Vera Miles Movies
Beauty contest winner Vera Ralston made a smattering of industrial films before beginning her Hollywood career in 1952. While making films at Republic studios, Ralston changed her name to avoid being confused with Republic's reigning queen Vera Hruba Ralston; "Miles" was the last name of her first husband. At first cast as a bland ingenue, she proved herself capable of conveying neurotic hysteria in The Charge at Feather River (1953), playing a white girl kidnapped by Indians who was violently resistant to being returned to her real family. She met her second husband, Gordon Scott, while filming Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1954). With her work in John Ford's The Searchers (1955), she graduated to big-budget productions. During the latter half of the 1950s, she was under contract to Alfred Hitchcock, who was impressed by the "still waters run deep" element of her performances. She played a delusional rape victim in "Revenge," the very first episode of TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents; she was cast as Henry Fonda's beleaguered wife in Hitch's The Wrong Man (her final scene is a knockout!); and, of course, she was seen as the sister of the ill-fated Janet Leigh in Psycho, a role she flamboyantly reprised in the 1982 sequel Psycho 2. While she never quite attained full film stardom, Miles kept extremely busy in both theatrical releases and television. During the 1960s and 1970s, she was regarded as a "good luck charm" by TV producers: if she guest-starred in the pilot episode of a potential series, chances are that series would sell (among those sold were the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Asphalt Jungle, The Eleventh Hour, The Fugitive, Court Martial, The Outer Limits, I Spy, Gentle Ben, Cannon and Owen Marshall, Counsellor at Law). She continued to make occasional appearances until the 1995 feature Separate Lives, in which she costarred with James Belushi; afterward, she retired from acting. As of this writing, Vera Miles is still married to her fourth husband, sound engineer and mixer Bob Jones. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide- 1951
Personally supervised by Howard R. Hughes, the RKO Technicolor musical Two Tickets to Broadway stars Janet Leigh as a small-town girl who hopes to make it big in the Big Apple. Moving into a Manhattan boarding house populated by such showbiz hopefuls as Ann Miller, Tony Martin, Gloria De Haven and Barbara Lawrence, Leigh aspires to appear on the popular TV variety program hosted by bandleader Bob Crosby. Two-bit agent Eddie Bracken promises to make her dreams come true, even though he doesn't know Crosby from Adam. Along the way, Leigh falls for Martin, though the course of true love seldom runs smooth--in fact, at one point it threatens to run all the way back to Leigh's home town. Injecting their time-honored routines into the proceedings are veteran vaudevillians Joe Smith and Charlie Dale, playing a couple of stagestruck deli owners (their roles were originally slated for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, but Laurel's illness precluded any film work). Despite the creative input of choreographer Busby Berkeley, the film's best number is the simplest: Let's Make Comparisons, wherein Bob Crosby explains why he's not his brother Bing. Seemingly a surefire box-office hit, Two Tickets to Broadway inexplicably posted a loss of $1,150,000. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tony Martin, Janet Leigh, (more)
- 1946
The 87-minute running time of Plainsman and the Lady was evidence aplenty that this was no mere Republic B western. William Elliot (formerly and latterly "Wild Bill" Elliot) stars as cattleman Sam Cotten, who offers his services-and his six-guns-to the newly formed Pony Express. Erudite villain Peter Marquette (Joseph Schildkraut) is a rival stagecoach owner who'll stop at nothing to keep the mail from going through. Ordering his minions to disguise themselves as Indians, Marquette masterminds a series of bloody raids on the pony express riders. But Cotton, aided and abetted by grizzled sidekick Dringo (Andy Clyde) proves to be more than a match for the bad guy. The lady of the title is high-born Ann Arnesen, played by Queen of Republic Vera Ralston; she's decorative enough, but no match for her talented costar Gail Patrick, cast as Ann's sister and the despicable Marquette's wife. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Don "Red" Barry, Andy Clyde, (more)
