Martin Landau Movies
Saturnine character actor Martin Landau was a staff cartoonist for the New York Daily News before switching to acting. In 1955, his career got off to a promising beginning, when out of 2,000 applicants, only he and one other actor (Steve McQueen) were accepted by Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.Extremely busy in the days of live, Manhattan-based television, Landau made his cinematic mark with his second film appearance, playing James Mason's henchman in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In 1966, Landau and his wife Barbara Bain were both cast on the TV adventure/espionage series Mission: Impossible. For three years, Landau portrayed Rollin Hand, a master of disguise with the acute ability to impersonate virtually every villain who came down the pike (banana-republic despots were a specialty). Unhappy with changes in production personnel and budget cuts, Landau and Bain left the series in 1969. Six years later, they costarred in Space: 1999 a popular syndicated sci-fi series; the performances of Landau, Bain, and third lead Barry Morse helped to gloss over the glaring gaps in continuity and logic which characterized the show's two-year run. The couple would subsequently act together several times (The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981) was one of the less distinguished occasions) before their marriage dissolved.
Working steadily in various projects throughout the '80s and '90s, Landau enjoyed a career renaissance with two consecutive Oscar nominations, the first for Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and the second for Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Landau finally won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood; his refusal to cut his acceptance speech short was one of the high points of the 1995 Oscar ceremony. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1965
Martin Landau plays the title role in the I Spy episode "Danny Was a Million Laughs." In Hong Kong, agents Kelly and Scott are ordered to protect Danny Preston, a mobster who has agreed to turn government witness in exchange for immunity. Making the job doubly difficult is the fact that the two agents hate the contentious Preston's guts -- and the feeling is mutual. Jeannette Nolan has a fascinating supporting role as Aunt Helen, who isn't quite the sweet little old lady she appears to be. Written by Arthur Dales, "Danny Was a Million Laughs" first aired on October 27, 1965. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Filmmaker George Stevens chose Monument Valley, Utah for his exterior sequences in The Greatest Story Ever Told, this ($20 million) adaptation of Fulton Oursler's best-selling book. The "Greatest Story" is, of course, the life of Jesus Christ, played herein by Max Von Sydow. The large supporting cast includes Dorothy McGuire as Mary, Claude Rains as Herod the Great, Jose Ferrer as Herod Antipas, Charlton Heston as John the Baptist, Donald Pleasence as Satan (identified only as "The Dark Hermit"), David McCallum as Judas Iscariot, Sidney Poitier as Simon of Cyrene, Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate and Martin Landau as Caiaphas. Even Robert Blake as Simon the Zealot, Jamie Farr as Thaddaeus, and motorcyle-flick veteran Richard Bakalyan as Dismas, the repentant thief, are well-suited to their roles. Originally roadshown at 260 minutes, Greatest Story Ever Told was later available in a 195-minute version. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Max von Sydow, Dorothy McGuire, (more)
In The Hallelujah Trail, Lee Remick plays temperance leader Cora Templeton Massingale, who is determined to halt a shipment of whiskey headed for Denver. The shipment is being escorted by the US cavalry, under the guidance of Col. Thadeus Gearhardt (Burt Lancaster). As the Denver miners thirstily await the precious booze, Gearhardt must fend off not only Cora and her minions, but a bibulous tribe of Sioux warriors, headed by Chief Walks-Stooped-Over (Martin Landau)-not to mention an outsized sandstorm. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Burt Lancaster, Lee Remick, (more)
- 1964
Defense lawyer Ned Murray (Martin Landau) is certain that he has made a name for himself by getting his client Lew Rydell (Frank Gorshin) acquitted on a murder charge. Later on, however, Lew mockingly informs Ned that he was actually guilty of the crime -- and under the rule of double jeopardy, he cannot be prosecuted twice for the same crime. Motivated by both guilt and the fear that he will be ruined if the truth comes out, Ned tries to figure out a way to bring Rydell to justice. But, as things turn out, the lawyer is placed in the unenviable position of saving Lew's life all over again. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Martin Landau, Frank Gorshin, (more)
- 1964
Luis Spain (Don Gordon), Genaro Planetta (Tony Mordente), and Henry Castle (Chris Warfield) are three seeming social misfits who are recruited into the ranks of the Invisibles, a subversive underground organization run by an alien race. The Invisibles, small creatures with hard shell-covered bodies and sharp claws, have the ability to invade and merge with any human being, taking over control of their minds and bodies; they have already done this with several high-ranking politicians and other prominent personalities, and are planning on doing it with more, with help from Spain, Planetta, and recruits like them. Spain turns out to be an agent of the GIA (Government Intelligence Agency), sent to infiltrate the ranks of the Invisibles' followers. Cut off from his agency by the murder of his partner (William O. Douglas, Jr.), he is sent on his first mission, the takeover of a top defense department advisor (Neil Hamilton), only to learn that the Invisibles have suspected him from the beginning, and that he is the target, their goal to get one of their own into the ranks of the GIA. Seriously injured and desperately seeking help, Spain turns to his fellow recruit Planetta, with whom he developed a tenuous bond during their indoctrination. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- 1964
Richard Bellero (Martin Landau) is a brilliant but frustrated scientist, forever failing to find approval from his wealthy, pacifist-oriented father Richard Sr. (Neil Hamilton), even when he develops a practical high-energy laser. Much to the displeasure of his ambitious wife Judith (Sally Kellerman), he has been told by his father that he is being passed over for chairmanship of the family-founded corporation. By accident, however, Richard's laser device draws in an alien being (John Hoyt) who, among other attributes, possesses an invisible force-shield. Judith sees this shield as something that would earn her husband the respect of his father and the world, and the chairmanship of his father's corporation, if he could claim it as his discovery. With help from her servant Mrs. Dame (Chita Rivera), she shoots the alien and takes the control device, a button attached by a vein to the being's body, and activates the shield for her father-in-law; the shield is, indeed, impenetrable, but Judith finds she is unable to deactivate it. With her air running out, it becomes apparent that nothing, including her husband's laser, can get her free. Her father-in-law finds the alien's body, but is killed by Mrs. Dame, an act that stirs the alien -- who is barely alive -- just long enough to rescue Judith. Now freed, she starts to move across the room but is blocked by a barrier that only she sees -- she has gone insane. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- 1964
The sixth volume in a collection culled from the 1963-1965 science fiction anthology television series chronicles the time travels of a mutant from the future who goes back to prevent the birth of the mad scientist who is responsible for creating a horrifying virus. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
- 1964
Having just defected from an Iron Curtain country, Major Ivan Kuchenko (Martin Landau) realizes that he is not out of the woods yet. Sequestered in a tiny hotel room, Kuchenko knows that he has been targeted for assassination by Commissar Vassiloff (Robert Kelljan). What he doesn't know is that the instrument for death is hidden in his room -- a booby-trapped telephone. Written by Rod Serling, this was one of the few Twilight Zone episodes with no science fiction or fantasy elements whatsoever. "The Jeopardy Room" originally aired April 17, 1964. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Martin Landau, Richard Donner, (more)
- 1963
Dr. Stuart Peters (Michael Forest) arrives in Los Angeles from upstate New York, with his ne'er-do-well younger brother Jory (Scott Marlowe) in tow, to take a job at NORCO, an energy research laboratory. After an odd encounter with a guard -- who tries to warn him away from NORCO -- he reports for work and immediately goes incommunicado for a week. When he reappears, Peters looks worn, haggard, and preoccupied -- and dies when something seems to explode in his chest. The medical examiner determines that the cause of death was a faulty heart pacemaker. The problem, for the police detective (Edward Asner) investigating the death, and for the victim's grief-sticken brother, is that the physicist was in perfect health and had never worn a pacemaker. They want to know what happened to him during the week he was unaccounted for at NORCO -- and why the staff, from the director (Kent Smith) on down, won't cooperate with the investigation. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- 1963
Engineer Alan Maxwell (Cliff Robertson) is using his commercial radio station's antenna to probe into deep space in experiments of his own, in the course of which he makes contact with a being (William O. Douglas, Jr.) from the great nebula in the constellation Andromeda. Through an accident, the alien is transported to Earth, where its radioactive emanations prove lethal to all who come in contact with it. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
In 1963, this colossal and opulent $60 million spectacular was epic in every sense of the word -- an epic investment, an epic in the annals of Hollywood gossip, and, ultimately, an epic flop that nearly dragged 20th Century Fox down the Nile along with Cleopatra's barge. Handsomely mounted by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who replaced Rouben Mamoulian as director after six days of shooting), the drama follows the eighteen tumultuous years that led to the founding of the Roman Empire. Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor) meets up with Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) and plans to lure Caesar to her boudoir in order to forge an alliance with Rome so that she may hold on to her Egyptian empire. When Caesar is stabbed to death in the Roman Senate, Cleopatra is left without an ally, and Egypt is up for grabs. When Roman general Mark Antony (Richard Burton) comes along, she seduces him in order to make him over into her new protector. But, under the charms of Cleopatra, Mark Antony is reduced from a an awesome and dominating general to a sniveling, drunken wimp. At the Battle of Actium, Mark Antony is defeated and Cleopatra withdraws her troops, dooming Mark Antony and his army. With Egypt in peril, Antony and Cleopatra, the doomed lovers, meet each other for the last time, as the enemy forces close in. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, (more)
- 1962
When a passenger seems to develop small pox, she and five fellow travellers are kicked off a stagecoach and stranded in the desert. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1961
Originally scheduled to air on March 18, 1961, the Bonanza episode "The Gift" finally made its first appearance on April 1 of that same year. Determined to capture a white Arabian stallion as a birthday present for his father, Joe Cartwright makes a treacherous desert journey to Yuma, Arizona. Attacked by Indians en route, Joe finds that his life is in the hands of Emeliano (Martin Landau), the mercurial Mexican who raised the stallion. Also appearing are Jim Davis as Sam Wolfe, Jack Hogan as Cash, and Joe Yrigoyen as Cayetano. "The Gift" was written by Denne Petticlerc and Thomas Thompson. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, (more)
- 1961
Jack Klugman guest stars as Morton Halas, an unethical but supremely successful criminal lawyer whose services are highly coveted by the Underworld. Now Halas has taken Big Mike Probitch (George Tobias) on as a client--and Elliot Ness (Robert Stack) determined to put Probitch away, no matter how many legal loopholes Halas is able to pull out of thin air. As it turns out, rival gangster Larry Coombs (Martin Landau) succeeds where Ness has failed, filling Probich full of lead while his flunkey Whitey Metz (Gavin McLeod) stabs Big Mike in the back. Almost immediately, Coombs hires Halas to defend him in court--while Ness puts the screws on the sniveling Whitey, hoping to sweat out a confession that will send both Coombs and his "mouthpiece" to the Big House. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1960
Elliot Ness (Robert Stack) is frustrated when a case that he has been building against mob functionary Theodore Newberry (Ken Lynch) literally goes South when the star witness, bookkeeper Julius Imbry (Byron Foulger), is kidnapped and spirited away to Mexico. When Newberry manages to humiliate Ness in public, undercover cop Nick Delgado (Vince Edwards) is assigned to bring Imbry back--while Newberry, who did not engineer the kidnapping, dispatches his own hired guns to locate and silence the witness. Martin Landau steals the show as a stuttering hit man in this episode, which also features an uncredited appearance by Batman's future "Chief O'Hara" Stafford Repp. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1959
- NR
Any murder mystery featuring a pigeon named Herman can be trusted to offer more mirth than mayhem and that is the case with this upbeat film by director George Marshall. Glenn Ford stars as Elliott Nash, a television playwright married to Nell (Debbie Reynolds), a successful Broadway thespian. Nell had an ignominious moment in her past when she posed for some photos best left in obscurity and now Elliott is being blackmailed by the owner of the photos. Elliot's solution is to carry out a carefully executed murder and then bury the body underneath a gazebo being constructed in the backyard. Although the dastardly deed goes off without a hitch, the body of the blackmailer turns up elsewhere, leaving Elliott to track down who it was he buried under the gazebo. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Glenn Ford, Debbie Reynolds, (more)
- 1959
First telcast October 16, 1959, this episode stars Dan Duryea as Al Denton, a once-legendary gunslinger fallen on hard times. Now the town drunk and the object of ridicule, Denton dreams of the day that he will regain his skills with a sixgun. That day comes sooner than expected, thanks to a travelling peddler named Henry J. Fate (Malcolm Atterbury) -- but there's a bizarre price tag attached. Written by Rod Serling, this Twilight Zone episode features an impressive cast of future TV-series stars, including Martin Landau as town bully Hotaling, Doug McClure as punkish fast gun Pete Grant, and Jeanne Cooper as faded saloon girl Liz. Incidentally, this dramatic episode was originally intended as a comic story titled "You Too Can Be a Fast Gun," with a timid schoolteacher unexpectedly gaining renown as a gunfighter. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dan Duryea, Martin Landau, (more)
While having lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York, advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) has the bad luck to call for a messenger just as a page goes out for a "George Kaplan." From that moment, Thornhill finds that he has stepped into a nightmare -- he is quietly abducted by a pair of armed men out of the hotel's famous Oak Room and transported to a Long Island estate; there, he is interrogated by a mysterious man (James Mason) who, believing that Roger is George Kaplan, demands to know what he knows about his business and how he has come to acquire this knowledge. Roger, who knows nothing about who any of these people are, can do nothing but deny that he is Kaplan or that he knows what they're talking about. Finally, his captors force a bottle of bourbon into Roger and put him behind the wheel of a car on a dangerous downhill stretch. Through sheer luck and the intervention of a police patrol car and its driver (John Beradino), Roger survives the ride and evades his captors, and is booked for drunk driving. He's unable to persuade the court, the county detectives, or even his own mother (Jesse Royce Landis) of the truth of his story, however -- Thornhill returns with them to the mansion where he was held, only to find any incriminating evidence cleaned up and to learn that the owner of the house is a diplomat, Lester Townsend (Philip Ober), assigned to the United Nations. He backtracks to the hotel to find the room of the real George Kaplan, only to discover that no one at the hotel has ever actually seen the man. With his kidnappers once again pursuing him, Thornhill decides to confront Townsend at the United Nations, only to discover that he knows nothing of the events on Long Island, or his house being occupied -- but before he can learn more, Townsend gets a knife in his back in full view of 50 witnesses who believe that Roger did it. Now on the run from a murder charge, complete with a photograph of him holding the weapon plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the country, Thornhill tries to escape via train -- there he meets the cooly beautiful Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who twice hides him from the police, once spontaneously and a second time in a more calculated rendezvous in her compartment that gets the two of them together romantically, at least for the night. By the next day, he's off following a clue to a remote rural highway, where he is attacked by an armed crop-dusting plane, one of the most famous scenes in Hitchcock's entire film output. Thornhill barely survives, but he does manage to learn that his mysterious tormentor/interrogator is named Phillip Vandamm, and that he goes under the cover of being an art dealer and importer/exporter, and that Eve is in bed with him in every sense of the phrase -- or is she? ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, (more)
Pork Chop Hill was based on the eyewitness essays of ex-soldier S. L. A. Marshall. The film is set during the Korean "police action." While diplomats argue pointlessly over the shape of the negotiation tables at Panmunjon, United Nations troops bleed and die. Lieutenant Gregory Peck leads a 135-man unit on the attack of the Chinese-held Pork Chop Hill. When reinforcements finally arrive, only 25 of Peck's men survive (and they aren't the usual survivors we've come to expect from earlier, cliché-ridden war films). Among the American troops are such dependable performers as Harry Guardino, Woody Strode, Rip Torn, Barry Atwater, George Peppard, Robert Blake and Martin Landau. Former cowboy-star Bob Steele also shows up briefly as an American general. According to director Lewis Milestone, Pork Chop Hill was cut by nearly twenty minutes because the wife of star Gregory Peck felt that her husband made his first entrance too late into the picture. True or not, the film does show signs of post-production tampering, with flashes of several excised scenes showing up under the main title credits. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gregory Peck, Harry Guardino, (more)
- 1958
While working in a South Dakota gold-mining camp, Bart (Jack Kelly) and Dandy Jim Buckley (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) befriend Genessee Jones (Frank Ferguson), a grizzled old prospector with a hefty bankroll. Later on, Jones gets into a poker game with two miners (one of them a young Martin Landau) and wins big--only to turn up murdered a few hours later. Sheriff Bald Bill King (Dan Sheridan) arrests the miners for murder, whereupon Bart stands up and confesses to the crime--not because he really did it, but because he hopes to flush out the real killer. Unfortunately, Bald Bill isn't in on the plan, and now Bart is a prime candidate for a quick hanging. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1955
Best known in 1955 as a sultry singer, Eartha Kitt returned to her dancing roots in this hour-long TV adaptation of Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salome. In one of his earliest TV appearance, Martin Landau costars as the prophet Jokanaan, better known as John the Baptist. When he denounces King Herod (Leo Genn) for marrying his brother's divorced wife Herodias (Patricia Neal), Jokanaan is thrown into prison on Herodias' orders. By chance, Jokanaan's incarceration coincides with a visit from Salome (Eartha Kitt), Herodias' daughter from her earlier marriage. Attracted to the charismatic prophet, Salome is outraged when Jokanaan spurns her. Small wonder, then, that Salome agrees to perform the celebrated Dance of the Seven Veils for her uncle Herod if he will grant her one little request: The head of Jokanaan, served on a platter. Forsaking the familiar music from Richard Strauss' opera version of Salome, this production offers a newly orchetrated score. A live presentation of the prestigious Sunday-afternoon NBCanthology Omnibus(where it orginally shared the bill with a concert by musical satirist Anna Russell), Salome exists today in kinescope form in a handful of private collections. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
