Jerry Leon Movies

Amanda Burton starred in this intense two-part British miniseries as Laura Tracey, a minor employee of a major international banking firm. While going through a routine record search, Laura found a number of irregularities in the bank's overseas accounts. Further investigation revealed that certain of the bank's CEOs were using company funds to finance a large drug cartel. Upon reporting her findings to the authorities, Laura realized that the lives of herself and her family were in danger, thus she agreed to enter a witness protection program. This middle-aged "change of life" forced Laura and her husband Dominic (Neil Pearson), previously a college professor, to assume jobs that both have been avoiding all their lives: Now she was nothing more than a housewife, while he was reduced to teaching grade-school children. Worse still, a Mexican hit man, hired to shut Laura up before she could go to trial, was coming ever closer to locating and eliminating the fugitive family. Capped by a truly startling denouement, The Whistle-Blower was first telecast in the U.K. on April 14 and 15, 2001, and has since been seen as a single, 170-minute "movie" over the BBC America cable service. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This was the only directorial effort of Philip D'Antoni, producer of the action classic Bullitt (1968). Roy Scheider stars as Buddy Manucci, a New York City Police Department investigator running a task force charged with taking down criminals guilty of offenses that would get them a minimum sentence of seven years in prison upon conviction. Manucci's best street informant is Vito Lucia (Tony Lo Bianco), who double-crosses Manucci by using the lawman's secret list of Mob loan sharks to kidnap the crooks on the list and hold them for ransom. When the scheme results in the death of Ansel (Ken Kercheval), one of Manucci's men, the tough cop and his team, including Barilli (Victor Arnold) and Mingo (Jerry Leon), wage war on the city's underworld. As they bend the law in whatever violent shape they see fit in order to track Lucia down, grisly deaths and a heart-stopping highway car chase along the Hudson River ensue. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

Raymond St. Jacques both directs and stars in The Book of Numbers. St. Jacques and Philip Thomas play depression-era African Americans, barely making out an existence as waiters in a deep-south community. Both men decide that there's more money to be had on the shadier side of the law, so they set up a successful rural numbers racket. All goes well until the operation attracts the attention of white crime boss Gilbert Greene. Though no one is particularly admirable in The Book of Numbers, the audience remains firmly on the side of the black characters, if only by default. The film was based on a novel by Robert Dean Phaar. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi