Emmett Murphy Movies
- 1957
Anita Ekberg amply fills the title role in the offbeat western Valerie. Clearly inspired by Rashomon, the film offers contradictory flashbacks during a lengthy trial. The defendant, Civil War hero John Garth, Sterling Hayden, is accused of seriously wounding his wife Valerie and murdering her parents. At first, the jury's sympathy is with Garth, who claims that his faithless wife was running off with preacher Blake (played by Ekberg's then-husband Anthony Steel) and that the death of his in-laws was accidental. But as testimony proceeds, it is revealed that the highly respectable, much-beloved Garth is a beast in human form. The complicated outcome of the trial has so many twists and turns that it would be criminal to reveal any one of them. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sterling Hayden, Anita Ekberg, (more)
- 1955
For an actress who seemed more at home in the lavish penthouses and smart supper clubs of New York, Phyllis Kirk appeared in a lot of westerns. Canyon Crossroads is a contemporary sagebrusher, wherein Ms. Kirk is cast as the daughter of geology professor Russell Collins. Father and daughter embark upon a uranium-hunting expedition in Colorado, accompanied by prospector Richard Basehart and Native American Alan Wells. Their trail is dogged by Charles Wagenheim, the sinister henchman of Basehart's bitter enemy Stephen Elliot. Trapped in a cave by the villains, Kirk and her companions spend at least a third of the film trying to figure a way out. Reviewers were impressed by the opening and closing scenes of Canyon Crossroads, but were indifferent to the reels in-between. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Richard Basehart, Phyllis Kirk, (more)
- 1952
Louis de Rochemont, former March of Time producer whose "docudrama" films proved so popular in the 1940s, offers more of the same in Walk East on Beacon. Based on an article written (or ghostwritten) by J. Edgar Hoover, the film concerns the efforts by the FBI to plug up a dangerous security leak. Federal agent Belden (George Murphy) is assigned to locate the communist mastermind behind the leak, and to trace all avenues of informational access utilized by the Bad Guys. Finlay Currie co-stars as an Einstein-like scientist who is being blackmailed by the Reds into cooperating with them, while Karel Stepanek is slime personified as the top Eastern-Bloc spy. Largely filmed on location in New York, Walk East on Beacon makes good use of several Manhattan-based actors, few of whom were seen in films either before or since. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- George Murphy, Finlay Currie, (more)
