The Film Detective

The Stranger is a deeply fascinating noir thriller and the third directorial feature by Orson Welles. It's a post-war suspense film about an escaped Nazi who disguises himself as an ordinary high school teacher in a small town in Connecticut. An officer for the war crimes commission, Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), is tasked with tracking down Franz Kindler (Welles), a mastermind of the concentration camps who, in the aftermath of World War II, has erased all traces of his identity and settled...

The ghostly apparition of a young woman is witnessed by an 18th Century French Lieutenant in Napoleon's army. After two failed attempts to keep up with her, Lt. Andre Duvalier (Nicholson) heads to the castle of Baron Von Leppe (Karloff), where he notices a painting of the Baron's latewife Ilsa, who looks identical to the ghostly woman. Duvalier is now determined to unravel the castle's mystery, and the Baron's hidden secrets. Though officially credited to Roger Corman, The Terror had a total...

In Dressed to Kill, three seemingly ordinary music boxes arrive at a London auction house from Dartmoor prison, where inmates construct crafts for income. Sold to three different customers, the boxes soon generate a most sinister interest. When one of the buyers, a friend of Dr. John Watson (Nigel Bruce) is murdered and his box taken, Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) quickly involves himself in the case. The last of fourteen films starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson,...

Salt of the Earth centers on a long, difficult workers' strike against a mining company in New Mexico. Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacon) fights for equity of wages as well as health and safety issues, but at home he mistreats his wife, Esperanza. When the men are forced to end their picketing, Esperanza joins the other women who demand to play a role in the strike, against their husband's wishes. Written, directed, and produced by members of the original blacklisted "Hollywood Ten," Salt of the...

John Muller, a career criminal on the fun from vengeful gangsters after a botched casino robbery, finds the ultimate hideout; he remakes himself to take the place of a successful psychoanalyst who bears a strong resemblance to him. However, he fails to take into account that when you take over someone's life, you inherit the good with the bad.

Vincent Price stars in this thriller about a down-trodden country estate that becomes the site of a horrific murder. Prolific writer/director Crane Wilbur (He Walked by Night, Crime Wave) helms this feature, with a cast that includes Agnes Moorehead, Gavin Gordon, and in her last film role, Darla Hood of the Our Gang comedies. But which of them is the mysterious killer known as The Bat? Youll find out soon enough. But beware -- the scream you hear may be your own!

A Bucket of Blood tells the story of Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) who, after accidentally killing his landlady's cat and covering the body in plaster to hide the evidence, is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor. Walter finds himself resorting to the same methods to produce new work, and soon people start mysteriously disappearing. Not wanting to direct another conventional horror flick, Roger Corman and screenwriter Charles B. Griffith came up with the concept for this entertaining black comedy...

Writer/Director John Huston's Beat the Devil stars Humphrey Bogart as Billy Dannreuther, the front man for a group of swindlers stranded in an Italian port town, scheming to take ownership of uranium-rich land in Africa. Also stranded is a naive British couple, Mr. and Mrs. Chelm (Edward Underdown and Jennifer Jones). Flirtations and a web of lies ensue among the group, testing romantic loyalty and allegiances among them. The last of six collaborations between Huston and Bogart, Beat the Devil...

In this whip-smart screwball comedy from revered director Howard Hawks, Cary Grant plays a desperate newspaper editor trying to keep his ace-reporter (and ex-wife) from leaving the job to marry someone else. Adapted from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's Broadway smash "The Front Page," the film features such stars as Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, and Rosalind Russell in a role originally written for a male.

Something To Sing About is the high-spirited account of Terry Rooney (James Cagney), a popular band leader with an offer to work in Hollywood. But nothing is ever easy in show business; Rooney learns that being famous is just as troublesome as being unknown. This colorful, comical film was directed by Victor Schertzinger (The Road to Zanzibar, The Road to Singapore) who also wrote the movie's many songs. The movie also features a superb supporting cast which includes William Frawley (I Love...

Jose Ferrer won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the large-nosed swordsman with a poet's soul. He'd played the role many times on Broadway, but his performance was captured for the ages in Stanley Kramer's 1950 production. The New York Times' Bosley Crowther wrote that Ferrer spoke Edmund Rostand's poetic dialog "with richness and clarity such as only a few other actors have managed on the screen." The story of Cyrano and his beloved Roxanne has been told many times with various actors,...

Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamar are the ill-fated couple in this Hollywood remake of the French classic Pepe le Moko. Boyer is Pepe, the jewel thief hiding out in Algiers' mazelike and mysterious Casbah. Pepe is a master criminal who rules his field, but when he meets the beautiful Parisian Gaby (Lamarr, in her American film debut), he begins to question his shady existence. Directed by John Cromwell (Dead Reckoning, The Prisoner of Zenda) with dialog by noir master James M. Cain, Algiers was an...