Phil Harvey Movies

In this taut thriller, an aging safe-cracker's daughter gets involved with a petty gangster who is always looking for the big heist that will make him a rich man. The fellow reminds her of her father, but this doesn't stop her from attending his latest crime and acting as a look out. Her boyfriend proves to be a lousy safe-cracker and the heist fails. The woman goes back to her night club singing gig. She then gets involved with the club owner. Meanwhile her father has found a female lock-picker and fallen in love. Later the girl is forced to join her father and his lover on a heist. The club owner also comes and ends up shot by the father's girl friend. The poor daughter ends up convicted of the crime and given the death penalty. Just before she is to fry, the real killer bursts in and confesses. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this sci-fi film, a college professor must deal with the cataclysmic consequences that ensue when a transmogrifying dragonfly bites a prehistoric fish from Madagascar. Soon after the bite, the strange fish becomes gigantic and begins passing on its new ability to morph all it comes in contact with back into their primal forms. When it bites a dog, the dog becomes a wolf. When some fish slime ends up in the professor's pipe, the professor put it to his lips, and he turns into a rampaging Neanderthal with a very large stone-axe that he freely wields around the terrified college campus. Bloody mayhem ensues. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this sensitive drama, a commercial artist is devastated by his tiny daughter's death and takes to drinking to numb the terrible pain. Soon he has become a full-blown alcoholic. His loving wife and caring doctor are unable to help. He wants to stop drinking, but he simply cannot until he meets another alcoholic who is also desperate to stop. Together, they support each other as they withdraw from the debilitating drug. Later the fellow founds an organization designed to help other drunks dry out by offering them the same kind of support he had. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This baroque nightmare of a south-of-the-border mystery is considered to be one of the great movies of Orson Welles, who both directed and starred in it. On honeymoon with his new bride, Susan (Janet Leigh), Mexican-born policeman Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) agrees to investigate a bomb explosion. In so doing, he incurs the wrath of local police chief Hank Quinlan (Welles), a corrupt, bullying behemoth with a perfect arrest record. Vargas suspects that Quinlan has planted evidence to win his past convictions, and he isn't about to let the suspect in the current case be railroaded. Quinlan, whose obsession with his own brand of justice is motivated by the long-ago murder of his wife, is equally determined to get Vargas out of his hair, and he makes a deal with local crime boss Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) to frame Susan on a drug rap, leading to one of the movie's many truly harrowing sequences. Touch of Evil dissects the nature of good and evil in a hallucinatory, nightmarish ambience, helped by the shadow-laden cinematography of Russell Metty and by the cast, which, along with Tamiroff and Welles includes Charlton Heston as a Mexican; Marlene Dietrich, in a brunette wig, as a brittle madam who delivers the movie's unforgettable closing words; Mercedes McCambridge as a junkie; and Dennis Weaver as a tremulous motel clerk. Touch of Evil has been released with four different running times -- 95 minutes for the 1958 original, which was taken away from Welles and brutally cut by the studio; 108 minutes and 114 minutes in later versions; and 111 minutes in the 1998 restoration. Based on a 58-page memo written by Welles after he was barred from the editing room during the film's original post-production, this restoration, among numerous other changes, removed the opening titles and Henry Mancini's music from the opening crane shot, which in either version ranks as one of the most remarkably extended long takes in movie history. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

William Faulkner's novel Pylon was optioned by Universal producer Albert Zugsmith, who used it as the source for his 1957 production The Tarnished Angels. Robert Stack is a disillusioned World War One ace eking out a living as a barnstorming pilot/parachutist during the early 1930s. New Orleans newspaperman Rock Hudson runs across Stack at a two-bit carnival. He becomes fascinated with Stack's fall from grace, and latches onto him. As he is drawn into Stack's iconoclastic, individualistic lifestyle, Hudson finds he is also drawn to the pilot's long-suffering wife, Dorothy Malone. Jack Carson is on hand as Stack's chief mechanic, whose anger over the pilot's abusive treatment of Malone explodes into tragedy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In some ways, the coming-attractions trailer for The Monolith Monsters is more exciting than the picture itself. The plot gets under way when a meteor crashes in the desert, leaving behind huge black chunks. While being analyzed in a science lab, the crystaline stones are accidentally drenched with water, whereupon they begin to grow to gargantuan dimensions. In a twinkling, these monster monoliths are running amok, "petrifying" whomever and whatever gets in their way. A sudden rainstorm further exacerbates the situation, causing the monoliths to grow to hitherto unimagined heights. Can the world be saved by the saline solution which the scientists are hurriedly developed in the lab? The notion of killer rocks was certainly a novelty: it would have been nice if Monolith Monsters had consistently lived up to the promise of its premise. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Four Girls in Town is essentially an excuse by Universal-International to test out several of their newer contractees. The plot is motivated by a worldwide movie talent hunt, which naturally arouses the attentions of a bevy of pretty young aspiring actresses. The four girls of the title are Kathy Sonway (Julie Adams, who'd been appearing in films since 1950), Ina Schiller (Germany's Marianne Cook, nee Koch), Maria Antonelli (Italy's Elsa Martinelli) and Vicki Dauray (Gia Scala, also from Italy but herein portraying a Frenchwoman). Conducting the screen tests is budding director Mike Snowden (George Nader), who predictably falls in love with one of the hopefuls. Some laughs are had at the expense of Universal's rival 20th Century-Fox in the person of Helene Stanton, cast as a Marilyn Monroe clone named "Rita Holloway". ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide