Gigi Perreau Movies

Five years after Mission: Impossible, Peter Graves accepted a starring assignment in the modestly budgeted High Seas Hijack. Most of the film takes place on a highly valuable oil tanker. A group of terrorists decide that the best way to advance their cause is to steal the tanker and imprison its passengers. Their tactics are just as brutal and bloodthirsty as the pirates of old, but the good guys manage to dish it out as well as take it. High Sea Hijack is distinguished by the presence of Gigi Perreau, a former child actress who seldom showed up on screen after 1961. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Del (John Ashley) is an auto mechanic who leaves his brother Marty (Marty Robbins) to open his own business in this routine action drama. The brothers are kidnapped when Del is chased by federal agents for running moonshine. Marty races stock cars during the day and sings at night. How else could they make room for him to sing five songs? Connie Smith and The Stonemans provide further music, with Robert Faulk and Frank Gertile as the moonshiners. The brothers face each other in a showdown at the racetrack for the finale. The interest for this film is fueled by fans of stock-car racing and the popularity of country singers Robbins and Smith. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Lifelong parasite Rachel Gordon (Phyllis Hill) will be cut off without a cent by her rich Uncle Abner (Richard Hale) unless she immediately returns all the money she has syphoned from his bank account. Out of desperation, Rachel takes a shot at Albert while the man is sleeping. It turns out she needn't have bothered: Albert is already dead, and the police have charged his secretary--and main benificiary--Bruce Jay (John Napier). Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) knows that Bruce is innocent, and that Rachel wanted to be guilty but technically isn't...so whose alibi does he ultimately break down in court? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this emotional romance, the young backwoods girl Tammy lives in a houseboat on the river. She is very sad because she hasn't heard from her college-student boyfriend in ages. Determined to be near him, she cruises her boat down to his university and enrolls. To pay expenses she gets a job. Her new boss is pleased and ends up borrowing Tammy's boat for a short vacation. She then gives the girl an expensive necklace. Tammy soon finds herself pursued by a handsome professor. Later, the niece of Tammy's boss becomes worried at her wealthy aunt's mysterious disappearance and organizes a search party. When she sees Tammy wearing her aunt's necklace, she assumes the worst and has the girl arrested. Later the conniving niece has her aunt tried for mental incompetence. Fortunately, Tammy's pleas are heard by the compassionate judge, her boss is deemed sane, and peace is restored. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Will Rogers Jr. follows in the cinematic footsteps of his famous father in the evenly-paced western Wild Heritage. Rogers is cast as a frontier judge, given to his own special, down-to-earth brand of jurisprudence. In truth, however, Will Jr's role is a subordinate one; most of the film's running time concerns two families heading westward by covered wagon. When rustlers attack, it is the sons of the respective families who emerge as the heroes. One of the "good guys" is portrayed by Rod McKuen, long before he became Poet Laureate of the flower-child generation. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Claiming to be suffering from amnesia, an 18-year-old girl (Gigi Perreau) asks Perry (Raymond Burr) to find out who she is and help restore her memory. As it turns out, the girl has plenty to forget: Her name is Doris Bannister, and she is the daughter of Lisa Bannister (Osa Massen)--who herself is the daughter of the East German Communist party leader, and is living incognito in the U.S. When Stefan Riker (a pre-Hogan's Heroes Werner Klemperer) arrived in America threatening to expose Lisa, Doris pretended to fall in love with him to throw him off the track. Thus, when Riker turns up murdered, Doris is accused of the crime--and Perry really has his work cut out for him! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This meticulous and unusually long cinemadaptation of Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit stars Gregory Peck as an ex-army officer, pursuing a living as a TV writer in the postwar years. Hired by a major broadcasting network, Peck is assigned to write speeches for the network's president (Fredric March). Peck comes to realize that the president's success has come at the expense of personal happiness, and this leads Peck to ruminate on his own life. Extended flashbacks reveal that Peck had experienced a torrid wartime romance with Italian girl Marisa Pavan, a union that produced a child. Peck is torn between his responsibility to his illegitimate son and his current obligations towards his wife (Jennifer Jones), his children, and his employer. Among the many life-altering decisions made by Peck before the fade-out is his determination to seek out a job that will allow him to spend more time with his family, even if it means a severe cut in salary. The superb hand-picked supporting cast of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit includes Ann Harding as March's wife, Keenan Wynn as the man who informs Peck that he'd fathered an Italian child, Henry Daniell as a detached executive, and an unbilled DeForrest Kelley as an army medic (who gets to say "He's dead, captain"!) ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Douglas Sirk directed this frothy musical comedy set in the 1920s starring Charles Coburn as Samuel Fulton, an elderly man with a multi-million dollar fortune. With no family of his own to whom he can leave his money, Fulton is pondering what to do with his estate. Years ago, he was in love with a woman named Harriet, whom he asked to marry. She turned him down and married another someone else, but he's still fond of her and considers leaving his millions to her family. However, Fulton decides to first give them a test. Posing as an eccentric and threadbare artist, he rents a room from Harriet (Lynn Bari) and her husband Charles (Larry Gates). He then arranges for an anonymous gift of $100,000 to be presented to them so that he can watch their reactions. Sadly, things don't go well; Harriet browbeats the rest of the family into moving into a mansion and tries to convince her daughter Millicent (Piper Laurie) to break up with her boyfriend, poor but good-hearted soda jerk Dan (Rock Hudson), in favor of a wealthier and more socially prominent man. Songs include "Tiger Rag," "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along," "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More," and "Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?" James Dean has a tiny part as a customer at the soda fountain; it was his first appearance onscreen. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Columbia and Universal were the leading purveyors of well-crafted "little" pictures in the 1950s. It was Universal who put together Reunion in Reno, which opens with little Maggie (Gigi Perreau) walking into the offices of divorce-attorney Norman (Mark Stevens), demanding a divorce from her parents! It seems that Maggie is an adoptee, who fears that she'll be left in the lurch when mom (Frances Dee) and dad (Leif Erickson) become natural parents, which will happen very soon. As Norman strives to solve his youthful "client"'s problems, problems, he decides at long last to wed his own fiancee Laura (Peggy Dow) -- though if ever there was a strong argument against marriage and parenthood, it is the precocious Maggie. Elements of Reunion in Reno were later reworked into the 1984 comedy Irreconcilable Differences. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This seminal Brady Bunch stars Van Heflin as a widower and Patricia Neal as a widow. Both parties have several children by their first marriages. Heflin and Neal fall in love and decide to marry, each hoping to adopt the other's kids. The couple idealistically subscribes to the "one big happy family" theory, but they hadn't figured that their kids would dislike the idea...and each other. This mild situation comedy was directed with lots of efficiency but little style by Douglas Sirk, who did better for himself with Universal's big-budget romantic melodramas of the mid-1950s. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this 1951 comedy Irene Dunne stars as Kay, a Manhattan-based songwriter who marries widowed rodeo cowboy Chris (Fred MacMurray). In the tradition of The Egg and I, Kay suffers a great deal of culture shock when she moves into Chris' western ranch. When she isn't being bedeviled by her new step-children, poor Kay is subjected to bumps and bruises as she tries to become an expert horsewoman. Nothing happens in Never a Dull Moment that isn't thoroughly predictable, though the stars bring a degree of freshness to the proceedings. This film was one of several produced for RKO by Harriet Parsons, daughter of gossip columnist Louella Parsons. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi