Paul Burke Movies

The original Broadway musical Call Me Mister was a plotless revue. By the time the property made it to the screen, however, a storyline was grafted on and much of the revue's funnier (and dirtier) material was weeded out. Betty Grable stars as an American USO entertainer Kay Hudson, touring the bases in postwar Japan. Somewhere along the way she crosses the path of former husband Shep Dooley (Dan Dailey). Despite the presence of ardent suitor Capt. Johnny Comstock (Dale Robertson), Dooley begins a campaign to win his wife back. They are reconciled during a climactic stage show, which affords ample opportunity for both Grable and Dailey to demonstrate their terpsichorean skills (Busby Berkeley handled the choreography). Cast as a GI who hates the army, Danny Thomas (a holdover from the Broadway production) does a truncated version of his own nightclub act. Specialty numbers are provided by the Dunhill dance team, and by an unbilled Bobby Short. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Diner owner Tony (Tito Vuolo) keeps a pair of protection racketeers (Terry Frost, Paul Burke) from bothering him by claiming (falsely) to be close friends with Superman (George Reeves). Unfortunately, Tony gets in over his head when he records an incriminating conversation between himself and the crooks, and he is forced to solicit the aid of reporter Clark Kent--little imagining that Clark and Superman are one and the same. The climax of this episode is a slapstick pie fight, in which no one is spared a custard massage. Actress Ruth Kilmonis, appearing herein as a jitterbugging teenager, would later be billed as Ruta Lee. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo, the stars of 1950's Flame and the Arrow, are reteamed in the lusty adventure romp South Sea Woman. It all begins at the military trial of Marine sergeant O'Hearn (Burt Lancaster), facing a court-martial for desertion. In flashback, O'Hearn recalls how he was stranded in Shanghai while trying to break up the impending marriage between his pal David White (Chuck Connors) and brassy nightclub photographer Ginger Martin (Virginia Mayo). The two marines try to make it back to Pearl Harbor, but they undergo several hair-raising adventures along the way, including a sticky involvement with a group of French resistance fighters. The upshot of all this is that O'Hearn arrives in Pearl after the Japanese attack, and as such is branded as a coward. It is up to Ginger Martin to provide the evidence that will clear our hero -- but she isn't too fond of O'Hearn at the moment. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

While Metropolis gears up to honor its most popular "citizen" during Superman Week, gangster Si Horten (Herburt Vigran) tries to figure out a way to rid the town of the Man of Steel. Taking reporter Jimmy Olsen (Jack Larson) into his confidence, Horten gives Jimmy a milkshake laced with truth serum, whereupon the boy reveals the location of some hidden Kryptonite--the only substance that can render Superman helpless. Meanwhile, the ever-suspicious Lois Lane (Noel Neill) eagerly anticipates the awkward situation awaiting Clark Kent (George Reeves), who has been assigned to interview Superman on TV. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Friday (Jack Webb and Smith (Ben Alexander) are certain that career criminal Louis Roat (Paul Burke), recently released from prison, is the man behind a series of holdups. Retracing Roat's steps, the detectives discover that among other things, he'd been attending a night-school class--in criminology! Caught red-handed, Roat confesses to the holdups and is sent back to the same jail whence he came. As it turns out, however, Roat had been carefully preparing a breakout during his previous incarceration. . .and now he's on the loose again. This episode is based on the Dragnet radio broadcast of June 8, 1954. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The D-Day invasion of 1944 provides a backdrop for the Allied Artists actioner Screaming Eagles. Tom Tryon plays Private Mason, an ill-tempered member of the 101st Airborne Infantry division. Mason makes plenty of enemies with his negative attitude until good-guy lieutenant Pauling (Jan Merlin) straightens him out. The 101st' s main objective (once all personal travails are swept away, that is) is to capture and hold a vital bridge in Normandy. Jacqueline Beer, later one of the costars of TV's 77 Sunset Strip, provides the feminine interest as an attractive resistance fighter (were there ever any unattractive resistance fighters?) Featured in the cast are TV favorites Martin Milner and Alvy Moore and second-generation thespian Edward G. Robinson Jr. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The Disembodied is a voodoo melodrama set in a Hollywood-backlot jungle. The villain of the piece is Tonda (Allison Hayes), the craven wife of jungle doctor Metz (John Wengraf). Whenever she can't get what she wants, Tonda resorts to voodoo to confound and destroy her enemies. Naturally, she receives her comeuppance in a particularly untidy fashion. Top billing is bestowed upon Paul Burke, who after achieving stardom in TV's Naked City and 12 O'Clock High tended to remove Disembodied from his resume. The film was originally released on a double bill with From Hell it Came. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Off the air since its cancellation in the fall of 1959, the location-filmed cop drama Naked City returned to ABC's prime-time schedule on October 12, 1960. Originally a half-hour weekly, the series had been expanded to a full hour, and was seen on Wednesdays opposite a dramatic anthology on CBS and an antiseptic sitcom on NBC. Carried over from the half-hour version are Horace McMahon as veteran New York City cop Lt. Mike Parker, and Harry Bellaver as Frank Arcaro, who during the series' year-long hiatus had been promoted from patrolman to sergeant. New to the cast is Paul Burke as Parker's young partner Detective Adam Flint, and Nancy Malone as Flint's girlfriend Libby. Also new is the series' theme song "Somewhere in the Night," written by Billy May and Milton Raskin. Still filmed in its entirety in New York City, and as often as possible on authentic locations rather than inside studio walls, the new Naked City features a number of well-known actors in the supporting casts, among them Eli Wallach, Suzanne Pleshette, Leslie Nielsen, Claude Rains, Telly Savalas, Jack Lord, Dick York, Bruce Dern, Keir Dullea, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Roddy McDowall, Ed Asner, Peter Falk, Hume Cronyn, a good-looking youngster named Robert Redford, and, in his first major TV appearance, Dustin Hoffman (in the episode "Sweet Prince of Delaney Street)." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Back on the job during the fourth and final season of the gritty New York-filmed cop drama Naked City are series regulars Horace McMahon as Lt. Mike Parker, Paul Burke as Detective Adam Flint, Harry Bellaver as Sgt. Frank Arcaro, and, from time to time, Nancy Malone as Adam's girlfriend, Libby. Of course, the location-filmed episodes are fully stocked with familiar supporting actors: this year's crop includes Diahann Carroll (who earned an Emmy nomination for her performance), Burgess Meredith, Aldo Ray, Robert Duvall, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, Carroll O'Connor, Jean Stapleton, Walter Matthau, George Segal, Piper Laurie, Steven Hill, and in their first major TV roles, Sandy Dennis and Alex Cord, the latter billed under his real name, Alex Viespi. More so than any other dramatic series of the period, Naked City capitalized on a then-popular trend, that of bestowing long, lyrical and somewhat pretentious titles on its individual episodes. Prime examples during the series' terminal season include "Idylls of a Running Back," "Kill Me While I'm Young So I Can Die Happy," "Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long," "Robin Hood and Clarence Darrow, They Went Out With Bow and Arrow," "Beyond This Place There Be Dragons," and the delectable "No Naked Ladies in Front of Giovanni's House!." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Two machine-gun specialists, Sgt. O'Neill (Paul Burke) and Lt. Collins (H.M. Wynant), demand that Sgt. Saunders (Vic Morrow) be court-martialed for gross incompetence. The men hold Saunders personally responsible for the deaths of two members of their gun squad. But a entirely different story emeges when others deliver their own eyewitness testimony. Seymour Cassel, later a fixture in the films of director John Cassavetes, appears as a doctor. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Fatal Confinement originated as an hour-long TV pilot film titled Royal Bay. Joan Crawford stars as a reclusive woman living with her daughter in a California coastal town. A business firm, headed by Charles Bickford, wants to buy her property. The sudden intrusion of the outside world causes personal and emotional problems for Crawford and her daughter. When Royal Bay failed to sell as a series, it was rechristened Fatal Confinement and expanded to 70 minutes for theatrical showings. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The third season of 12 O'Clock High was really a half-season, and is the least well-remembered of the three years it was on the air. It was also the only season in color, which created endless problems, in terms of budget and airborne footage, and probably sealed the doom of the program as much as the changing times and shifting tastes of the public. Television had been making the transition to color very gradually since the start of the 1960's, spearheaded by NBC which, as an offshoot of RCA Victor -- which held the patent on the US color television system -- had a strong interest in selling the sets (what we now call the hardware). CBS made the jump to color broadcasts in 1966, and ABC, then the poorest of the three networks, was forced to follow suit -- but the question arose of who would actually pay for color shooting. (That matter killed The Patty Duke Show, which would have been brought back for a fourth season but only if United Artists, the company producing it, paid for color filming). 12 O'Clock High came back for a third season in color, but that decision created all manner of problems. For starters, it rendered useless any stock footage from prior seasons; and it severely limited the amount of actual World War II footage that could be used. Additionally, the more expensive shooting required that a major change took place in the action, which affected the scripts -- in order to save money, the character of Colonel Joseph Gallagher (Paul Burke) was usually depicted that season as flying in a pathfinder capacity, in a single-engine fighter, rather than in a bomber with a full crew, in order to save money (in terms of other actors in the shot etc.) on his airborne scenes. Even more damaging to the series' prospects for survival was the calendar -- by late 1966, the United States was involved in a new war, in Vietnam, which had far less popular support than the Second World War ever did. Less and less of the public was interested in tuning in every week to stories that seemed ever more out of a receding past; and there weren't yet quite enough color television receivers in use for those viewers to have made a difference (at least not to ABC -- NBC renewed Star Trek at least once because of the network's connection to RCA Victor and the color television patent). The series was cancelled midway through the season, which only produced 17 episodes. These have been seen in syndication and on cable far less frequently than the two black-and-white seasons. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) is a self-made Boston millionaire who masterminds a bank heist in hopes of leaving it all behind. Tired of being part of the Establishment, he has hopes of pulling off the caper and flying to Rio. Erwin Weaver (Jack Weston) leads the cast of crooks who never actually meet Crown but manage to pull off the robbery without a hitch. Crown deposits 3 million in a Swiss bank account, pays off the crooks, and waits for the insurance company to repay the bank for the loss. Eddy Malone (Paul Burke) is the savvy detective who helps insurance investigator Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway) find the mastermind behind the heist. Thomas Crown Affair became one of the first films to employ many split-screen images throughout its running time, as devised by editor Hal Ashby. Michel Legrand's score was nominated for an Academy Award, and the song The Windmills Of Your Mind, written by Legrand with Alan and Marilyn Bergman took home the coveted Oscar. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi