Peter Breck Movies

Shock Corridor represents filmmaker Samuel Fuller at his most excessive, but few would have it otherwise. Peter Breck plays a ruthless journalist who believes that the quickest way to a Pulitzer Prize is to uncover the facts behind a murder at a mental hospital. To glean first-hand information, Breck pretends to go insane and is locked up in the institution. While pursuing his investigation, Breck is sidetracked by the loopy behavior of his fellow inmates. During a hospital riot, Breck is straightjacketed and subjected to shock treatment. By now almost as crazy as he's previously pretended to be, Breck begins imagining that his exotic-dancer girlfriend Constance Towers (a Samuel Fuller "regular") is actually his sister! Typical of the Fuller ouevre, the characters in Shock Corridor are either saved or destroyed by their individual obsessions. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

To square a gambling debt, Bart Maverick (Jack Kelly) is forced to take the job of marshal in a dusty frontier town. Before long, Bart runs up against a local joker named Archie Walker (John Dehner), who gets his kicks by posing as various famous gunslingers. Right now, Archie is claiming to be none other than Wyatt Earp--a guise that may prove detrimental to everyone's health when the real Wyatt Earp (Med Flory) shows up. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The final episode of Maverick finds Bart Maverick (Jack Kelly) crossing the path of his brother Bret's old nemesis Modesty Blaine (played in earlier episodes by Mona Freeman, and here enacted by Kathleen Crowley). Hoping that Bart will marry her, Modesty goes ballistic (even though that word didn't exist in the 1870s) when he turns her down--and to get even, she tells the authorities that Bart tried to "have his way" with her. Somehow or other, all this nonsense is prelude to the climactic sequence, in which both Bart and Modesty are key players in a spectacular train robbery, which also involves real-life luminaries Diamond Jim Brady (Barry Kelley) and Doc Holliday (Peter Breck). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Prolific director Joseph Pevney is better known for his next venture -- the Star Trek television series -- than this conventional docudrama on mobster "Dutch" Schultz (played by Vic Morrow). Rather than take the focus of 1997's Hoodlum, in which Schultz's attempt to move into Harlem is thwarted, the events leading to the demise of the nearly illiterate, Bronx-born, "king of beer" are stressed. His affair with Iris Murphy (Leslie Parrish) also gets front-and-center treatment when Iris leaves her policeman husband to hook up with Schultz, only to degenerate into alcoholism. To the credit of the director, the repugnant Schultz (whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer) is not romanticized, even though the legend of his "buried treasure" and the literary non-sequitur of his famous, 1935 deathbed ramblings would tend to lure anyone into digressions. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Learn the grim truth about the lifestyles of those colorful beatniks in this exploitation drama that tells the story of a naive aspiring performer who meets an agent who promises to make him a star. Unfortunately, when the young man's friend murders someone, his dreams are shattered. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this comical western, a curmudgeonly fur-trapper is hurt by an enraged bear and must send his nephew to town with his pelts so he can get much-needed supplies. En route, the young man passes a covered wagon and convinces the man who lives there to allow his daughter to travel with him. The two innocent mountain youths then make their way to the town. It is the first time for either of them. There they meet the sheriff who controls the town. As soon as the previously rag-tag girl has bathed and donned a pretty dress, the sheriff is attracted to her. He gets her a job in a "dance hall." The naive nephew thanks the sheriff for being so kind. He then falls in love with the dance-hall madam. Fortunately, a truly kind storekeeper removes the innocent veil from the boy's eyes. Quickly he moves in to save his traveling companion from a life of ill-repute. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Paladin (Richard Boone) comes to the defense of a strong-willed schoolteacher named Molly Stanton (Marian Seldes). It seems that Molly has been instructing her pupils in the facts concerning an infamous band of Civil War vigilantes, incurring the wrath of several former members of the organization who have threatened to burn the schoolhouse down unless the teacher retracts her statements. This is one of several episodes wherein Paladin surreptitiously acts as spokesman for all those blacklisted filmmakers who had been denied the right of free speech during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. Among the child actors appearing as the schoolkids is Lana Wood, the younger sister of film star Natalie Wood. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Robert Mitchum (who also wrote the story and served as executive producer) stars in Thunder Road as Lucas Doolin, a Korean War veteran who returns home and promptly rejoins the family's bootlegging business. His father, Vernon (Trevor Bardette), runs the still and heads the family, while Lucas handles the driving and transporting of the moonshine (mostly to Memphis), and his younger brother, Robin (James Mitchum), takes care of the car he uses to outrun the competition and the Treasury agents; and their mother, Sarah (Frances Koon), keeps the home. Lucas is a better driver than anyone around, and he and Robin have rigged a few tricks on the car that surprise the Treasury men -- but Robin is nearly 17 and tired of just working under the hood; he wants to drive like Lucas. Lucas doesn't want his brother to become a transporter, though, preferring that the teenager stay in school and stay straight with the law. But Lucas is pretty easy to idolize, looked up to by most of their neighbors for his driving skills, among other attributes, and the object of affections of lots of women between Harlan and Memphis, most especially teenaged neighbor Rozanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight). He appreciates her admiring and lustful gaze, though he has all the woman he can handle and wishes that she were that interested in Robin, who's her own age and just as attracted to her in his own awkward way. Lucas and his family have always been able to outrun the revenue agents, even with a new man, Troy Barrett (Gene Barry), assigned to the territory and out to get him -- they're dedicated and tough, but they're not killers. However, now they're hearing of a new threat in the guise of a Memphis-based gangster named Carl Kogan (Jacques Aubuchon), who wants to take over the Doolins' operation and all the other moonshining activity in Harlan County. He's already offered a lot of money, but the Doolins and most of their neighbors running stills are too independent for that, and now he's sending in muscle, and that gets a young neighbor of theirs (Jerry Hardin) killed. But Lucas was pretty tough before the war, and he learned a thing or two about combat in Korea, and is not about to let either revenue agents or a bunch of strong-arm men from the city get in his way, and he has the car and the firepower to back up those sentiments.

When Kogan goes too far and kills a Treasury man, Lucas also picks up an unintended ally in agent Barrett, whose highest priority becomes indicting Kogan. The problem is that indictments and prosecutions aren't what Lucas is about -- he means to meet shot-for-shot and take more personal action, especially when his family becomes involved in Kogan's machinations. One thing he always swore to any and all within hearing range was that he'd keep Robin from becoming a transporter, and kill anyone who tried to make him one. And when Kogan manipulates a situation where Robin is lured into driving, Lucas means to make good on that vow. Director Arthur Ripley (1895-1961), a music and dance student-turned-editor-turned-gagman and short-subject specialist and academic (whose preceding feature film, 12 years earlier, had been the eerie Cornell Woolrich-based thriller The Chase), working in tandem with second unit directors James Casey and Jack Lannan and second unit photographer Karl Malkames, keeps the action moving at a brisk pace. Robert Mitchum is the center of gravity to the movie, though, which contains the quintessential Mitchum performance, the actor making his work look so easy that he could almost seem lazy if he weren't so magnetic in the role. He helped make Thunder Road into a national success, but the movie always had an extra-special resonance in the South, where it was shot and set. Thunder Road continued to generate annual five- and six-figure ticket sales from drive-ins in the border and Southern states for 25 years after its original release, a factor that caused United Artists and its successor organizations to purposefully delay its release on home video until the end of the 1980s. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide