Maurice Marsac Movies

Inspired by the 1949 hit A Letter to Three Wives, this takes the other side of the coin with a deceased playboy leaving letters to the husbands accusing their wives of having had affairs with him. Although the 1949 hit was done as a dramatic treatise on the reactions of the wives to the revelations, this movie is played strictly for laughs as the husbands stumble all over themselves trying to dig out the truth behind the allegations. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide

William Powell stars in Take One False Step as a happily married college professor who foolishly agrees to a reunion supper with old flame Shelley Winters. Winters later disappears, and the evidence points to murder. To allay suspicion--and to avoid losing an important financial grant to his university--Powell starts his own investigation. The trail leads him to San Francisco, where poor Powell becomes mired in a confusing crime plot. Fortunately, Winters is still alive; unfortunately, Powell may not be for long. Adapted from the Irwin Shaw novel Night Call, Take One False Step is saved from tawdriness by the innate dignity of William Powell. Also, the film is leavened by unexpected moments of humor, notably the relaxed banter between Powell and Shelley Winters. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Long before he became a highly respected Wall Street financial adviser, Richard Ney was a minor-league film star. In Secret of St. Ives, Ney plays Anatole de Keroual, the unofficial head of a group of French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. Organizing an escape from his British captors, Anatole leads his fellow prisoners to Scotland, thence to London. Doggedly pursued by nasty British major Chevenish (Henry Daniell), Anatole is recaptured and sentenced to hang. How he wriggles out of this dilemma is the dramatic thrust of the film's last reel. Vanessa Brown co-stars as Floria, Anatole's British sweetheart. The Secret of St. Ives was adapted from a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this crime drama the trouble begins when a murder occurs aboard a docked ship. Another murder occurs aboard an airplane in flight. An insurance investigator comes to Tangier to look into the theft of 50,000 pounds of sterling from the ship. He is assisted by a cafe entertainer. Together they solve the mysteries and recover the missing silver. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this musical comedy, a soldier falls in love with a very young woman who in turn has a crush on an older, more sophisticated man. When the older gent goes to New York, she follows as does her younger suitor. While in the Big Apple, the soldier encounters the older man's ex-wife who is still in love with him. The soldier helps bring the couple back together and is rewarded by being united with his true love. The story was adapted from a Sinclair Lewis play. Songs include: "Gremlin Walk," "It's the Girl," "Yippee-I-Vot," "With a Song in My Heart," "All or Nothing at All," "You're a Lollapalooza," "At Sundown," and "L'Amour Toujours L'Amour." ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Humphrey Bogart plays Harry Morgan, owner-operator of charter boat in wartime Martinique. Morgan's right-hand man is Eddie (Walter Brennan), a garrulous alky whose pet question to anyone and everyone is "Ever get stung by a dead bee?" While in port, Harry is approached by Free French activist Gerard (Marcel Dalio), who wants to charter Harry's boat to smuggle in an important underground leader. Adopting his usual I-stick-my-neck-out-for-no-one stance, Morgan refuses. Later on, he starts up a dalliance with Marie Browning (screen newcomer Lauren Bacall), an attractive pickpocket. In order to help Marie return to America, Harry agrees to Gerard's smuggling terms. He uses his boat to bring resistance fighter De Bursac (Walter Molnar) and De Bursac's wife Helene (Dolores Moran) into Martinique. The Vichy police, suspecting that something's amiss, hold Morgan's pal Eddie hostage, tormenting the poor rummy by denying him liquor. Predictably, Morgan comes to Eddie's rescue and manages to escape Martinique, with the delectable Marie as cozy company. In the hands of director Howard Hawks and screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, the end result bore only a passing relation to the original story by Ernest Hemingway: instead, it was a virtual rehash (but a good one!) of the recently released Casablanca, replete with several of that film's cast members. The film's enduring popularity is primarily -- if not solely -- due to the sexy chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, especially in the legendary "You know how to whistle, don't you?" scene. The most salutary result of To Have & Have Not was the subsequent Bogart-Bacall marriage, which endured until his death in 1957. It's widely believed that Lauren Bacall's singing voice was dubbed in by a pre-puberty Andy Williams; this is not true. For the record, a more faithful-to-the-source cinemadaptation of the Hemingway original was filmed in 1950 as The Breaking Point. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide