Billy Roy Movies

It Happened in Brooklyn was released at a time when the mere mention of the eponymous New York borough elicited loud laughter and extended applause. Frank Sinatra stars as ex-GI Danny Webson Miller, who makes a sentimental journey to the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. Danny moves in with an old pal, high school janitor Nick Lombardi (Jimmy Durante), then inaugurates a romance with music teacher Anne Fielding. He also resolves to turn stuffy uptowner Jamie Shelgrave (Peter Lawford) into a true "son of Flatbush." The plot thickens when Jamie himself falls for Anne and when Danny tries to secure a scholarship for Anne's prize pupil, Nick's granddaughter Rae (Marcy McGuire). Since MGM was giving Peter Lawford the big build-up, it is Jamie who ultimately wins Anne's heart, but Danny finds consolation with an old "goil friend" (Gloria Grahame). Musical highlights include Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante's imitations of one another in "The Song's Gotta Come From the Heart" and Sinatra's rendition of the standard-to-be "Time After Time". ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this 1945 filmization of Emlyn Williams' semi-autobiographical 1938 play The Corn is Green, Bette Davis steps into the role originated on Broadway by Ethel Barrymore. Davis plays Miss Moffat, a turn-of-the-century schoolteacher in a Welsh mining town. She has opened her own school in hopes of lowering the town's illiteracy rate, thus enabling the younger residents to seek out more fulfilling lives than merely sweating away in the mines until they drop. She runs into a great deal of resistance from mine-owner Nigel Bruce, who realizes that as soon as the citizens can read and write, they'll rebel against his benevolent despotry. Even Miss Moffat concludes that her mission is hopeless until she is visited by young miner John Dall, who wants to know "what is behind all those books". Within two years, Dall has made so much progress that he has qualified for Oxford. A last-minute snag involving Dall's illegitimate child is solved when Miss Moffet herself agrees to adopt the baby so that her student can complete his education. Emlyn Williams himself came from a backward mining town, and was himself inspired to better things by a compassionate schoolteacher; the pregnancy angle was (probably) added to provide the story with a third act. The Corn is Green was remade for television in 1978, with Katharine Hepburn as Miss Moffat. Watch for one amusing gaffe in the original: despite carefully setting up the premise that the villagers are illiterate, they are shown hovering around a poster and reading it out loud in an early scene. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Designed as a followup to the enormously successful Casablanca, Passage to Marseille utilizes the talents of many of the on- and off-screen personnel of the earlier Warner Bros. classic. Unfolded in a complex flashback-within-flashback structure, this is the story of Matrac (Humphrey Bogart), a freedom-loving French journalist who sacrifices his happiness and security to battle Nazi tyrrany. The film opens as French liason officer Freycinet (Claude Rains), stationed in London, tells Mantrac's story to a British reporter (John Loder). Freycinet reveals that Mantrac, happily married to Paula (Michele Morgan), was framed by pro-fascists and sentenced to Devil's Island. Here he engineered a daring escape with such lost souls as Marius (Peter Lorre), Garou (Helmut Dantine), Petit (George Tobias) and Renault (Philip Dorn). Adrift in a lifeboat, the escapees were picked up by a French vessel commandeered by pro-fascist Major Duval (Sydney Greenstreet). With the help of Mantrac and the prisoners, the ship's patriotic captain (Victor Francen) thwarted Duval's evil machinations, enabling Mantrac to continue his battle against Nazism as a member of the RAF. By modern standards, Passage to Marseille is overproduced, overdirected, overacted and overscored (by Max Steiner); however, it filled a definite need in wartime America, and proved a huge financial success. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The time is World War II. A group of disillusioned French soldiers are approached by Nazi troops and promised safe passage to their homeland. The Frenchmen willingly surrender, only to discover that their next destination is a German concentration camp located near a Gallic village. The anticipated escape attempt results in an uprising from the French villagers--hence the film's title, which refers to the emblem of the Free-French underground. Cross of Lorraine compensates for its Hollywood's-eye view of France (no more realistic than the Paris of the Ernst Lubitsch musicals) with some remarkably graphic sequences showing the extent of German brutality. The melting-pot cast includes Frenchman Jean-Pierre Aumont as a patriot, Hungarian Peter Lorre as a hateful Nazi, American Gene Kelly as a cynical victim of German torture, and Canadian Hume Cronyn as the traditionally rodent-like informer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this drama, set during WW II, a teacher at a military school is derided by his students because he has not joined the military. The man is deeply disturbed by their ridicule and disrespect and so pleads with the draft-board to reconsider his "essential" status and allow him to join. He is allowed to enlist, but still, because he has a punctured ear-drum, is not allowed to join. Unable to face his students, the teacher gets a job at a shipyard, then deceives his students into believing that he is at war by having a buddy at boot camp forward their letters to him. Soon ugly rumors begin to circulate amongst the suspicious students. One is that their teacher went AWOL. The other is that he is really a Nazi spy. The students' actions threaten to destroy the teacher's new romance with a female welder. In the end everything comes out hunky-dory when the teacher proves himself a courageous hero during a shipyard fire. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

"It's box office poison," producer Samuel Goldwyn is said to have exclaimed when he heard the idea of filming the life story of fabled first baseman Lou Gehrig. "If people want baseball, they go to the ballpark!" The story begins before World War I, when young Lou Gehrig (played as a boy by Douglas Croft) begins dreaming of becoming a professional ballplayer. Lou's immigrant parents (Elsa Jansen and Ludwig Stossel) insist that the boy attend Columbia University to become an engineer. While in college, Lou (played as a man by Gary Cooper) becomes a star athlete, and, with the help of sports journalist Sam Blake (Walter Brennan), he is signed by the New York Yankees and joins their big-league lineup in 1925; real-life Yanks Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey, Bob Meusel and Mark Koenig play themselves. He also meets and falls in love with Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright) (an event that actually happened in 1933) and earns the nickname "The Iron Man of Baseball" because he never misses a game. In 1939, Lou discovers that he has a fatal neurological disease called amytrophic lateral sclerosis (now known, of course, as "Lou Gehrig's Disease"). On July 4, 1939, an emotional Lou Gehrig, a scant two years away from death, bids farewell to 62,000 of his fans and friends at Yankee Stadium. Allowing that he might have been given a bad break, he concludes his speech with "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Deftly weaving basic facts with yards and yards of fancy, screenwriters Jo Swerling and Herman J. Mankiewicz serve up one of the most entertaining and inspiring baseball biopics. A more accurate but less dramatic adaptation of the same story, A Love Affair: The Eleanor & Lou Gehrig Story, was produced for television in 1977. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The South Seas romance is set on the scenic island of Tahiti where the island chief betroths his son to a woman and then ships him to the US to attend Harvard. During the return voyage the lad is befriended by the ship's captain who also protects the beautiful girl the boy meets, but doesn't know he is supposed to marry. The two end up falling in love, even though the young man has sworn not to marry the girl his father picked out for him 15 years before. Meanwhile another jealous girl interferes with the romance as does another chieftain who wants the betrothed girl for himself and so tries to kill the young man. The whole mess is later resolved by a tremendous volcanic eruption which destroys the island and leaves the girl standing alone on a rocky peak staring at the blood red sun slowly sinking beneath the horizon. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide