Virginia Brissac Movies

Radio legend and 3-D pioneer Arch Oboler brings his story, Alter Ego, to the screen in a low-budget yarn that benefits from a strong cast and direction. Joan Ellis (Phyllis Thaxter) hears a voice in her head (in flashbacks) shortly before she is to be married. She flees to another city and even takes up with another man to rid herself of the voice, but random words bring it back at unexpected moments. The voice ultimately tells her to kill her husband-to-be, and when a psychiatrist (Edmund Gwenn) determines on the eve of her execution that Joan is possessed by a split personality, a struggle ensues to see which one will survive. Oboler uses radio techniques and tense scripting to bring his thriller to visual life. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

Night Club Girl was designed as a feature-length "screen test" for new Universal contractee Vivian Austin. The plot is the old one about a couple of young showbiz aspirants who are given their Big Break by a hotshot journalist. In this instance, the aspirants are tapdancer Ellen (Austin) and Betty Huttonish songstress Janie (Judy Clark), while the benevolent journalist is columnist Clark Phillips (Edward Norris). In a cute cliché reversal, Ellen and Janie's debut at Maxie Rosenbloom's nightclub proves to be a disaster. Even so, there's a happy ending, not to mention dozens of music numbers performed by the likes of the Mulcays, The Delta Rhythm Boys and Paula Drake. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is at a seedy midtown Manhattan bar early one evening, drowning his sorrows over a failed marriage, when he strikes up a conversation with a woman (Fay Helm). She's well dressed, with a very ornate hat topping off her ensemble, and also seems even sadder and more lost than he is. Henderson persuades her to join him in taking advantage of the two theater tickets he has. They attend the show -- a song-and-dance showcase by a Brazilian artist (Aurora) -- and then part company without ever exchanging names. He returns home to find three detectives in his apartment and his wife strangled. Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) questions Henderson and tries to verify his alibi, but no one -- not the bartender, the cabbie who hauled them to the theater, or the drummer in the band who was watching her -- admits to remembering the woman. Henderson can't prove that he was elsewhere when his wife was strangled and is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His assistant, Carol Richman (Ella Raines), who has watched all of this happen, can't sit by while Scott is destroyed, and decides to get at the truth, joined by Inspector Burgess, who now believes Henderson to be innocent. Carol hounds the bartender (Andrew Tombes) until he seems ready to crack, but before he talks, he tries to get away from her and dies in an accident. The drummer, Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr.), proves more talkative and reveals that someone paid him 500 dollars to forget about the woman, but before Burgess can question him, he's strangled. It seems as though there's no hope left, even with the added help of Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), Scott's best friend, newly returned from Brazil, when Carol gets a line on the unusual hat the woman was wearing. She traces the hat to its owner in a mansion on Long Island, where she is recovering from a breakdown over the death of her fiancé -- that was her trouble on the night she crossed paths with Scott Henderson. It is only on returning to New York, while awaiting Burgess' arrival, that she realizes that Jack Marlow is the murderer -- that he returned after having dinner with them, following their fight, and strangled Henderson's wife; paid off the bartender, the cab driver, and Cliff Milburn to keep them from revealing the existence of the woman that Scott was with; and killed Milburn to prevent him from talking; and he plans to kill Carol before she can talk to Burgess. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Robert Z. Leonard, who must have taken room and board at MGM, was the directorial hand behind this slight domestic drama. Lana Turner is the bride, John Hodiak the groom. James Craig is the odd man out, who pursues Turner when Hodiak is off fighting the war. Bored by domesticity, Turner welcomes Craig's attentions, but impending motherhood straightens out her priorities. Nearly two hours of celluloid are expended on a story that any other studio would have zipped out in seven reels. Marriage Is a Private Affair was based on a slightly steamier novel by Judith Kelly. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Teresa Wright plays Charlie, a small-town high-schooler who enjoys a symbiotic relationship with her favorite uncle, also named Charlie (Joseph Cotten). When young Charlie "wills" that old Charlie pay a visit to her family, her wish comes true. Uncle Charlie is his usual charming self, but he seems a bit secretive and reserved at times. Too, his manner of speaking is curiously unsettling, especially when he brings up the subject of rich widows, whom he characterizes as "swine." When a pair of detectives (MacDonald Carey and Wallace Ford), posing as magazine writers, arrive in town and begin asking questions about Uncle Charlie, young Charlie's curiosity is aroused. Why, for example, has Uncle Charlie torn an article out of the evening newspaper? Rushing to the library, Young Charlie locates the missing item: the headline screams WHO IS THE MERRY WIDOW MURDERER? As the horrified Charlie reads on, the conclusion is inescapable: her beloved Uncle Charlie is a mass murderer, preying upon wealthy old women. And what happens next? Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock) based their screenplay on a story by Gordon McDowell, who in turn was inspired by real-life "Merry Widow Murderer" Earle Leonard Nelson. The casting, from stars to bit players, is impeccable; the best of the batch is Hume Cronyn, making his film debut as a wimpy murder-mystery aficionado. Lensed on location in Santa Rosa, California, The Shadow of a Doubt wasAlfred Hitchcock's favorite film. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this entry in the "Dead End Kids" series (later they would reappear as "The Bowery Boys") the lads encounter a terribly ill young boy while they stay in a rural boarding house. The lad tries hard to keep up with the lads as they sneak into a train yard and begin playing amongst the box cars. Unfortuantely, when a railroad detective shows up, the sick boy is killed while trying to get away. The guilt-stricken kids attempt to tell the dead boy's mother, but she is too kind to hear them. Instead she takes the kids into her home. Tommy, the lead boy, manages to get a job as a gas jockey, but things go wrong when he entangles himself with racketeers. Eventually he is caught and taken to court where the mother of the dead child speaks movingly on Tommy's behalf. Just after he is acquitted, word of Pearl Harbor reaches them and the Dead End Kids decide to join the army. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The Iron Major is the saga of WW1 hero-cum-football coach Frank Cavanaugh, played with his usual no-nonsense professionalism by Pat O'Brien. Leaving home and hearth behind to serve his country in the Great War, Cavanaugh goes on to lead the Dartmouth, Boston College and Fordham football teams to victory. His credo throughout is "Love of God?Love of Country?Love of Family"-inspiriational words indeed in war-torn 1943. Based on the memoirs of Cavanaugh's wife Florence (played in the film by Ruth Warrick), The Iron Major suffers from repetition and overkill. But, as Humphrey Bogart once said in an unrelated interview, "Pat O'Brien was good? Pat was always good." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Star-Spangled Rhythm is a typical wartime all-star musical-comedy melange, this time from Paramount Pictures. The slender plot involves the efforts by humble studio doorman Pop Webster (Victor Moore) to pass himself off as a big-shot Paramount executive for the benefit of his sailor son Jimmy (Eddie Bracken). The overall level of humor can be summed up by the scene in which Webster is advised that the best way to pretend to be a studio big-shot is to say "It stinks!" to everything -- whereupon Cecil B. DeMille shows up to ask Webster's opinion about his current production. Betty Hutton, cast as studio switchboard operator and co-conspirator Polly Judson, is at her most rambunctiously appealing here. The huge lineup of guest performers includes Bing Crosby (and his 8-year-old son Gary!), Bob Hope, Veronica Lake, Dorothy Lamour, Dick Powell, Mary Martin, Alan Ladd, Fred MacMurray, William Bendix, Paulette Goddard, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, most (but not all) of them going through their characteristic paces. Highlights include a surrealistic rendition of That Old Black Magic with Johnnie Johnston and Vera Zorina; a frantic staging of the old George S. Kaufman sketch "If Men Played Cards as Women Do" with MacMurray, Ray Milland, Franchot Tone, and Lynn Overman; and The Sweater, the Sarong and the Peekaboo Bang, first performed by Goddard, Lamour and Lake, then lampooned in drag by Arthur Treacher, Sterling Holloway and Walter Catlett! PS: The actor playing Rochester's chauffeur in the Smart as a Tack number is John Ford "regular" Woody Strode. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A bit higher-budgeted than most of Universal's "pocket" musicals, Get Hep to Love runs a full 79 mintues rather than the standard hard-and-fast hour. Gloria Jean plays child musical prodigy Doris Stanley, who is overworked and exploited by her avaricious Aunt Addie (Nana Bryant). Escaping her aunt's clutches for a well-deserved vacation, Doris manages to elude the private detective (Tim Ryan) hired to bring her back. Landing in a small town, she assumes a phony name and allows herself to be adopted by young marrieds Stephen and Ann Winters (Robert Paige, Jane Frazee). She also attends a "normal" high school for the first time in her life, where she vies with brattish Elaine Sterling (Cora Sue Collins) over the affections of Jimmy Arnold (Donald O'Connor). In standard movie-musical fashion, everyone's problems are straightened out with a climactic production number, spotlighting Gloria Jean's operatic soprano and Donald O'Connor's fancy footwork. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

You cannot keep a good mummy down forever and Kharis is back in this sequel to The Mummy's Hand, which itself was something of a remake of the classic Boris Karloff thriller of 1935, The Mummy. Although assumed to have been killed by Stephen Banning (Dick Foran) in the previous film, Andoheb (George Zucco) has miraculously survived and is now planning a terrible revenge on both Banning and his entire family in Mapleton, MA. With High Priest Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey) as his faithful companion, Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) takes up residence in a Mapleton graveyard where the mysterious Mr. Bey somehow has obtained the job of caretaker. At the first full moon, the mummy is fed enough tanna leaves to break into the Banning residence and kill the now elderly Stephen. To find out what exactly happened, the dead man's son, John (John Hubbard), gets in contact with Babe Hanson (Wallace Ford), one of the members of the original Banning expedition to Egypt. Neither Babe nor John can prevent Kharis from killing Stephen's sister, Jane (Mary Gordon), or from kidnapping John's blonde fiancée, Isobel (Elyse Knox). A posse of upset citizens advances to the graveyard where Mehemet Bey has been promising to literally spend an eternity with Isobel. Interrupted in these romantic pursuits, Bey hands the girl over to Kharis before being shot by John. Carrying a prostrate Isobel, Kharis shuffles back to the Banning estate, which is soon set afire by the mob. Isobel is rescued in the nick of time by John and Kharis perishes in the flames. Or does he? ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide

Take a Letter, Darling is from the "boss lady" school of 1940s comedies. Fred MacMurray is Darling (that's his last name), an unsuccessful artist who advertises for a position as male secretary. He is hired by female advertising executive Rosalind Russell, who is all business--during business hours. MacMurray learns that his job description includes escorting Ms. Russell and her clients to social gatherings. This goes on and on until Rosalind begins softening her steely exterior and MacMurray asserts his male prerogative (this of course was 1942, when gender stereotypes weren't subject to the ACLU). The film's best moments belong to Robert Benchley as Russell's ad agency partner, who'd rather play cards than tend to business. Though Rosalind Russell seems to be typecast in Take a Letter, Darling she was actually second choice for her role; it had been slated for Claudette Colbert, but Colbert became unavailable when she took over for the recently deceased Carole Lombard in The Palm Beach Story (42). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

What's a modern guy to do when his wife's ideas about marriage are a bit too modern for his taste? Andre Casall (Charles Boyer) is a successful, free-thinking playwright who becomes infatuated with a progressive female doctor, Jane Alexander (Margaret Sullavan). They marry impulsively, and Andre soon learns that Jane's ideas about marriage are a bit different from his own -- she demands that they keep separate apartments, and they are to meet only once a day, at 7 a.m. This isn't quite the way that Andre had imagined wedded bliss, and he is soon scheming to make her jealous, in hopes that she'll demand a more traditional living arrangement. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Author Hartzell Spence's popular biography of his preacher father was the source for One Foot in Heaven. Fredric March stars as Methodist cleric William Spence, whose calling requires him to move his family from parish to parish on a near-monthly basis. The children resent the fact that they're never able to sustain friendships, while Reverend Spence is equally upset by what he perceives to be encroaching immorality in the early 20th century. Spence's stubbornness loses him as many parishioners as he gains, but he is gradually humanized by a series of random events. In the best of these, the Reverend, who has railed against movies from the pulpit, attends a "scandalous" picture show--and as the picture reaches its climax, he finds himself cheering on the good guys as loudly as everyone else! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide