Jimmy Boyd Movies

Contract on Cherry Street represented Frank Sinatra's TV movie debut--an event deemed worthy of a TV Guide cover story. Sinatra plays NYPD veteran Deputy Inspector Frank Hovannes, in charge of a special unit set up to battle organized crime. The murder of Hovannes' partner, coupled with departmental restrictions and legalities, leads the Inspector to organize a semi-vigilante group with three other like-minded officers. They murder an underworld honcho, in hopes of triggering a mob war that will result in the decimation of every gangster in the Big Apple. Edward Anhalt's script for Contract on Cherry Street can't make up its mind whether to emulate The Godfather or Kojak. Sinatra's own Artanis Productions was responsible for this film, so any praise or blame must ultimately fall upon Ol' Blue Eyes' shoulders. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this romance, an ex-Marine begins looking for a fellow Vietnam vet in hopes of making it as musicians in New York. He does not realize it, but he is driving in stolen cars. After being chased by the police, he ditches the cars and hitchhikes the New York. By the time he arrives, his pal has already left. At the friend's former apartment, the Marine gets romantic with a hippie chick and begins singing in the Village where he finds audiences unreceptive. He then boards a bus where he meets a young woman on her way to marry a Marine who ends up refusing to marry her. Soon she and the musical Marine are traveling companions. They are accompanied by a trick chicken, and a midget. Just as he finally finds his friend, the girl states that she is pregnant and the honorable fellow offers to marry her, but she will not. Then her old fiancé appears and a fight ensues. She ends up going with him. When the singer finally gets his big chance, he sees the girl watching him and realizes they are in love. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

This is a low-budget, standard drama by Charles Haas (his last film) in which a father investigates the mysterious death of his son in a military school. Steven Conway (Mickey Rooney) never knew his son who was raised by the ex-Mrs. Conway after their divorce. The son had been enrolled in a hard-as-nails military school, a place of last resort for delinquents of wealthy families unable to straighten out in any other way. Once he learns of his son's death, Conway goes to the school and comes up against a stone wall when he tries to find out how he died. As his investigation raises dangerous confrontations with school authorities it becomes more than apparent that his son was murdered. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

The Evolution vs. Creationism argument is at the center of the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee Broadway play Inherit the Wind. Lawrence and Lee's inspiration was the 1925 "Monkey Trial," in which Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in violation of state law. Scopes deliberately courted arrest to challenge what he and his supporters saw as an unjust law, and the trial became a national cause when The Baltimore Sun, represented by the famed (and atheistic) journalist H. L. Mencken, hired attorney Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. The prosecuting attorney was crusading politician William Jennings Bryan, once a serious contender for the Presidency, now a relic of a past era. While Bryan won the case as expected, he and his fundamentalist backers were held up to public ridicule by the cagey Darrow. In both the play and film versions of Inherit the Wind, the names and places are changed, but the basic chronology was retained, along with most of the original court transcripts. John Scopes becomes Bertram Cates (Dick York); Clarence Darrow is Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy); William Jennings Bryan is Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March); and H. L. Mencken is E. K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly). Dayton, Tennessee is transformed into Hillsboro -- or, as the relentlessly cynical Hornbeck characterizes it, "Heavenly Hillsboro." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This musical is a contemporary version of Aristophanes' ancient play Lysistrata. Instead of Greece, this play is centered in the town of Osawkie, Kansas and centers on the feuds between the men there and those of nearby towns. They are fighting over the possession of a safe filled with important county records. The women, sick of all the fighting, band together, lock themselves in a fortress and refuse to make any form of love with the brutes until they stop. They do, and prairie love blossoms. Songs include: "Lysistrata," "Send Us a Miracle," "My Love Is Yours," "Travellin' Man," "What Good Is a Woman Without a Man?" "There's Gonna Be a Wedding," "The Second Greatest Sex," "How Lonely Can I Get?" ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi