Alexander Hall Movies

Tailing a Brooklyn tax evader, tax investigator Al Benjamin (Joe Pantoliano) uncovers several murders. Ignoring the police and his tax-office boss, Al teams with rookie cop Joseph Romero (Wade Dominguez). Their efforts to solve the killings lead them to the boss of the Russian immigrant community at Brooklyn's Brighton Beach. The boss' attractive daughter Nadia (Elizabeth Berkley) takes an interest in Al. Joseph and Al succeed in getting a state prosecutor to examine the case, but the key figure in the crime remains elusive. A Raymond Chandler-styled voiceover narration moves the story along. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide

When Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz beat the odds against TV stars succeeding on the big screen in The Long, Long Trailer (1954), MGM contracted America's favorite couple for a second theatrical feature. Forever Darling casts Desi as Lorenzo Xavier Vega, a brilliant scientist and Lucy as Susan, his neglected wife. Wishing out loud that her husband would pay attention to her, Susan is surprised to find her Guardian Angel standing in her living room. Even more surprising is the fact that said angel is an exact double for Susan's favorite movie star, James Mason. Following the angel's advice, Susan tags along when Lorenzo takes a trip in the woods to test out a revolutionary new insecticide. Hoping that the trip will constitute a second honeymoon, poor Susan is in for a major disappointment; as for Lorenzo, he must suffer his wife's well-intentioned "assistance," which of course is no help at all. After a number of I Love Lucy-style comic situations, the couple is on the verge of divorce, but the angelic Mason straightens things out. Forever Darling tanked at the box office, but at least Desi Arnaz cultivated a hit song by recording the title tune. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Golden-throated Mario Lanza stars in Because You're Mine. Lanza plays opera singer Renaldo Rossano, who is drafted into the army. Much to the displeasure of topkick Sgt. Batterson (James Whitmore), Renaldo is given celebrity treatment even while in uniform. Even more problematic is the romance between Renaldo and Batterson's sister, Bridget (Doretta Morrow, fresh from her Broadway success as Tuptim in The King and I). Wait till you see the "dueling tenors" scene between Whitmore and Lanza! For the benefit of those not operatically inclined, Because You're Mine features a gratuitous dance solo by Bobby Van. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Never mind the top-billed Ronald W. Reagan; the real stars of Louisa are sprightly seniors Charles Coburn, Spring Byington and Edmund Gwenn. Spring plays Reagan's widowed mother, who is outwardly satisfied with her lot but inwardly lonely. Enter Coburn and Gwenn, who vie for Spring's attentions. Uptight Ronnie disapproves of his mother's dalliances, and has additional problems with his spunky daughter (Piper Laurie), who has just begun dating. Spring Byington and Charles Coburn worked so well together in Louisa that plans were made to star them in a weekly TV series. The project never sold, but Spring would star in a similar sitcom, December Bride, from 1954 through 1959. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In The Great Lover, Bob Hope plays "Boy Rangers" scoutmaster Freddie Hunter, who accompanies his young charges on a European tour. During the ocean voyage to the continent, Freddie falls under the influence of erudite cardsharp O. J. Dabney (Roland Young), who promotes a romance between Freddie and Duchess Alexandria (Rhonda Fleming), the daughter of chronic gambler Grand Duke Maximillian (Roland Culver). What Freddie doesn't know (but the audience does) is that Dabney is not only a crook, but a murderer. Musical highlights include the peppy romantic ballad "A Thousand Violins," delivered by a delightfully intoxicated Rhonda Fleming. Watch for cameos by George "Superman" Reeves and Jack Benny. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Rosalind Russell plays yet another independent career woman in She Wouldn't Say Yes. This time she's a psychiatrist who sees no need for a man in her life. Her resolve weakens a bit when she meets Lee Bowman, a dashing combat sketch artist suffering from wartime emotional problems. Bowman falls in love with the shrink and determines to establish a beachhead, while Russell is equally determined to hold her ground. She doesn't say yes for the first 80 minutes of the film, but does in the last six. Even Rosalind Russell made jokes concerning the inordinate number of look-alike films she made in this vein. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this light romantic comedy, William B. Whitley (William Powell) is an astronomer who is very excited about his latest discovery, a comet that has been named after him. However, Whitley has been so busy tracking the course of his comet as its path leads straight into the moon that he's been ignoring his new wife, Vicky (Hedy Lamarr). Bored and lonely, one day Vicky visits an astrologer who informs her that she will -- on a specific day -- meet a handsome stranger, and they will fall in love. A bit perplexed at this news, Vicky shares the astrologer's report with William; however, he's so appalled that she would waste her time on pseudo-scientific hooey like astrology that he storms out of the house, moving into his observatory for a few days. On the predicted day, Vicky is wondering what happened to her dream man when an air raid warden, Lloyd Hunter (James Craig), shows up to confront Vicky and ends up going inside her house and shutting off her lights. Vicky and Lloyd strike up a conversation, and she begins to realize that he could well be the man the astrologer predicted she would meet; Vicky is interested in him, but just as he's leaving, William returns. William, however, senses that Vicky is infatuated with Lloyd, and he quickly hatches a devious plan to win back her good graces. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Rosalind Russell plays aspiring Ohio journalist Ruth Sherwood, who heads for New York to seek her fortune, accompanied by her sister, Eileen (Janet Blair), an aspiring actress. The girls take a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, which becomes a gathering place for several oddball characters, including a football jock (Gordon Jones), his silly wife (Miss Jeff Donnell) and an eternally drunken fortuneteller (June Havoc). Ruth tries to sell her writing, but is advised by a friendly magazine editor (Brian Aherne) that she'll never succeed unless she writes from her own experiences. Meanwhile, Eileen is continually getting in trouble due to her ingenuous attractiveness. Ruth secures an assignment to interview several visiting Portuguese sailors, who follow her to her apartment, are immediately entranced by Eileen, and break up the joint with an impromptu conga line. Everyone ends up in jail, and it looks as though Ruth is going to have to leave New York without achieving success. But when Ruth begins writing about her life with her sister Eileen, she becomes a success -- and wins the love of the magazine editor in the bargain. My Sister Eileen was based on a series of autobiographical articles by real-life writer Ruth McKenney, who with Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodhorov adapted these stories into a Broadway play. The play was later musicalized for the stage as Wonderful Town (again with Rosalind Russell), while the film version was itself adapted into a separate movie musical in 1955. There was also a brief 1960 TV series, starring Elaine Stritch and Shirley Bonne. As an added fillip, the 1942 My Sister Eileen includes a fleeting guest appearance by the Three Stooges! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Robert Montgomery plays saxophone-playing boxer Joe Pendleton, who insists upon piloting his own plane, much to the consternation of his manager Max Corkle (James Gleason). Just before a championship bout, Joe's plane crashes. When he revives, he finds he has been whisked away to Heaven by the overanxious Messenger #7013. Checking with the man in charge, one Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), Pendleton discovers that he isn't scheduled to die for another 50 years. Joe heads back to earth, only to learn to his chagrin that his body has been cremated. Mr. Jordan is obliged to find Joe a new body; the "candidate" is a business mogul named Farnsworth, who is in the process of being murdered in his bath by his wife (Rita Johnson) and her lover (John Emery). Joe takes over Farnsworth's body, astonishing the murderers by emerging from the bathroom, very much alive (while Joe still looks like Joe to himself and the audience, he looks like Farnsworth to everyone else). Still desirous of winning the upcoming championship, Joe begins to whip Farnsworth's body into shape, even hiring Max Corkle to manage him. It takes some doing, but Joe convinces Max that he is indeed Joe and not Farnsworth (their scenes together are priceless, far better seen than described). Meanwhile, Joe has fallen in love with Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), a woman whose father had been ruined by the real Farnsworth. For her sake, he pays back millions of dollars that the crooked Farnsworth had finagled out of his investors. This prompts Mrs. Farnsworth and her lover to kill "Farnsworth" again, and once more Joe Pendleton is without a body. How Mr. Jordan arranges for Joe to win the championship, expose the murderers and walk off arm and arm with Bette is a bit too complex to detail here. Here Comes Mr. Jordan is one of the most consistently clever romantic comedies of the 1940s, and richly deserving of the Oscars won by screenwriters Sidney Buchman, Seton I. Miller and Harry Segall. A sequel, Down to Earth, was filmed in 1947, with Roland Culver as Mr. Jordan; and in 1978, the original Jordan was remade by Warren Beatty as Heaven Can Wait. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Fiercely independent authoress June Cameron (Loretta Young) has no time for men in her life. Chauvinistic medical college professor Timothy Sterling (Ray Milland) has no use for women. So guess who is mistaken for June's husband, and guess who is forced by circumstances to pretend that she's married? The Doctor Takes a Wife maintains its exhausting comic pace until about five minutes before the end, when the scriptwriters are forced to take a breather to tie up all the loose plot ends. The "fantasy" closing gag went over so well that Columbia Pictures utilized variations of it in several subsequent screwball comedies. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The "Lady" of the title is horse-farm owner Penelope Hollis (Ellen Drew), but during the first half of this film, bookie Marty Black (George Raft) only has eyes for Penelope's prize two-year-old. After losing his gambling joint, Marty finds himself with half ownership of the horse as his sole asset. He tries to persuade Penelope to continue racing the horse, but she will have none of this and packs the nag back to her Kentucky farm. Through Marty's persistence, the horse is entered in an important stake race, but in the process is "ridden out" and rendered useless. The enraged Penelope refuses to have anything to do with Marty again unless he changes his reckless ways-which of course he does. The best moment in The Lady's From Kentucky comes at the end, when supporting players Hugh Herbert ("Woo woo!") and ZaSu Pitts ("Oh, dear, oh, my") imitate each other's catch-phrases, a gag repeated the following year by Mae West and W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Spunky Joan Blondell is practically the whole show in the diverting comedy Good Girls Go to Paris. Blondell is cast as ambitious college-campus waitress Jenny Swanson, who yearns to see the sights in Gay Paree. She gets her chance by latching onto British exchange professor Ronald Brooke (Melvyn Douglas), who is en route to the City of Light. Once she sets foot on French soil, Jenny proves the veracity of the film's title by straightening out the wayward family of dyspeptic millionaire Olaf Brand (Walter Connolly)-though for a while it looks as though she's a "bad girl", merely out to take the Brands for every penny they've got. In later years, Joan Blondell ruefully recalled that the film's original title was Good Girls Go to Paris Too, but the Hays Office nixed that harmlessly suggestive monicker. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Capitalizing on the success of MGM's Thin Man series, virtually every major studio of the 1930s came up with its own husband-and-wife detective team. Columbia's entry was There's Always a Woman, starring Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell. Douglas and Blondell are the married proprietors of an unsuccessful private eye. On the verge of quitting the business, Douglas is given a $300 retainer by Mary Astor for a seemingly simple trackdown job. Disinterested, Douglas turns the case over to his wife--but reenters the scene when a murder occurs. Rita Hayworth appears in a 30-second bit, cut down from a full supporting role when the picture threatened to run too long. There's Always a Woman was supposed to be the first of a Douglas/Blondell series, but that notion ended with the comparative failure of their next vehicle, There's That Woman Again (39). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide