Louis Jean Heydt Movies

Rawhide is a westernized remake of the 1936 crime melodrama Show Them No Mercy. Tyrone Power stars as Tom Owens, the assistant manager of a remote stagecoach way station. A coach arrives, bearing Vinnie Holt (Susan Hayward), who carries her baby niece in her arms. Having learned that an outlaw gang is in the vicinity, Owens advises Vinnie to hold up at the station until the next day. Shortly thereafter, the gang arrives and kills stationmaster Sam Todd (Edgar Buchanan). Outlaw leader Zimmerman (Hugh Marlowe), assuming that Owens and Vinnie are the baby's parents, decides not to kill them as well but to hold them prisoner while he and his men await the arrival of a gold shipment. Tension mounts as the relatively civilized Zimmerman argues with his psychotic henchman Tevis (Jack Elam) over the fate of the "married couple." Meanwhile, Owens tries to think up an escape plan for himself, Vinnie and the child. The film closes with a nail-biting shootout, with the baby in the thick of the fray. So as to avoid confusion with the TV series of the same name, Rawhide was retitled Desperate Siege for its first television showing in 1962. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Using elements of two earlier films, The Fleet's In and Lady Be Careful, Paramount came up with the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicle Sailor Beware. As usual, Jerry Lewis is the helpless goof and Dean Martin the suave ladies' man; this time Lewis is a navy recruit while Martin is his submarine-officer buddy. The film skips from one comic setpiece to another (the best is a parody of radio audience participation shows) until it reaches the slapstick climax: A boxing match pitting Lewis against the navy champion. After a few very funny moments in which Lewis pretends to be a punch drunk pug, the match commences, much to the dismay of Lewis and the delight of his fervent fan following. Martin makes good use of his screen time by romancing an "ice princess" movie star (Corinne Calvert), who of course melts once Dino turns on the charm. Betty Hutton, star of Sailor Beware's precursor The Fleet's In, pops up at the beginning and end of the Martin/Lewis epic as "Hetty Button." And watch for an unbilled James Dean as one of the team's shipmates. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Paramount's Ray Milland and 20th Century-Fox's Gene Tierney star in Warner Bros.' Close to My Heart. The stars play, respectively, journalist Brad Sheridan and his wife Midge. Unable to have children of her own, Midge opts for adoption, thereby subjecting her husband and herself to the very exacting requirements of adoption agencies. Upon learning of an abandoned child left at a police station, Midge determines to claim the baby for her own, but Brad refuses to go along with his wife's plans until he can find out something more about the child's parents. Brad's feverish above-and-beyond search for the facts make him a highly unreliable adoption risk--but there's still hope for a happy ending. Ironically, star Gene Tierney was still trying to cope with the personal tragedy of giving birth to a severely retarded daughter while filming Close to My Heart. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston give standout performances in this dark, psychological western, which Martin Scorsese has compared to the work of Dostoevsky. T.C. Jeffords (Huston) is a cunning and highly successful ranch owner who has announced his engagement to a wealthy socialite, Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson). This news is not warmly received by his daughter Vance (Stanwyck); she had a romance of her own with gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey) foiled by her father, and Vance does not care for her light-headed stepmother-to-be. Vance is driven into a violent rage by T.C.'s Machiavellian actions, and when he kills a good friend of Vance's (a ranch hand he believes was helping Mexicans squat on his land), she swears revenge on her father and joins forces with Darrow to see that violent justice is done. The Furies proved to be Walter Huston's last film; he died within a few months of its release. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Director Kurt Neumann, more closely associated with science fiction and mystery programmers, delivers a powerhouse of a pocket western in Bad Men of Tombstone. Barry Sullivan and Broderick Crawford head the cast as a pair of gunslingers who hold no regrets and evidently harbor no consciences. They ride into a mining camp during the Gold Rush days and set about staking a claim--and woe be unto him who gets in the way. A blood-splattered gunfight is the logical conclusion when the two gunfighters have their final falling out. Screenwriters Philip Yordan and Arthur Strawn clearly hold their leading characters in contempt, but can't help imbuing them with a certain degree of fascination. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Make Believe Ballroom is a feature-length derivation of the popular LA-based radio series of the same name. Hosted by Martin Block and then by Al Jarvis, the original Ballroom was a combination disc-jockey program and quiz show. Jarvis plays himself in the film version, introducing such musical artists as Frankie Laine, the King Cole Trio,Jack Smith, Kay Starr, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Dorsey, Jan Garber, Gene Krupa and Pee Wee Hunt. The barely relevant plot concerns two carhops, Gene Thomas (Jerome Courtland) and Josie Marlow (Virginia Welles), who participate in the question-and-answer portion of the radio series. Though competitors on the air, Gene and Josie eventually fall in love. The supporting cast is filled with such stock Columbia players as Sid Tomack, Adele Jergens, and Vernon Dent. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In the RKO swashbuckler Sinbad the Sailor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. nostalgically emulates his famous father. The first seven voyages of Sinbad have come and gone: now he is on an eighth mission, in search of the island where Alexander the Great allegedly hid his treasure. Participants in the proceedings are the incredibly gorgeous Maureen O'Hara as a feisty princess, Walter Slezak as a duplicitous green-skinned barber, George Tobias and Mike Mazurki as two of Sinbad's faithful seamen, and Anthony Quinn as the villain of villains, who meets a suitably fiery demise. If the plot seems well nigh impossible to follow at times, you can always wallow in the splendiferous Technicolor and the eye-popping stunt work of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (and, it must be admitted, his uncredited stunt double). Budgeted at nearly $3 million, Sinbad the Sailor was one of the few postwar RKO flicks to post a profit. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The "spoilers" in this Republic programmer are headed by unscrupulous salmon fisherman Matt Garraway (Paul Kelly). Treating women and competitors with equal contempt, Garraway charms and abandons such lovelies as Laura Reed (Evelyn Ankers) and Jane Koster (Adrian Booth). Having persuaded Laura to put up money for his fish cannery, Garraway drops her like a bad habit and begins pursuing Jane, so that she'll recruit her Native American friends to do some off-season salmon fishing. Jane's brother Pete (Francis McDonald) figures out long before anyone else does that Garraway is a no-good, and he sets the wheels in motion for the villain's ultimate downfall. Even if the opening credits had been removed, audiences would have known that Spoilers of the North was a Republic picture when Roy Barcroft showed up as Greenaway's chief henchman. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

William Powell plays a cynical con man who graduates from penny-ante operations to a big-time charity racket. The scam involves collecting money on behalf of St. Dismas, bringing Powell in close contact with several men of the cloth. As the racket rolls on, Powell is touched by the sincerity of the religious men and the plights of the charity's rightful recipients. He has a change of heart, confessing his original criminal intentions but seeing to it that the money goes to the right people. Hoodlum Saint was typical of the facile religiosity often found in MGM pictures of the period. The film is best remembered as the first non-aquatic performance of MGM swimming star Esther Williams. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

"You can live a long time in three days -- sometimes when you're in a tight spot, you can live a year in ten seconds." US Army Air Force Major Bob Collins (Robert Cummings), Captain "Shakespeare" Anders (Don Defore), and Lt. "Handsome" Janoshek (Charles Drake) are three happy-go-lucky combat pilots, decorated heroes who are on a tour promoting War Bonds. Their public relations representative from the Treasury Department, Ivy Hotchkiss (Lizabeth Scott), finds at first that can't do much more than tag along, picking up after them and observing their carousing, especially Collins, who seems to have a wide array of female acquaintances in every city they visit. Indeed, although she says little about it, their carousing is out-of-proportion to their circumstances -- yes, their current mission involves a lot of cramped traveling cross-country. shaking hands, endless speechifying, and even more endless listening to tributes to the heroism of the air corps, all of which gets boring and tiring very fast; but these men act like they're burning the candle at both ends, almost manic in their pursuit of women and laughs, and just as devoted to the three of them enjoying anything they do together, past the point of pilots' usual comraderie. They go so far as to sneak out ahead of one extremely important rally, but eventually Ivy gets them to straighten up and fly right, at least when they're supposed to, and the trio -- who has taken a liking to her for being such as good sport -- agrees to behave, at least when they're supposed to be meeting the public. After a few more misunderstandings, some of them comical, she actually gets to like the trio; the four of them become friends, and Ivy starts getting especially close to Bob, despite his womanizing ways -- but whenever she asks Handsome and Shakespeare about Bob's story, they get very close-mouthed and vague. She doesn't think too much of it, enjoying the time she's having with them, until the truth is accidentally dumped in her lap by a well-meaning medical officer (Rhys Williams) -- that Bob, for all of his freewheeling, happy-go-lucky outlook on life and love, is terminally ill. She suddenly understands their behavior and the true depth of the friendship that Handsome and Shakespeare share with him -- she's also nearly shattered, but she dares not let Bob know that she knows, for fear of destroying what little time he has left. The trio at last becomes a true foursome, bound together around Bob and Ivy. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Newspaper reporter Marion Hargrove's best-selling novel was adapted to the screen by MGM as a vehicle for Robert Walker. The story is basically a series of humorous anecdotes about Hargrove's tenure at boot camp in the early days of World War II. Keenan Wynn is terrific as Hargrove's topkick, and Robert Benchley is no less superb as the father of Hargrove's girl friend (Donna Reed). See Here, Private Hargrove not only secured the stardom of Robert Walker, but launched Marion Hargrove on a lengthy career as a Hollywood screenwriter (his son, Dean Hargrove, has carried on the tradition into TV). The film was followed by a lesser 1946 sequel, What Next, Corporal Hargrove?, which followed the leading character to France. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this crazy comedy, a casino worker writes a book about headhunters and finds himself the target of the leader of an anthropological society who is determined to prove that the book is phony. The writer tricks the woman into going on a head-hunting expedition to prove his claims. He dresses up as a headhunter, and allows her to capture and return him to her society for study. Dressed as a native, the writer also manages to secure a $10,000 advance from his publisher to write an expose of the wealthy society-leader's life. Meanwhile, another heiress pursues the writer to collect on a $10,000 debt. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This irresistably-titled comedy is arguably the best of RKO Radio's Wally Brown-Alan Carney vehicles. The daffy duo is cast once more as Jerry Miles and Mike Strager, this time employed as Broadway press agents. Mike and Jerry's latest scheme is to hire a genuine zombie for the opening of a new nightclub. The boys head to a mysterious tropical island with cabaret singer Jean la Dance (Anne Jeffreys), where they cross swords with looney zombie expert Professor Renault (Bela Lugosi). Barely escaping with their lives, Jerry and Jean return to Manhattan with a "zombified" Mike, who is under the spell of Renault's secret formula. When Mike snaps out of his trance, the boys must face the wrath of nasty nightclub owner Ace Miller (Sheldon Leonard), who's a lot more frightening than any zombie. Zombies on Broadway turned a neat profit for RKO, encouraging the studio to reteam Brown, Carney, Anne Jeffreys and Bela Lugosi in the far less satisfying Genius at Work (1946). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide