The place: World War II Burma. The mission: Drive a fatal wedge between an enemy linkup. The troops: the 5307th Composite Unit, led by Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill (Jeff Chandler) and manned by Stock (Ty Hardin), Chowhound (Will Hutchins), Kolowicz (Claude Akins) and other young dogfaces who, after a few weeks of basic training, have the fate of the world loaded on their backs. Director Samuel Fuller, whose later The Big Red One is a benchmark work about GIs in World War II's European theater,...

Would-be ghosts. UFO voyagers. A chicken that pecks out the "Moonlight Sonata" on the piano -- blindfolded! They're the kinds of stories that keep the National Mirror in the nation's shopping carts. And they're the kinds of stories that make the tabloid's reporters think they've heard and seen it all. But that's before they meet Michael. He may be a grubby party animal who knows his way around a dance floor, but Michael is very much an angel. And with John Travolta in the title role, Michael...

James Sullivan works the carny circuit, promoting the likes of a boxing kangaroo or grappling bear. Then the wheeler-dealer meets a million-dollar idea: beautiful swimming champ Annette Kellerman. She'll churn through a River Thames PR stunt. Cause a bathing-suit scandal among Boston bluebloods. Headline New York's Hippodrome. And become a Hollywood swimsation as cameras roll and Rin Tin Tin looks on. Glamorous, amphibious Esther Williams portrays the real-life aquatic star in a splashy biopic...

The USS Reluctant carries cargo along World War II's forgotten Pacific seaways. Beyond the horizon, the real war passes its stir-crazy crew by. Mister Roberts, directed by John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy, is the classic story of men fighting to survive -- not war's dangers, but its indignities. Henry Fonda's reprise of his Tony -winning Broadway role returned him to movies after seven years away. Jack Lemmon won his first Academy Award * as hapless, lecherous Ensign Pulver. James Cagney's petty,...

Adventure and intrigue await all ye who venture into the small and sinister village of Moonfleet on the windswept moors of Dorsetshire. Particularly as directed by master-of-menace Fritz Lang, this colorful tale of a young boy's experiences among some really bad companions enthralls in the tradition of Kidnapped and Treasure Island. Here, young John Mohune (Jon Whiteley) arrives at his ancestral estate, now owned by the dashing, and mysterious Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Out of love for the...

The Mortal Storm is the story of Hitlers rise to power as seen through the microcosm of one German family. What may seem small and personal is instead towering, a bold revelation of the brutality of the Nazi regime that so infuriated propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that he banned all M-G-M movies in Germany. In their fourth and final teaming, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart play sweethearts, evoking the tender, romantic empathy that always marked their work together. They lead a...

New York adman Jim Blandings is ready to say goodbye to his cramped city apartment and build, from the ground up, a Connecticut home with room enough for his growing family and dreams. All it will cost him is his time and money and perhaps his job, marriage, happiness and what's left of his sanity. Goodbye, Manhattan. Hello, comedy. As Jim, Cary Grant is a flustered poster boy for homeowner anxiety in this gleeful laughfest. Myrna Loy, her voice and line phrasing like musical chimes, plays...

Synopsis He chops, he dices, he purees! Jackie Chan has the recipe for delicious action-comedy entertainment when he plays a celebrity TV chef caught in a deadly dispute between rival Australian crime lords. With Chan in the kitchen, you know there'll be more pow! than kung pao, and the irrepressible star does not disappoint. Take a look at the in-one-door, out-the-other fight sequence staged at a construction site and you'll discover what we mean. Just when you think you've seen it all, along...

They say crime doesn't pay. Private detective Philip Marlowe knows better. The fat wad of folding money warming his breast pocket is the kind of thing that keeps him going through thick and thicker as he wades chin-deep into a mystery involving a missing necklace and a missing hoodlum's moll named Velma. Sharply directed by Edward Dymytrk, Murder, My Sweet is film at its most noir, Creating a moody sense of a world that never plays on the level. Cast against type, Dick Powell puts sunny...

Talent agent Doug Blake (Jack Carson) is giving 100% to earn his 10%. He walks away from his arrogant singing star (Lee Bowman) and scrambles to discover another who will shine even brighter. He finds effervescent songstress Martha Gibson. Doris Day plays Martha. Think she has a chance? During the shooting of Day's first film (Romance on the High Seas), director Michael Curtiz was sure the sparkling newcomer had much more than a chance and set the wheels in motion for My Dream Is Yours. Curtiz...

King Kaiser's Comedy Cavalcade goes on in minutes. But guest star Alan Swann is exiting the building. Fast. "I'm not an actor. I'm a movie star!" he bellows in stark fear. He just found out the show is LIVE! Directed by Richard Benjamin and inspired by incidents from comedy legend Mel Brooks' early career, My Favorite Year is a golden age revisited, a zany, misty-eyed tribute to TV's early days. Academy Award winner* Peter O'Toole plays Swann. Once a swashbuckling movie idol whose face was...

Bodies are mysteriously disappearing all over town, and a new wax museum has just opened. Is there a connection? But of course! In this horror classic, Fay Wray (King Kong) stars as the intended next victim of a mad wax sculptor obsessed with her resemblance to one of his prior creations. Glenda Farrell plays a quintessential wisecracking newspaper reporter, and noted actor Lionel Atwill is the deranged artist who loses his studio to a fire set by his partner. Filmed in the early Two-Color...

Norman Mailer's classic comes to the big screen courtesy of director Raoul Walsh (Objective, Burma!; High Sierra) and an ensemble of seasoned actors and fresh-faced up-and-comers. Raymond Massey and Cliff Robertson play officers whose opposing views on military leadership are the two poles between which a platoon's fate is stretched during the war of the Pacific. Massey's Gen. Cummings advocates fear as the guide to goading men to face death, whereas Robertson's Lt. Hearn vehemently disagrees....

"Plain arithmetic. Money splits better two ways instead of three," smooth talking outlaw Ben Vandergroat reasons to his captors, three bounty hunters thrown together by chance. They're taking to justice in Abilene, but Ben has other ideas. If he can set the men against each other -- play on their greed, their fears, their vanities -- he may be able to make his break to freedom. In the third of his five landmark Anthony Mann-directed Westerns, James Stewart stars as the relentless leader of...

As long as young hearts endure, so will National Velvet and movies like it. in her star-making role, Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a wide-eyed adolescent who, assisted by her jockey pal (Mickey Rooney), trains Pie, a horse she won in a raffle, for the Grand National Steeplechase. Of course, no girl can ride in the National, can she? Yet Velvet, posing as a boy, assuredly does. Superbly directed by Clarence Brown, this exciting winner of two Academy Awards * (one to Anne Revere for her...

Frank Sinatra told the director to give the newcomer a break .John Sturges (The Great Escape) obliged, providing favorable camera angles for Sinatra's young costar. In his first big-budget film, Steve McQueen was ready to grab the movie world's attention. McQueen plays Bill Ringa, one of the O.S.S. combatants harassing the enemy in World War II Burma. Sinatra is Capt. Tom Reynolds, leading the guerilla fighters and risking court-martial while doing so. Also among Never So Few's many are...

L.A. detective Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) has problems. Missing persons and bedroom stakeouts are no match for his glory days as a pro football player. His wife is having a not-so-secret affair. And while sorting things out, he takes on the case of a runaway teenager that may be a lot more than he can handle. Director Arthur Penn, who worked with Hackman on Bonnie and Clyde and Target, guides this spellbinding, first-rate thriller where solutions to murderous riddles don't come easily....

They work by day, take a full schedule of classes all night and somehow find time for study and an occasional date. Women in the evening curriculum at Boston's distinguished Wendell College do a lot to get ahead in life. But there's someone who will go to even greater lengths. Someone who will do anything to get a head. A killer whose m.o. is the ritualistic decapitation of victims makes terror a required course at Night School, directed by Kenneth Hughes (Casino Royale 1967) and starring...

When down-on-his-luck financial planner Chuck Lumley (Henry Winkler), fast-talking loser with a million get-rich-quick schemes Bill Blazejowski (Michael Keaton) and prostitute in need of a pimp Belinda Keaton (Shelley Long) meet at the New York City morgue, nothing will ever be the same on the Night Shift. Now, as odd a group as the trio may be, their talents combine perfectly to transform a warehouse for the dead into the liveliest place in the City as the three go into business as "Love...

A crippled C-47 transport crash-lands on a remote Pacific island. For the Marines aboard, World War II becomes smaller, but no less deadly. The atoll is held by a Japanese platoon, also cut off from its command. Debuting director Frank Sinatra stars in this suspenseful war saga, joined by Clint Walker, Tony Bill and Olympic champion Rafer Johnson. After initial bullet-laced confrontations, the Japanese leader (Tatsuya Mihashi) offers to swap water for the aid of Pharmacist Mate Maloney...

Mission accomplished! Errol Flynn, who brought boyish bravado to The Adventures of Robin Hood, Dodge City, Gentleman Jim and other screen yarns, turns in a mature, acclaimed performance as the leader of a paratrooper patrol stranded in Burma. It's "one of the few features of which I am proud," Flynn later said. There's reason for pride. "This is one of the finest World War II films made during the war," The Movie Guide says. "One of the best war movies," Guide for the Film Fanatic's Danny...

"Why do you make me do it?" New York cop Jim Wilson asks the hoodlum he's about to smash senseless. Jim has seen it all on the city's shadowy streets: killers, thugs, pimps, sadists. And the experience has cost him his soul. Ironically, his redemption may come in his next case, a brutal murder that brings him into the open sky and white light of the countryside and into the arms of a beautiful blind woman. Directed with intensity by Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, They Live by Night) and...

Not since Judy met the boy next door in St. Louis has there been a heaping of tuneful, romantic Midwestern American life like this! Doris Day and Gordon MacRae team for spoonin', croonin' and swoonin' On Moonlight Bay, based on Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories. "Try not to walk like a first baseman," Mama (Rosemary DeCamp) tells tomboy Marjorie (Day) as she prepares to date college man Bill (MacRae). The advice takes. The lovebirds hear wedding bells ahead, just as soon as Bill gets his...

Hoops McCann has the name but not the talent to carry on the family basketball tradition. He'd rather use his drawing skills to earn an art school scholarship by writing and illustrating a love story. This summer in Nantucket he's going to get the necessary romantic experience. John Cusack (as Hoops), Demi Moore, Curtis Armstrong and Bobcat Goldthwait headline One Crazy Summer, a zany comedy from Savage Steve Holland, creator of the cult favorites Better Off Dead and How I Got into College....