Frank Allenby Movies

Allegedly based on a Rudyard Kipling novel, this draws most of its inspiration from the 1939 film made of Kipling's narrative poem Gunga Din. Stewart Granger, Robert Newton and Cyril Cusack play three boisterous English soldiers stationed on the Northern India frontier. Walter Pidgeon and David Niven are the threesome's superior officers, who are aggravated by the soldiers' drunken exploits but who appreciate how valuable they are to the regiment. The soldiers three become heroes once more when they thwart a native uprising. Producer Pandro S. Berman, coincidentally, had been in charge of production at RKO when Gunga Din was filmed. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

MGM circumvented the censorship that would otherwise have prevented a film version of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary by adding a prologue and epilogue that assured any and all bluenoses that the story was strictly a work of fiction. James Mason appears as Flaubert, defending his inflammatory novel before a French jury. Thus, the tragedy of Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones) is offered as a product of Flaubert's imagination, rather than a real-life story. The body of the film concerns Emma's attempt to escape the boredom of her bourgeois existence by marrying a wealthy doctor (Van Heflin). She finds life with the physician even more tiresome than her previous experiences, thus begins taking a series of wealthy lovers-all of whom prove to be two-dimensional cads. Unable to tolerate a lifetime of dead-end affairs, Emma eventually commits suicide. The best sequence-indeed, one of the finest set pieces ever directed by Vincente Minnelli-is the "Emma Bovary Waltz" sequence, a dazzling experience in dizzying camera movements. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this WW II comedy, a professor teaching a correspondence school gets in hot water when he entangles himself with the Nazis who are trying to prevent the signing of an important trade agreement between South American countries and England. When the professor learns that a Nazi agent has breached security and is posing as the economics expert responsible for lining out the international agreement, the good professor tries to find the real expert, who has been kidnapped and hidden. To find him, the prof must utilize numerous ridiculous disguises. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this comedy, an unemployed ex-con searches for the gang that falsely fingered him for counterfeiting. He attends a charity auction and ends up getting sold as a butler for five pounds. Upon examination, he realizes that the five-pound note is bogus. This leads him to confront the father of the woman that hired him. He accuses him of framing him. Rather than go to prison, the semi-honorable father commits suicide. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide