G & L Classics

One of the films Wilhelm Dieterle made in his native Germany before escaping the Nazi and becoming Hollywood director William Dieterle. Dieterle plays Sommer, a young husband who is sentenced to a jail term after killing a man who was threatening his wife. During their time apart, he finds sexual release with one of his fellow prisoners, while his wife (Mary Johnson) starts up a physical relationship with her boss, the only person who offers her any help while her husband is imprisoned. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

Steven Gale (J. Evan Bonifant) is an artistically inclined six-year-old boy in the 1950's, who is especially fascinated by the television antics of Dottie Frank (Julie Halston) a zany comedienne with her own weekly show (similar to Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy -- his mother (Barbara Garrick) tolerates and even encourages his drawing, but his father (Robert Pall) doesn't understand the boy or his interests. Steven watches "The Dottie Frank Show" whenever it's on, and draws Dottie and dreams her. He does have contact with day-to-day reality, in the form of other children but he always feels separate from them, the other boys failing to understand or even regard him while the girls quietly ridicule him; but mostly he's isolated from them because of his rich fantasy life, which involves Dottie, the girls he knows, and himself. He strikes a quiet, careful (if uneasy) balance in his life between fantasy and reality, until one fateful day when he wins a contest that allows him to visit the set of "The Dottie Frank Show" -- and as luck would have it, he's present as his favorite television star and the object of his obsession acts out a scene that plays to his deepest fantasies. Steven's dreams become more vivid, as do his drawings, which leads to his parents discovering his fantasies. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi