Virginia Mullen Movies

In the original Broadway production of this William Inge play, Shirley Booth played Lola Delaney, the vulgar, dumpy, less-than-bright "shotgun bride" of recovering alcoholic Doc Delaney, played on stage by Sidney Blackmer, who won a Tony award for his efforts. When time came to film the play, Shirley Booth was retained as Lola, but Burt Lancaster replaced Blackmer as Doc. Although Lancaster seems far too youthful for the role, the film is a fascinating and sometimes funny study of an unhappy marriage made unhappier by the arrival of a sexy stranger. Young Marie (Terry Moore) rents a room from Lola, a tiresome creature who never stops talking, especially about the "imminent" return of her runaway dog Sheba. Doc is having enough trouble staying away from the bottle and resigning himself to his marriage without the curvaceous Marie arousing his baser instincts. The characters interact with gloomy consequences, in the typical kitchen-sink-realism style of Inge's Fifties plays, although a tacked-on happy ending, common to Fifties movie melodramas, pretends otherwise. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Also known as The Tall Lie, For Men Only was a hard-hitting if somewhat gratuitous expose of college fraternity "hazing." A young man is rushed by a popular and well-established frat, only to discover that part of the initiation ceremony requires him to kill a puppy. He drops out of the fraternity and tells the world its "secrets". The fraternity leader, played by Russell Johnson, organizes a campaign to drive the pledge off the campus--which results in the pledge's death. Professor Paul Henried investigates, and learns that the fraternity's ties to the business community are so strong that he can do nothing to stop the cruelty of the hazing process. Henried's only recourse is to expose arrogant frat leader Johnson as a coward with feet of clay--which he does, in a breast-beating scene that will surprise those who know Russell Johnson only as the mild-mannered "Professor" on Gilligan's Island. Made inexpensively, For Men Only is competently directed by star Paul Henried. The only question is: Why should the non-collegiates in the audience care anything about the iniquities of fraternity life? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lin McAdam (James Stewart) and his friend High-Spade (Millard Mitchell) arrive in Dodge City for a shooting contest, in which the prize is a perfectly manufactured Winchester repeating rifle, referred to as "One of a Thousand" -- a gun so fine that Winchester won't sell it. Lin runs across Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) in a saloon and the two would kill each other right there but for the fact that town marshal Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) has everyone's guns. Lin wins the rifle in an extraordinary marksmanship match-up with Brown, but the latter steals the prize from him and sets out across the desert. Thus begins a battle of wits and nerves, and a pursuit to the death. The roots and raw psychological dimensions of that chase are only exposed gradually, across a story arc that includes references to Custer's Last Stand, run-ins with marauding Indians, a heroic stand with a a shady but well-intentioned grifter (Charles Drake), and a meeting with murderous sociopath named Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea), plus a romantic encounter with a young, golden-hearted frontier woman (Shelley Winters). All of these story lines eventually get drawn together neatly and gracefully by director Anthony Mann, who balances the violence of the events with a lyrical, almost poetic visual language. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Blonde good-time girl Vivian Heldon (Jan Sterling), who lives in a cheap rooming house in a working-class section of Boston, run by the inquisitive and neurotic Mrs. Smerrling (Elsa Lanchester), goes out one night after a phone conversation with her boyfriend, proclaiming that she's got big plans and might even move to a nicer place. After putting in her shift as a waitress at a cheap dive called The Grass Skirt, she latches onto Henry Shanway (Marshall Thompson), an innocently drunk patron, who's trying to wash away his sadness over his wife's stillborn child. She uses Henry's car with him in tow to drive out to Cape Cod, then strands him on foot and meets her boyfriend -- but when she arrives, he puts a bullet into her, then strips the body, throws it into the sea, and drops the clothes and the car into a lake. Six months later, an ornithologist from the cape spots the skeleton of a human foot sticking up through the sand.

Enter Lt. Peter Morales (Ricardo Montalban) of the Boston PD; he and his partner on this case, Det. Sharkey (Wally Maher), bring the bones to Dr. McAdoo (Bruce Bennett), of Harvard University's forensic medical laboratory. Over the next few days, McAdoo and his staff are able to determine the gender, age, and general appearance of the person to whom the bones belonged, and that this is a case of murder -- and that the victim was pregnant. Morales and Sharkey, combing through what they know about the victim and the missing persons records of six nearby states, eventually tie the skeleton up with Vivian Heldon, who disappeared on just about the same day the victim was killed, and also to Shanway's car, which he reported stolen that day. The poor slob, who is merely trying to cover up a drunken lapse from his wife (Sally Forrest), acts guilty enough and lies about just enough so that Morales is certain that he's the murderer. His investigation isn't helped by the interference of Mrs. Smerrling, who sold Vivian's belongings when she didn't return to her room, and now seems fixated, even obsessed with the details of the case and its connection to her rooming house. While the police tighten the screws on Shanway, she backtracks Vivian's phone calls and makes contact with the woman's boyfriend, James Joshua Harkley (Edmon Ryan), member of a wealthy Boston family, and a married man; she also manages to steal a vital piece of evidence. But instead of turning it over to the police, she uses it to blackmail Harkley.

Meanwhile, the district attorney sets an early trial date for Shanway, but with the opening arguments only a week away, Morales begins to develop doubts about Shanway's guilt, in addition to harboring his own sympathy for Grace Shanway, whose life is being gradually destroyed by the prosecution on her husband -- not that Morales thinks he's innocent, but there's enough that's not right about the case, including the missing murder weapon, that he's not 100-percent sure. And that's when Vivian's friend and neighbor, Jackie Elcott (Betsy Blair) reports how strangely Mrs. Smerrling is acting, and the fact that she's got a gun. But before they can question her, Harkley kills Mrs. Smerrling -- now it's a race between Morales and Harkley to see who can get to the murder weapon first. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

First love leads to unexpected responsibilities and difficult decisions in this well-crafted drama. Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest) is a free-spirited young woman who is chafing at the restrictions of living at home with her folks and wants to make something of herself. One evening after work, she stops for a drink with some friends and meets Steve Ryan (Leo Penn), a charming but cynical piano player. Sally falls for Steve in a big way and they embark on a brief romance, but Steve regards Sally as a passing fancy and soon moves on to another town. While Sally follows him, Steve makes it clear things are over between them and he takes a gig in South America. Heartbroken Sally takes a new job at a filling station and general store run by Drew Baxter (Keefe Brasselle), a war veteran with a bad leg and a serious crush on Sally. Sally is still getting over Steve and isn't interested in Drew when she learns that she's carrying Steve's child. The disgraced Sally decides to give her child up for adoption, but finds her maternal instincts are stronger than she expected and her desire to have her baby back leads her on a desperate and dangerous path. While Streets of Sin (aka Not Wanted) is credited to director Elmer Clifton, most of the picture was actually shot under the aegis of co-producer Ida Lupino after Clifton fell ill during production; it was the actress' first film as a director. In the '60s, Streets of Sin was reissued as The Wrong Rut, with the addition of footage of a Caesarian birth "borrowed" from an educational film, and booked into drive-ins and grindhouses on the exploitation circuit. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

When Lizabeth Scott's Jane Greer husband Arthur Kennedy accidentally gets his mitts on $60,000 in stolen money, she insists that he keep the dough rather than turn it over to the authorities. Two-bit private eye Dan Duryea catches on to Scott's subterfuge, and demands that she turn the cash over to him. Scott persuades Duryea to split the money with her--then, determining that Kennedy might be too honest for everyone's own good, she murders her husband. To cover her tracks, Scott reports her husband as missing. This brings in yet another fly in the ointment: Don DeFore, the brother of Scott's first husband, who died under mysterious circumstances. The already knotted webs of intrigue become even more tangled before Scott's ironic comeuppance. Too Late for Tears was scripted by Roy Huggins, who later produced such TV detective series as The Rockford Files. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Young model Jean Dexter is knocked unconscious and drowned in her own bathtub in her Manhattan apartment, and a lot of jewelry that she supposedly owned is missing. The Naked City is actually about six days in the life of New York City that coincide with the murder and the subsequent investigation by Lt. Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Detective James Halloran (Don Taylor). The account of their work, and the workings of the New York City police department, is interspersed with brief vignettes about the life of the city around them, and, especially, the reaction of residents to the murder and the newspaper reports of the progress of the case. Muldoon and Halloran first must determine why she was killed, which may (or may not) have to do with how a woman with a minimal income came by the jewelry -- was it a love affair gone bad (and if so, with whom?), or something more complex and sinister? Retracing the final 18 months of the victim's life, their investigation reaches out to a mysterious "Philip Henderson" with whom she was supposedly linked romantically, and to Frank Niles (Howard Duff), who's a little too fast-and-loose with the truth when he doesn't have to be to make Muldoon comfortable; to make things more complicated, Muldoon determines that there were at least two men involved with the actual commission of the murder. The victim turns out to have led a wild life, filled with men and parties, and was tied up with several sordid figures. Their investigation carries them into the highest and lowest ends of New York's social strata to find the killer, and it turns out there are a lot of interlocking reasons why at least three men might've wanted her dead. In the process, we get glimpses of the private lives of the detectives, which was something new in movies at this time; in the midst of all of this activity, the writers set up a fascinating contrast, in adjacent scenes, between Halloran, his wife, and their young son looking toward the future, with the parents of the dead woman, looking back with bitter regret and recriminations -- no movie ever presented in more subtle fashion the contrast between the zeitgeist of the 1930s and that of the postwar era. The final chase on the Williamsburg Bridge is one of the classic pieces of suspense cinema, as the armed and desperate killer races up the walkway past children playing and adults strolling, while detectives close in on foot from behind and patrol cars come up from ahead, with crowded subways rolling past, and then into the superstructure of the bridge for a stand-off and shootout. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot future character leads Paul Ford, James Gregory, John Marley, Kathleen Freeman, and Arthur O'Connell as well as familiar faces Tom Pedi, John Randolph, Molly Picon, and Walter Burke in the supporting cast. Cinematographer William Daniels and editor Paul Weatherwax won Oscars for their work, but awards might just as easily have been presented to director Jules Dassin, writers Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, composers Miklos Rozsa and Frank Skinner, and, most notably, to producer/narrator Mark Hellinger, who intoned the closing monologue, which opens with one of the most famous tag lines in movie history: "There are eight million stories in the Naked City." ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

This suspenseful crime drama reenacts the famed 1947 prison break out of the Canon City, Colorado corrections facility and features the actual warden, Roy Best playing himself. The trouble begins when one prisoner manages to fashion a crude pistol. Enlisting the aid of eleven others, they successfully escape and terrorize the town until the warden and his men manage to round up the survivors and bring them back. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide