Bob Morgan Movies

Although Marie Windsor plays the title role in Dakota Lil, she is shunted away to third billing, right after male leads George Montgomery and Rod Cameron. Montgomery is cast as a secret service agent Tom Horn, sent West to round up a gang of counterfeiters. He starts by gaining the confidence of dance-hall girl Lil (Windsor), one of the ringleaders. She, in turn, leads Horn to the brains of the operation, Harve Logan
(Cameron). When Lil finds out that Horn is a Fed, she's tempted to fill him full of holes; instead, having fallen in love with him, she tries to help him get the goods on Logan. Dakota Lil was based on a story by Frank Gruber, later one of the leading lights of the TV-western craze. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sealed Cargo was based on The Gaunt Woman, a novel by Edmund Gilligan. Dana Andrews stars as Pat Bannon, a Newfoundland fishing-boat captain during WW II. Coming to the rescue of an endangered vessel, Bannon finds himself in the middle of a nest of Nazi spies. Reasoning that he'll never be able to alert the authorities, Bannon takes it upon himself to scuttle an impending large-scale German submarine attack. Claude Rains is the personification of cultured evil as the head Nazi naval officer, while Carla Balenda co-stars as an innocent bystander who may well lose her life as a result of Bannon's planned heroics. Sealed Cargo was one of several moneymaking films released by RKO Radio during one of the studio's most profitable years. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on the novel The Pork Butcher by David Hughes, this melodrama was directed by literary adaptation specialist Geoffrey Reeve, producer of The Shooting Party (1984), Half Moon Street (1986), and The Whistle Blower (1987). Christopher Plummer stars as Ernst Kestner, a German Army veteran who relocated to New York, where he has lived for 43 years, since the end of WWII. Upon the death of his wife and the takeover of his deli business by a chain store, Ernst embarks on a nostalgic journey to France, the site of a 1944 love affair he had with a beautiful young woman in the small, occupied town of Lascaud. In Paris, Ernst reunites with his estranged daughter Tina (Catherine Hicks), who is having marital problems and agrees to accompany her father on his sentimental journey. In Lascaud, however, Ernst discovers both the fate of his long-lost love and horrifying evidence of his complicity in a wartime atrocity he never knew occurred. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

John Payne always felt that he delivered his best screen performance in The Boss. Set in the years following WW1, the story concerns a small-town veteran named Matt Brady (John Payne), whose brother, machine politician Tim Brady (Roy Roberts), arranges for Matt to get a cushy government job. When Tim dies, Matt takes over his operation, eventually assuming control of the entire state (which judiciously remains unnamed in the film). Though a successful power broker, Matt is unable to win the woman he loves (Doe Avedon), so he settles for another (Gloria McGhee) whom he treats atrociously. A falling out with his best friend/severest critic Bob Herrick (William Bishop) sets the stage for the ruthless Brady's inevitable downfall. Though all the names were changed to protect the guilty, audiences in 1956 were quick to perceive that the film was a thinly disguised attack on the Pendergast machine of Kansas City, Missouri. Coproduced and cowritten by John Payne, The Boss falters only in its overreliance upon anachronistic newsreel footage. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Gary Grimes stars in this revisionist western as Ben Mockridge, a 16-year-old boy who has long dreamed of living the life of a cowboy. Wanting adventure, he persuades Frank Culpepper (Billy Green Bush) to take him along on a cattle drive, and Ben learns the hard way just how lonesome, exhausting, and violent the life of a cowhand can be. As one of the men on the drive puts it, "Being a cowboy is what you do when you can't do anything else." Hal Needham, who would later direct a string of successful films starring Burt Reynolds, can be spotted in a small role as Burgess, one of the cowboys. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Like Pontius Pilate, director John Ford asks "What is truth?" in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--but unlike Pilate, Ford waits for an answer. The film opens in 1910, with distinguished and influential U.S. senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) returning to the dusty little frontier town where they met and married twenty-five years earlier. They have come back to attend the funeral of impoverished "nobody" Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). When a reporter asks why, Stoddard relates a film-long flashback. He recalls how, as a greenhorn lawyer, he had run afoul of notorious gunman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), who worked for a powerful cartel which had the territory in its clutches. Time and again, "pilgrim" Stoddard had his hide saved by the much-feared but essentially decent Doniphon. It wasn't that Doniphon was particularly fond of Stoddard; it was simply that Hallie was in love with Stoddard, and Doniphon was in love with Hallie and would do anything to assure her happiness, even if it meant giving her up to a greenhorn. When Liberty Valance challenged Stoddard to a showdown, everyone in town was certain that the greenhorn didn't stand a chance. Still, when the smoke cleared, Stoddard was still standing, and Liberty Valance lay dead. On the strength of his reputation as the man who shot Valance, Stoddard was railroaded into a political career, in the hope that he'd rid the territory of corruption. Stoddard balked at the notion of winning an election simply because he killed a man-until Doniphon, in strictest confidence, told Stoddard the truth: It was Doniphon, not Stoddard, who shot down Valance. Stoddard was about to reveal this to the world, but Doniphon told him not to. It was far more important in Doniphon's eyes that a decent, honest man like Stoddard become a major political figure; Stoddard represented the "new" civilized west, while Doniphon knew that he and the West he represented were already anachronisms. Thus Stoddard went on to a spectacular political career, bringing extensive reforms to the state, while Doniphon faded into the woodwork. His story finished, the aged Stoddard asks the reporter if he plans to print the truth. The reporter responds by tearing up his notes. "This is the West, sir, " the reporter explains quietly. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Dismissed as just another cowboy opus at the time of its release, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has since taken its proper place as one of the great Western classics. It questions the role of myth in forging the legends of the West, while setting this theme in the elegiac atmosphere of the West itself, set off by the aging Stewart and Wayne. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Superpatriotic Briton Michael Caine learns from his son Nigel Havers, a Russian translator with Government Communications Headquarters, that the CIA might have ordered the deaths of some GCH employees to avoid any security leaks. When Havers mentions that he's thinking about blowing the whistle on the sordid goings-on, Caine, convinced that whatever the CIA is doing is for the greatest good, implores his son to keep quiet. Soon afterward, Havers is found murdered. Even after this, Caine refuses to think ill of his government and its allies. It takes the death of investigative reporter James Fox to shake Caine out of his self-denial and to confront the persons responsible for the killings within the GCH. The venerable John Gielgud offers a surprising characterization in this complex conspiracy thriller. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

You're Never Too Young is a slapstick-with-songs remake of the 1944 Ray Milland/Ginger Rogers vehicle The Major and the Minor. Dean Martin plays the Milland part, while Ginger's shoes are filled by...Jerry Lewis? Lewis plays an apprentice barber who inadvertently crosses a homicidal jewel thief (Raymond Burr), and equally inadvertently hightails it out of town with the crook's jewels in his possession. Desperate to escape the crook's clutches, and lacking the necessary funds for a train ticket, Lewis disguises himself as a 12-year-old boy so he can travel half fare. He latches onto Dean, a music teacher heading for an all-girls school. After innumerable routines sparked by Lewis's adolescent disguise, the jewel thief catches up with him, leading to a rollicking climactic speedboat chase. Dean Martin has plenty of opportunities to serenade leading lady Diana Lynn (who'd played a supporting role in The Major and the Minor), while Jerry Lewis is in peak form doing his usual "waah-waah-waah" schtick. The original Billy Wilder/Charles Brackett script for The Major and the Minor was reshaped into You're Never Too Young by future bestselling novelist Sidney Sheldon. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide