Marianna Hill Movies

In his final Untouchables appearance, Lee Marvin is cast as Chicago cop Mike Brannon, a veteran of fifteen years on the force. Alas, Brannon's experience means very little when he is suspended after mobster Tony Lamberto (Frank DeKova) complains that Mike has roughed up one of his "boys". Outraged by a system that punishes honest cops while letting hoodlums walk free, Brannon and his four brothers form a vigilante group, "The Fist of Five". Dressed in police uniforms and driving a phony squad car, Brannon boys intend to destroy Lamberto by playing his own crooked game--something that Elliot Ness (Robert Stack), for all his hatred of punks like Lamberto, simply can't allow. Featured in the cast as Keir Brannon is a young James Caan. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This violent, gore-filled, effective horror tale by director Robert Gordon is about a totally wacko private zoo keeper, Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) whose literal worship of the animals he tends -- especially the cat species -- starkly contrasts with his cold-blooded disregard for human life. Conrad has a mute son Carl (Rod Lauren) with a simmering Oedipal hatred, and a wife who should have left him eons ago. Whenever Conrad gets miffed with anyone coming a little too close to his private affairs he simply feeds the hapless victim to the animals. It seems inevitable that if the animals do not get him, then the human species will. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In Volume 41 of a collection culled from the 1963-1965 science fiction anthology television series, a robot goes on trial following charges it killed its creator. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Written by Alex Sharp, the comic episode "Ponderosa Matador" finds the Cartwright boys vying for the attention of the lovely Dolores (Marianna Hill), the daughter of Ben's house guest Señor Tenino (Nestor Paiva). Discovering that Dolores is an aficionado of the bull ring, the boys decide to impress her with a staged bullfight. As a result, Viriginia City is nearly reduced to rubble by a rampaging toro! Originally scheduled to air on November 24, 1963, "Ponderosa Matador" was pre-empted due to the ongoing TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination; the episode was finally shown on January 12, 1964. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

While on a routine stop at Tantalus, a rehabilitation facility -- the twenty-third century equivalent of a hospital for the criminally insane -- the starship Enterprise is involved in an unsuccessful escape attempt. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) knows of the sterling reputation of Tantalus under its enlightened director, Dr. Tristan Adams (James Gregory), but he is compelled to investigate, due in part to the concerns of chief medical officer McCoy (DeForest Kelley) over the fragile mental condition of the would-be escapee, Simon Van Gelder (Morgan Woodward) -- and to the fact that Van Gelder is not an inmate at Tantalus, but was assigned there as Adams' assistant. While McCoy tries to help Van Gelder, with some assistance from Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and his Vulcan mind-meld (the first time this is seen in the series), Kirk and a psychiatric expert, Dr. Noelle (Marianna Hill), beam down to the colony. They discover that Adams has been experimenting with a very powerful and dangerous device, the neural neutralizer, using it on staff members as well as inmates to control their thoughts and psyches -- and won't tolerate any interference or inquiries from Kirk or anyone else. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Like the first-season Mission: Impossible episode "The Ransom," the second-season installment "The Condemned" is an unusual departure from the series' format. Racing against the clock, Jim Phelps hopes to save the life of his close friend Kevin Hagen, who has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in a Spanish prison. Unbeknownst to anyone, the "murder victim" is actually alive and well and living under an assumed name. Other plot wrinkles include the disappearance of a diamond tiara and the curious behavior of Webster's ex-sweetheart Luisa Rojas (Mariana Hill). First telecast January 28 1968, "The Execution" was written by Laurence Heath. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

"I love to shoot film" is the sanguine motto of TV lensman John Cassellis (Robert Forster) in Haskell Wexler's 1969 Medium Cool, a semi-documentary investigation of image-making and politics. With his soundman, Gus (Peter Bonerz), John films such events as gruesome car wrecks with frosty detachment, considering himself a mere recorder of circumstances, his only responsibility to get his film in on time. Even his girlfriend, Ruth (Marianna Hill), cannot understand or penetrate John's complacency. Encounters with signs of the late '60s times, however, raise John's consciousness about the implications of his job, as he films a verbal attack by black militants on the media's racism, gets fired after he objects to having that footage turned over to the FBI, and meets Vietnam War widow Eileen (Verna Bloom). John witnesses the violence of the state firsthand as he and Eileen search for her son amidst the real-life demonstrations and riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Even though he realizes the political power of pointing a camera at anything, John finally cannot extricate himself or his loved ones from a culture obsessed with recording any sensational, gory incident. Scripted (from a novel by Jack Couffer), directed, and shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer and political activist Wexler, Medium Cool systematically questions the ideological power of images by combining documentary techniques such as "talking heads" and cinéma vérité with staged scenes between the actors. By the time Wexler and his crew start filming Forster and Bloom among the actual events at the convention, all barriers between fiction and fact are broken down, as Wexler's assistant can be heard warning, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," when tear gas is thrown. The footage of cops clubbing people in the crowd is real, but Wexler's presence also turns it into part of a fictional story, revealing filmed "reality" to be as artificially constructed as any other fiction, subject to the interpretation of whoever holds the camera and, perhaps, to larger institutions of power.

Funding Medium Cool partly out of his own resources, Wexler had free reign during production, but when the execs at Paramount saw the result, they were not pleased. Despite the timely subject matter, Paramount delayed and then curtailed the film's release, tempering its impact on critics and audiences. Regardless of that record, Medium Cool stands as a vital late-'60s film for its incisive narrative and formal dissection of the visual politics of "truth," and its awareness of how coolly seductive televised violence might be as entertainment, especially in a historical moment marked by incendiary images of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and counterculture protests. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

In this unusual black comedy, Stacy Keach plays Jonas Candide, a former carnival showman who roams the southern U.S. in 1918 with a portable electric chair. He offers his services as a freelance executioner for $100 a pop. He takes a job in a prison in Alabama, where he is supposed to execute a young woman named Gundred Herzallerliebst (Marianna Hill) and her brother. He electrocutes the brother first. On the night before she is scheduled to die, Gundred seduces Jonas and he falls for her. Jonas tries to get Doc Prittle (Graham Jarvis) to help him fake her execution, but the doctor demands a high price. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

In this adventure, a stereotypical hippie couple hitchhikes around California and meets various odd people ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide

"Who are you?" the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwood's Stranger at the end of Eastwood's 1973 western High Plains Drifter. "You know," he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near California's Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name persona from his films with Sergio Leone, Eastwood's second film as director begins as his drifter emerges from that heat haze and rides into the odd lakefront settlement of Lago. Lago's residents are not particularly friendly, but once the Stranger shows his skills as a gunfighter, they beg him to defend them against a group of outlaws (led by Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis) who have a score to settle with the town. He agrees to train them in self-defense, but Mordecai and innkeeper's wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) soon suspect that the Stranger has another, more personal agenda. By the time the Stranger makes the corrupt community paint their town red and re-name it "Hell," it is clear that he is not just another gunslinger. With its fragmented flashbacks and bizarre, austere locations, High Plains Drifter's stylistic eccentricity lends an air of unsettling eeriness to its revenge story, adding an uncanny slant to Eastwood's antiheroic westerner. Seminal western hero John Wayne was so offended by Eastwood's harshly revisionist view of a frontier town that he wrote to Eastwood, objecting that this was not what the spirit of the West was all about. Eastwood's audience, however, was not so put off, and an exhibitors' poll named Eastwood a top box-office draw for 1973. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

A small California village is attacked by zombies in this 1974 thriller. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

The Mad, Mad Movie Makers is the alternate title of The Last Porno Flick. The plot (yes, there is a plot!) concerns a pair of two-bit movie producers who are anxious to cash in on the Deep Throat craze (the film, not the Watergate informant). They end up producing a lampoon of Deep Throat, meaning that they've produced a lampoon of a lampoon. Setting this one apart from the usual sleaze is its cast, peopled with such respectable names as Michael Pataki, Mike Kellin, Mariana Hill, and Anthony Carbone. At 88 minutes, The Mad, Mad Movie Makers wears out its welcome long before the final fadeout. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide