is concerned. Socks' friends, family and handlers assume that he's turned yellow. A series of complex flashbacks, coupled with a subsequent tour of duty in Korea, prove otherwise. For those not interested in cinematic pugilism, Glory Alley offers such sidelines pleasures as the jazz music of Jack Teagarden and the dancing of leading lady Leslie Caron. Kurt Kazner also provides some choice moments as a blind "boxing groupie" who happens to be Caron's father. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

John Sturges directed this sequel to his Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which is more of a melancholy character study than an action Western. The Edward Anhalt screenplay (based on Douglas D. Martin's Tombstone's Epitaph) traces Wyatt Earp's (James Garner) moral decline from a lawman with high ideals to a mean-spirited vigilante bent on personal revenge. Ironically, Doc Holliday (Jason Robards), an admitted lawless gambler, reacts to Earp's vengeful turnabout by becoming the moral force that Earp has rejected. When Earp's brothers are killed by goons employed by Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan), Earp becomes obsessed with vengeance and organizes a posse to track down the killers. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Don Siegel's classic exercise in psychological science fiction has often been interpreted as a cautionary fable about the blacklisting hysteria of the McCarthy era. It can be read as a political metaphor or enjoyed as a fine low-budget suspense movie, and it works well either way. Kevin McCarthy stars as Miles Bennel, a doctor in the small California community of Santa Mira, where several patients begin reporting that their loved ones don't seem to be themselves lately. They look the same but seem cold, emotionally distant, and somehow unfamiliar. The longer Miles looks into these reports, the more stock he places in them, and in time he makes a shocking discovery: aliens from another world are taking over Santa Mira, one citizen at a time. Emissaries from a distant planet have sent massive seed pods containing creatures that can assume the exact physical likeness of anyone they choose. When Santa Mirans go to sleep, the pod creatures take on the shape of their victims and then destroy their bodies. The aliens may look the same, but they possess no human emotions and, like plants, are concerned only with propagating themselves and eventually subsuming the earth. Needless to say, Miles and his friends are terrified, but since it's hard to tell who's a person and who's a pod, they're at a loss for what to do, especially when it seems that there are increasingly more aliens than humans. Invasion of the Body Snatchers builds tension slowly and steadily, dealing not in the shock of bug-eyed monsters common to other 1950s science-fiction movies but in the unnerving possibility that the enemy is among us -- and impossible to tell from our allies. The ultra-paranoid conclusion of Siegel's original cut was softened by Allied Artists, who added a framing device that suggested help was on the way. This coda was as effective in blunting the film's grim conclusion as giving a Band-Aid to a beheading victim; few films of the era make it more painfully clear that for these people (and maybe for ourselves), there's no turning back and no way home. Keep an eye peeled for a bit part by soon-to-be-legendary Western director Sam Peckinpah, who plays a meter reader and also (uncredited) helped write the screenplay. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade in 1978 by Philip Kaufman and in 1993 by Abel Ferrara (as Body Snatchers); and its influence can be felt from The Stepford Wives (1975) to The X-Files. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

One of the most ambitious productions ever undertaken during the era of "live" television, this adaptation of Walter Lord's best-seller A Night to Remember successfully conveys the full scope and horror of the sinking of the superliner Titanic on April 14, 1912. Utilizing seven cameras, 31 different sets and over 100 actors, director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting), meticulously recreates the last three hours of the Titanic from the moment it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic to its final descent beneath the waves, carrying some 1500 souls to a watery grave. Like Lord's book, John Whedon's adaptation emphasizes the element of fate in the tragedy, noting the hundred-and-one ways in which the disaster could have been averted, and also offers brief, poignant character vignettes, illustrating individual moments of courage and cowardice. Although there is plenty of dialogue, the dominant voice in the proceedings is narrator Claude Rains, who dispassionately dispenses the chronology of the disaster, minute by minute, as the viewer watches them unfold. Featured in the enormous cast is a pre-Avengers Patrick Macnee as Thomas Andrews, benighted designer of the Titanic. This version of A Night to Remember was originally telecast as an episode of the NBC anthology Kraft Television Theater; it was subsequently restaged for British viewers by the BBC, and was ultimately adapted as a theatrical feature in 1958 (long, long before either Kate Winslet or Leonardo DiCaprio were even born). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

TV producer Aaron Spelling first came up with the story for this standard western set in a small town just after the American Civil War. Mitch (Alan Ladd) has tragically lost his wife during a problem in her pregnancy because he could not come up with $1.87 for the medicine she needed. A little twisted right from the beginning, he vows revenge. In the first step toward his goal, he gets the post of deputy sheriff from the repentant townspeople. In the second step, he murders the sheriff and then recruits a gang of disreputable toughs to steal $100,000 and bankrupt the town. In the last and fatal part of his plan for vengeance, he turns on his own gang of thieves. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Pueblo is a 2-hour videotaped special, originally telecast March 29, 1973 on ABC Theatre. Hal Holbrook stars as commander Lloyd M. Bucher, who in January of 1968 was forced to surrender the USS Pueblo to North Korea. The drama is staged in an impressionistic manner, with dramatized transcripts from Bucher's subsequent Naval Review Board testimony flashing back to isolated moments of terror and torment during the Pueblo crew's 11-month sojourn in a North Korean prison camp. Despite network restrictions of the era, Pueblo is refreshingly frank, right down to the first-ever TV display of a familiar obscene gesture (which the American prisoners explain away to their captors as a "salute"!) Written by Stanley R. Greenberg, Pueblo was later adapted to a stage play, starring Shepperd Strudwick as Bucher. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide