Isabel Withers Movies

Howard Hawks hoped to capture the screwball comic fervor of his 1938 film Bringing Up Baby with his 1952 comedy Monkey Business. As in the earlier film, Cary Grant stars as an absent-minded professor involved in a research project. This time he's a chemist seeking a "fountain of youth" formula that will revitalize middle-agers both mentally and physically. Though Grant's own laboratory experiments yield little fruit, a lab monkey, let loose from its cage, mixes a few random chemicals and comes up with just the formula Grant is looking for. This mixture is inadvertently dumped in the lab's water supply; the fun begins when staid, uptight Grant drinks some of the "bitter" water, then begins cutting up like a teenager. A harmless afternoon on the town with luscious secretary Marilyn Monroe rouses the ire of Grant's wife Ginger Rogers, but her behavior is even more infantile when she falls under the spell of the youth formula. Everyone remembers the best line in Monkey Business: foxy-grandpa research supervisor Charles Coburn hands the curvacious Monroe a letter and says "Get someone to type this". Even better is his next line: after Monroe sashays out of the room, Coburn turns to Grant and, with eyes atwinkle, murmurs "Anyone can type." Likewise amusing is Monkey Business's pre-credits gag, wherein Cary Grant opens a door and is about to step forward when director Hawks, off-camera, admonishes "Not yet, Cary." Among the co-conspirators on Monkey Business's carefree script are Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer and I.A.L. Diamond, with an original story by Harry Segall (Here Comes Mr. Jordan) as their source. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur Broadway comedy Ladies and Gentlemen formed the basis of the Warner Bros. laughspinner Perfect Strangers. The title characters are Terry Scott and David Campbell, played by Ginger Rogers and Dennis Morgan. She's a divorcee, he's a husband and father. Terry and David are thrown together by fate -- or rather, the LA judicial system. While serving as jurors on a murder trial, the two fall in love. Ironically, the woman on trial allegedly killed her husband because he'd asked for a divorce. The seriocomic tension develops on two levels: will juror Isobel Bradford (Margolo Gillmore) be able to sway the others to vote for the death penalty, and will Terry and David continue to pursue their romance at the expense of the happiness of others? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this musical comedy with dramatic touches, Jack and Molly Moran (Dan Dailey and Betty Grable) are a show business couple who, after hosting their own radio show, have just been given a deal to star in a TV series. They're also thrilled to discover that Molly is expecting a baby, but their joy turns to sorrow after she loses the child in an auto accident, and her doctors tell her that she may not be able to conceive again. When they see how happy their friends Walter and Janet Pringle (David Wayne and Jane Wyatt) are with their five children, the Morans decide to adopt, but they discover that show people are not generally regarded as fit parents, regardless of their success or stability. However, good fortune eventually shines on Jack and Molly, as they find themselves with not one but two adopted tykes, and a big surprise around the corner. My Blue Heaven marked the film debut of musical star Mitzi Gaynor. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Gene Autry enjoyed considerable success with his recording of Stan Jones' haunting "Riders in the Sky". He then parlayed this success into a film, which proved to be one of Autry's best postwar efforts. The basic plot concerns Autry's efforts to clear rancher Ralph Lawson (Steve Darrell) of a trumped-up murder charge. The trumper-upper, Rock McCleary, is played by Robert Livingston, a former cowboy star who turned to character roles late in his career. The heroine is played by Gloria Henry, ten years removed from her TV fame as Alice Mitchell in Dennis the Menace. The title song is imaginatively staged by director John English, with a ghostly Tom London riding hard and fast as a montage of moody images play across the screen. So effective was this vignette that Columbia included it in the coming-attractions trailer for Riders in the Sky. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Viewers who know Gale Storm only through her chaotic comic performances on TV's My Little Margie and Oh Susanna will be surprised by her subdued dramatic performance in Abandoned. Storm plays Paula Consodine, who comes to Los Angeles in search of her missing sister. Newspaperman Mark Sitko (Dennis O'Keefe), investigating on Paula's behalf, discovers that the sister is dead, a supposed suicide. The whole thing seems a bit fishy to Sitko, and indeed it is: the girl's death was engineered by a black-market adoption racket, headed by one DeCola (Will Kuluva). Paula bravely offers to act as bait to draw the criminals out, a formidable task given the presence of such secondary villains as Raymond Burr and Mike Mazurki. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Beauty contest winner Patricia Knight's one bid for screen stardom was Columbia's Shockproof. Knight plays Jenny Wright, a convicted murderess paroled in the care of probation officer Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde). What begins as an aloof professional relationship eventually blossoms into romance. The fly in the ointment is shady Harry Wesson (John Baragrey), the gambler who inveigled Jenny into committing murder. The girl is torn between creature comforts offered her by Wesson and the promise of a clean life offered by Griff. This early Douglas Sirk effort contains a smattering of the stylistic touches which distinguished his later work.The screenplay was written by famed director Samuel Fuller, known for his gritty realism and hard-boiled style. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this romantic comedy, a wealthy heiress marries hastily and realizes her mistake on her honeymoon in New York. Though it is her wedding night, she decides not to consummate the union and so ends up hiding in the room of a fellow whose airplane cargo company is facing financial ruin. He assumes that the frightened girl is poor and homeless and so takes her in. She then overdoses on sleeping pills and cannot wake up. The fellow is forced to take her back to California. The flight back is tumultuous as she, a fugitive criminal, two enamored newlyweds, a cigar smoking chimp, a corpse, and a shipment of lobsters are aboard the plane. Mayhem really ensues when the plane crashes in a farmer's field. By this time, the woman and the fellow have fallen in love. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this drama, a soldier's widow, whose husband died a hero in WW II, begins a quest to find the five men whose lives were saved when her husband sacrificed his own life by taking the brunt of a hand grenade blast. Her search begins two years after the war's end, and is an attempt to see if the men were worthy of her husband's death. En route she is slightly hurt in a minor accident and becomes hysterically paralyzed and unable to walk. One of the soldiers she was looking for tries to help her overcome her hysteria by using hypnosis. While she sleeps, he allows her to "talk" to all the soldiers involved in the incident. In this way, she is able to accept her husband's death. Seeing that the hypnotist is himself filled with guilt about the death, she in turn hypnotizes him. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Soon to be married in real life, Barbara Hale and Bill Williams also played sweethearts on screen in the frantic farce A Likely Story. After a routine medical examination, ex-GI Bill Baker (Bill Williams) overhears a conversation between two doctors, leading him to the mistaken conclusion that he's doomed to die from a rare heart condition. Chancing to meet aspiring artist Vickie North (Barbara Hale), Baker resolves to help Vickie realize her dream by bankrolling her career. He takes out a huge life insurance policy, then talks a couple of gangsters (Sam Levene and Nestor Paiva) into bumping him off so that Vickie and her kid brother Jamie (Lanny Rees) can collect immediately. Things get complicated when Baker discovers that he's as hale and hearty as the next fellow, prompting him to try to weasel out of his bargain with the gangsters-who, having financed the insurance policy in the first place, aren't inclined to let our hero off the hook so easily. Curiously, what should have been a frothy comedy plays more like a film noir, complete with a brief, hallucinatory nightmare sequence! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this western, a Native American boy and his horse Wild Beauty make friends with a gentle doctor who helps the boy save his beloved steed from the cruel industrialist who has been slaughtering horses and using their hides for making shoes. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

If there were any doubts that little Shirley Temple was all grown up by 1945, those doubts were disippated by her appearance in Columbia's Kiss and Tell. Based on the mildly risque stage comedy by F. Hugh Herbert, the film casts Temple as impulsive teenager Corliss Archer, who is the only person in on the secret marriage between her GI brother and local girl Mildred Pringle (Virginia Welles). When Mildred becomes pregnant, Corliss can't reveal the marriage, since the Archers and the Pringles aren't overly fond of one another. Thus it is that Corliss herself pretends to be expecting, intending to claim Mildred's baby as her own. She further identifies her next-door boyfriend Dexter Franklin (Jerome Courtland) as the father, opening yet another can of worms. Somehow this mess straightens itself out, but not before several "chancy" scenes and lines of dialogue that must have given the Hollywood censors headaches aplenty. Kiss and Tell (the original play, that is) not only spawned a 1949 movie sequel, A Kiss for Corliss, but also inspired the popular radio and TV sitcom Meet Corliss Archer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Jane Randolph, the star of several Val Lewton projects at RKO, goes the "spoiled heiress" route in Republic's Sporting Chance. Before she can inherit the family millions, Jane must go out and find a job without using her connections. Not surprisingly, she is brought down to earth by the experience, finding true love in the form of poor-but-honest John O'Malley. Director George Blair managed to helm four pictures the same year that Sporting Chance came out. While the strain doesn't show, there is a paucity of inspiration and nuance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sam White, brother of Columbia Pictures' 2-reel-comedy maven Jules White, served as producer of the quickie Columbia musical Tahiti Nights. The lissome Jinx Falkenberg plays Tahitian princess Luana, who is promised in marriage to American bandleader Jack (Dave O'Brien). Luana is delighted by the arrangement, but Jack is less enchanted, and he spends most of the film trying to wriggle out of the wedding. In the meantime, Luana and a chorus line of sun-kissed sweeties dance to such tunes as "Let Me Love You Tonight," which in 1945 was a Hit Parade favorite. Featured in the cast of Tahiti Nights is hefty Hawaiian nightclub entertainer and radio star Hilo Hattie, who brightened many an otherwise dreary tropical musical of the 1940s. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide