Gale Sondergaard Movies

The longest (26-1/2 hours), most expensive ($25 million) and most complicated (four directors, five producers, five cinematographers, almost 100 speaking parts, several hundred extras) project made for television up to that time, Centennial was shown in two- and three-hour installments over a period of four months. An adaptation of James Michener's best-selling novel, it told the story of the settling of the American West by looking at the founding of the fictional town of Centennial, Colorado, from the settling of the area in the late 18th century to the present. Emmy-nominated for film editing and art direction, it boasts of sterling performances from Richard Chamberlain as frontiersman Alexander McKeag, Robert Conrad as the French-Canadian trapper Pasquinel, and a surprisingly powerful performance from former football star Alex Karras as compassionate but iron-willed immigrant farmer Hans Brumbaugh. ~ Brian Gusse, Rovi

The close friendship between a passionate old woman and a 12-year-old girl is presented in this drama. They meet when the girl is sent to her grandmother's house for the summer. It takes a while, but eventually the two become friends and the woman shares that she has been defying the cruel contractors who want her off the land so they can develop it. But the woman will not budge. Later she dies and her granddaughter continues her fight until she realizes that she cannot fight the future and lets them build. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Luke (Ossie Davis) is the loyal slave of a Kentucky horse breeder who is sold to the cruel Mississippi plantation owner MacKay (Stephen Boyd). The evil slave owner has the black beauty Cassie (Dionne Warwick) as his mistress, who longs to escape the clutches of her lecherous master. With the arrival of Luke, Cassie and the other slaves revolt in a desperate attempt to gain their freedom. MacKay offers Luke his freedom in exchange for selling out the rest of the slaves, but the loyal Luke chooses to fight and joins the side of his oppressed brethren. Bobby Scott writes five songs that Warwick sings off camera in this story of social upheaval in the days preceding the Civil War. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Director Mervyn Leroy lends a burnished MGM gloss to this sordid tale of infidelity among rich New York East Siders. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Jessie Bourne, a charming society woman whose finds out that her husband Brandon (James Mason) is guiltily indulging in an illicit affair with the earthy Isobel Lorrison (Ava Gardner). Jessie bears her husband's indiscretion with a gallant dignity, and when Isabelle is killed, Jesse realizes that she doesn't care for Brandon anyway. Van Heflin is also on hand as ex-cop Mark Dwyer, who admires Jessie's stoic dignity. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Road to Rio was the first of three "Road" pictures jointly produced by stars Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. On the run from the law again, musicians Bob and Bing stow away on an ocean liner. They try to come to the rescue of heiress Dorothy Lamour, who is doomed to an arranged marriage to caddish George Meeker. All gratitude and effusions for their assistance, Dorothy surprises Bob and Bing on their next meeting by slapping them in their faces and declaring "I hate you! I loathe you! I despise you!" The explanation? Dorothy is being hypnotized by her scheming aunt Gale Sondergaard, who has set up the marriage for mysterious mercenary reasons of her own. When Dorothy is "herself" again, Bob and Bing smuggle her off the ship and into their Rio de Janeiro hotel room. The boys plan to save Dorothy from her unwanted marriage by passing her off as a nightclub singer, and themselves as band leaders. Trouble is, they have no band. Enter the Wiere Brothers, three Rio street entertainers. Bob and Bing hire the threesome on the spot, unmindful that they have booked themselves into Nestor Paiva's nightclub on the promise that they're delivering an American band. Since the Wieres speak only Portuguese, Bing teaches each brother an American phrase by rote: "You're in the groove, Jackson", "You're Telling Me," and "This is Murder." Naturally, it isn't long before the boys' ruse is discovered, and this coupled with the newly hypnotized Lamour's threats to have Bob and Bing arrested, leaves our heroes broke and stranded once more. Still, they pose a menace to Sondergaard, thus she contrives a method of disposing of them. Hypnotizing them both, Sondergaard orders Bob and Bing to kill each other. They snap out of the spell just in time, but still there's the problem of rescuing Dorothy. And now there's a new angle: mysterious stranger Frank Puglia informs the boys that the only way to stop the wedding is to retrieve (pause; a furtive glance left; a furtive glance right) "The Papers." Said papers are in the possession of Sondergaard, obliging Bob and Bing to show up at the pre-nuptial festival in disguise (with Bob in drag). Managing to hypnotize Sondergaard's henchmen Frank Faylen and Joseph Vitale, Bob and Bing uncover the precious Papers, and Dorothy is saved. But how can those papers stop a wedding? We won't give away the surprise, nor will we tell you whether Dorothy ends up with Bob or Bing, nor even what the heck Jerry Colonna is doing in the picture leading a cavalry charge. Not the best of the "Road" pictures, Road to Rio is nonetheless one of the most memorable--and quotable (how many of your high school pals used to confound the teacher by declaring "You're in the groove, Jackson"?) ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

If Grecian storyteller Aesop really did exist, he was most likely a black slave. He wasn't an Austrian actor with an Egyptian name, but that's who played him in A Night in Paradise. Turhan Bey portrays the fable-spouting Aesop, who tries to escape his bondage by disguising himself as an old man. It is at the lavish court of King Croesus that the greyed-up Aesop first meets luscious Grecian princess Merle Oberon. The low-born talespinner is smitten, and determines to win the princess for his very own. Moral: If Universal buys a novel by George S. Hellman titled The Peacock's Feather, transforms it into a picture called A Night in Paradise, and appoints onetime Abbott and Costello cohort Arthur Lubin as director, you know what you're in for. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

While perhaps not Abbott & Costello's best film, The Time of Their Lives is certainly their most unusual. Lou Costello plays a Revolutionary War-era tinker, whose prized possession is a letter from George Washington, commending Costello as a loyal patriot. Costello's lady love is Anne Gillis, maidservant to aristocratic Jess Barker. Costello's rival in romance is Barker's butler Bud Abbott, who locks the tubby tinker in a trunk to keep him away from Gillis. Meanwhile, Gillis stumbles onto a plot to betray the Colonial Armies, masterminded by Barker. The girl is kidnaped and spirited away, but not before Barker has appropriated Costello's letter from Washington and hidden it in a mantelpiece clock. All this is witnessed by Barker's fiancee Marjorie Reynolds, who disguises herself as a man, the better to make her way through the lines to warn the Colonial troops of Barker's plot. She frees Costello from his trunk and enlists his aid in locating Washington. Mistaken for traitors, Costello and Reynolds are shot dead. Their bodies are thrown in a well as a colonial officer curses their souls to remain on the grounds of Barker's estate "until the crack of doom," unless some evidence should prove them innocent of treason. A few moments later, Costello and Reynolds materialize as ghosts. They try to escape the grounds, but a supernatural force holds them back. Flash-forward nearly two centuries to 1946: Costello and Reynolds, still confined to the estate, resent the intrusion by Barker's descendants, who plan to renovate the mansion and open it to tourists. The two ghosts decide to haunt the estate, resulting in a series of amusing and well-conceived invisibility gags. Much to their surprise, Costello and Reynolds find none other than Costello's old nemesis Bud Abbott as one of the house guests. No, Abbott isn't a ghost: he's a famed psychiatrist, a descendant of the butler who double-crossed Costello back in 1780. Costello has a high old time playing tricks on the nervous Abbott (a fascinating reversal of the usual Abbott-Costello relationship) before the rest of the house's occupants decide to hold a seance to find out what's annoying the two ghosts. In a genuinely spooky sequence, sinister house servant Gale Sondergaard, possessed by the spirit of Jess Barker, reveals that the ghosts have been falsely accused of treason, and that their salvation lies in locating that letter from Washington. Driven by a feeling of remorse over the sins of his ancestor, Abbott does his best to help the ghosts. Before the plot is resolved, there is time for a standard Abbott-and-Costello chase scene, with the invisible Costello driving a car wildly around the estate, with a terrified Abbott cringing in the back seat. More than a little inspired by The Canterville Ghost, The Time of Their Lives was the second of two Universal films that attempted to recast Abbott and Costello as individual characters rather than smart guy-dumb guy team members. While the film is an unmitigated delight when seen today, it failed at the box office in 1946, compelling Bud and Lou to return to their standard formula in their next film, Buck Privates Come Home. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The fifth in the Invisible Man series stars Jon Hall as Robert Griffin, a convict who takes the invisibility serum and then goes on a crime spree. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

The Climax was hurriedly and economically filmed on leftover sets from Universal's super-production The Phantom of the Opera. In his Technicolor debut, Boris Karloff plays Dr. Hohner, a brilliant but unstable theatrical physician who murders a beautiful opera star when she rejects him. Ten year later, a beautiful young opera singer named Angela (Susannah Foster) makes her debut at the Royal Opera House. Convinced that Angela is the reincarnation of his murdered sweetheart, Dr. Hohner fiendishly hypnotizes the girl so that she will be unable to sing. The spell is broken by the combined efforts of Angela's boyfriend Franz (Turhan Bey) and an opera-loving "boy king" (Scotty Beckett). As for Hohner, well, what usually happens to Boris Karloff in films of this nature? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this swashbuckler, a princess is raised by gypsies and becomes their queen. The trouble really begins when a count is murdered and the evil, ambitious baron who really did it blames the crime on the gypsies. The baron's messenger knows the truth and tries to prove it. When he notices that the gypsy queen is wearing a pendant bearing the slain count's crest, he reveals her true identity--the count's estranged sister and heir to the throne. The messenger then accuses the baron of the death. The baron has him thrown into the same dungeon as the gypsies and together they team up and escape. Meanwhile the gypsy girl, who has finally promised to marry the wicked baron in exchange for her clan's freedom, is kidnapped by the baron. The gallant messenger rescues her, kills the baron, and gets to marry the young queen. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Cult-favorite director Edgar G. Ulmer has quite a disparate cast to work with in Isle of Forgotten Sins. The story is typically brawny adventure fare, concerning a band of hardy South Sea pearl divers. But instead of a group of he-man protagonists, the leading players include the likes of pudgy Frank Fenton, scrawny John Carradine and septugenarian Sidney Toler. They play their parts well, but they aren't terribly convincing as rough-and-ready adventurers. For the record, the plot is motivated by $3 million in gold, which went down to the bottom of the sea during a storm. A second monsoon wipes out most of the cast members, though enough survive for a happy ending. The female cast members are as curiously chosen as the males, with Gale Sondergaard as a cabaret girl and Veda Ann Borg as a villainous native. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Columbia's Ellery Queen series called it quits with the timely 1942 entry Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen. The eponymous enemy agents are on the lookout for a cache of precious diamonds, which are being smuggled from Holland to the United States by way of Egypt. The gems are hidden in a mummy case, the better to throw the Nazis and the American authorities off the track. When smuggler Paul Gilette (Gilbert Roland) is murdered upon arriving in the US with the diamonds, Ellery Queen (William Gargan) and his police-inspector father (Charley Grapewin) try to solve the killing. The villains lead Ellery on a merry chase through a jewelry shop, art gallery, athletic club and cemetary, with Ellery's secretary Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay) ending up in the Nazi's clutches at one juncture. Boasting a formidable lineup of "heavies" (Gale Sondergaard, Sig Ruman et. al.), Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen is easily the best of the series. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi