TV Guide: Gene Barry

Video: Salvage

iTunes — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:51:30 -0400

Gene Barry stars as Dan Varrel, a gangland big shot and ex-convict, who plots a diabolical scheme to avenge the homicide of his younger bother. When Varrel is released from jail, he seeks out Lois Williams (Nancy Gates), a singer in a cheap nightclub who was responsible for his brother's death at the hands of the police. Now destitute and a marked woman, Lois tries frantically to find a friend for protection from Varrel, without success. Desperate and overwrought by the strain of the approaching disaster, the girl goes to Varrel and begs him to end her misery. But the ruthless Varrel has other plans. He forces her to accept the management of a dress business he has organized. When the business prospers and Lois, in her happiness, has almost forgotten her former plight, Varrel moves in to culminate his retribution.

Video: The Houston Story - (Original Trailer)

TCM — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:18:14 -0400

A Texas oil driller (Gene Barry) schemes to steal millions of dollars in oil in The Houston Story (1956).

Video: Guyana: Crime Of The Century

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:00:24 -0400

Names have been changed to protect the innocent in this infamous fictionalization of the tragic mass suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones' People's Temple in Guyana in the fall of 1978. Rev. James Johnson (Stuart Whitman) is a charismatic but deeply paranoid man of the cloth who moves his flock from Northern California to a settlement in Guyana, where he intends to create an interracial socialist utopia. Addicted to prescription drugs and convinced he is surrounded by enemies, Johnson rules his colony, Johnsontown, with an iron fist, torturing anyone who violates his rule, seducing both women and men from his congregation, confiscating money and property from his followers, and forcing them to work long hours in the fields for meager rations. Lee O'Brien (Gene Barry), a California congressman who represents the district Johnson and his followers once called home, has received complaints from friends and relatives of the Johnsontown settlers, convinced something is wrong. O'Brien and a team of reporters fly t

Video: Columbo:Prescription Murder

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:42:22 -0400

Prescription: Murder, a 1967 TV movie, represents the first appearance of Peter Falk as the rumpled but crafty detective Columbo. Gene Barry plays a distinguished doctor whose happiness is thwarted by his drunken wife (Nina Foch). Barry is in love with a pretty actress (Katherine Justice), and to smooth the path of his romance he murders his wife and arranges the evidence to pin the blame elsewhere. Enter Columbo, who seems to be slow on the uptake but who in fact is suspicious of the doctor's story. Snooping, prodding, puttering, and forever stopping at the doorway with the inevitable just one more question, Columbo gets to the truth by playing a psychological trick on Barry, with the grudging cooperation of Barry's mistress. Written by Richard Levinson and William Link, Prescription Murder began life as a Broadway play in the late 1950s, starring Thomas Mitchell in the Columbo part (with a different character name), Joseph Cotten as the devious doctor, Agnes Moorehead as the victim and Patricia Medina (Mrs.

Video: War Of The Worlds, The

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:55:30 -0400

H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds had been on Paramount Pictures' docket since the silent era, when it was optioned as a potential Cecil B. DeMille production. When Paramount finally got around to a filming the Wells novel, the property was firmly in the hands of special-effects maestro George Pal. Like Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio adaptation, the film eschews Wells' original Victorian England setting for a contemporary American locale, in this case Southern California. A meteorlike object crash-lands near the small town of Linda Rosa. Among the crowd of curious onlookers is Pacific Tech scientist Gene Barry, who strikes up a friendship with Ann Robinson, the niece of local minister Lewis Martin. Because the meteor is too hot to approach at present, Barry decides to wait a few days to investigate, leaving three townsmen to guard the strange, glowing object. Left alone, the three men decide to approach the meterorite, and are evaporated for their trouble. It turns out that this is no meteorite, but an invadin