A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby's talent for improvisation. Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder, ignoring the temptation ...
Gary Cooper plays the oldest of three brothers who join the French Foreign Legion to cover a mysterious theft, and are soon caught up in high adventures. The opening scene in a fort full of corpses sticks in the memory forever, and Brian Donlevy's role as a sadistic sergeant makes a striking impression as well. Director William Wellman (Wings), a veteran pilot of World War I, drew--as he ...
Cheating? Who's cheating? When an egghead chemistry professor (Ray Milland) stumbles upon a formula for making baseballs resistant to the touch of wood, he sneaks a little onto a pitcher's glove and for a time has a career throwing from a major league mound. Set aside ethical concerns: this light comedy is in an Absent-Minded Professor mold, with balls clownishly, impossibly dancing around ...
On her first day of work, Sue Applegate (Ginger Rogers) has to escape the clutches of a lecherous client (Robert Benchley, whose favorite line is "Why don't you slip out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?"). Fed up with the big city, Sue decides to head home to Iowa with the precious $27.50 train fare she's kept in a sealed envelope since her arrival. The fare has gone up, however, and ...
Strife-torn America wanted a meat-and-potatoes romance in the late '60s, and the country embraced Erich Segal's slim, generic-sounding novel in a big way. It did so again for the film adaptation in 1970, starring Ryan O'Neal as a law student who defies his rich and powerful father (Ray Milland) on every issue, including the former's love for a music student (Ali MacGraw). The two marry, start life ...
John Wayne was in the early stages of superstardom when this lavish Cecil B. DeMille adventure was produced in 1942, so it's interesting to see the Duke in a heroic supporting role as opposed to the commanding one. Here he's on equal footing with Ray Milland in the romantic lead; they play a pair of dashing yet wildly different characters who've both fallen for a feisty Southern belle played by ...