TV Guide: Veronica Lake

Video: Sullivans Travels

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:56:45 -0400

In Preston Sturges' classic comedy of Depression-era America, filmmaker John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), fed up with directing profitable comedies like Ants in Your Plants of 1939, is consumed with the desire to make a serious social statement in his upcoming film, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Unable to function in the rarefied atmosphere of Hollywood, Sullivan decides to hit the road, disguised as a tramp, and touch base with the real people of America. But Sullivan's studio transforms his odyssey into a publicity stunt, providing the would-be nomad with a luxury van, complete with butler (Robert Greig) and valet (Eric Blore). Advised by his servants that the poor resent having the rich intrude upon them, Sullivan escapes his retinue and continues his travels incognito. En route, he meets a down-and-out failed actress (Veronica Lake). Experiencing firsthand the scroungy existence of real-life hoboes, Sullivan returns to Hollywood full of bleeding-heart fervor. After first arranging for the girl's screen test,

Video: Star Spangled Rhythm

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:21:19 -0400

Star-Spangled Rhythm is a typical wartime all-star musical-comedy melange, this time from Paramount Pictures. The slender plot involves the efforts by humble studio doorman Pop Webster (Victor Moore) to pass himself off as a big-shot Paramount executive for the benefit of his sailor son Jimmy (Eddie Bracken). The overall level of humor can be summed up by the scene in which Webster is advised that the best way to pretend to be a studio big-shot is to say It stinks! to everything -- whereupon Cecil B. DeMille shows up to ask Webster's opinion about his current production. Betty Hutton, cast as studio switchboard operator and co-conspirator Polly Judson, is at her most rambunctiously appealing here. The huge lineup of guest performers includes Bing Crosby (and his 8-year-old son Gary!), Bob Hope, Veronica Lake, Dorothy Lamour, Dick Powell, Mary Martin, Alan Ladd, Fred MacMurray, William Bendix, Paulette Goddard, and Eddie Rochester Anderson, most (but not all) of them going through their characteristic paces. H

Video: Glass Key, The

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:52:24 -0400

Dashiel Hammett's {-The Glass Key,} a tale of big-city political corruption, was first filmed in 1935, with Edward Arnold as a duplicitous political boss and George Raft as his loyal lieutenant. This 1942 remake improves on the original, especially in replacing the stolid Raft with the charismatic Alan Ladd. Brian Donlevy essays the role of the boss, who is determined to back reform candidate Moroni Olsen, despite Ladd's gut feeling that this move is a mistake. Ladd knows that Donlevy is doing a political about-face merely to get in solid with Olsen's pretty daughter Veronica Lake. It is Ladd who is left to clean up the mess when crime lord Joseph Calleila murders Olsen's wastrel son Richard Denning and pins the rap on Donlevy. As Ladd struggles to clear Donlevy's name, he falls in love with Lake--when he's not being pummeled about by Calleila's psychopathic henchman William Bendix. Far less complex than the Dashiel Hammett original (and far less damning of the American political system), The Glass Key furthe

Video: Sullivan's Travels

Video Detective — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:19:19 -0400

Video: I Married A Witch

Video Detective — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:39:09 -0400

As she burns at the stake, a 17th century witch, Jennifer (Veronica Lake), places a curse on her accuser (Fredric March), so that from this day forward, all of his descendants (each played by him) will be unhappy in marriage. After several hilarious through-the-years examples (the Civil War-era Fredric March runs off to battle rather than endure his wife's nagging), we are brought up to 1942. Wallace Wooley (March) is a gubernatorial candidate, preparing to wed snooty socialite Estelle Masterson (Susan Hayward) -- the well-to-do daughter of a publisher who is backing him. A bolt of lightning strikes the tree where Jennifer had been executed three centuries earlier, thereby freeing the spirits of Jennifer and her warlock father, Daniel (Cecil Kellaway). Wallace meets Jennifer when she materializes in a burning building, obliging him to save her life. The revivified sorceress does everything in her power to induce Wallace to fall in love with her -- even destroying the ceremony in which the wedding is supposed

Video: Stronghold

Video Detective — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:15:13 -0400

Produced in Mexico, Stronghold was distributed in the U.S. by Lippert Pictures. The studio hoped that the presence of American film stars Veronica Lake and Zachary Scott would prove beneficial at the box-office. Set during Juarez' revolution against Austrian emperor Maximillian, the film casts Lake as Mary Stevens, a wealthy American visitor who is kidnapped by gentleman bandit Don Pedro Alvarez (Arturo de Cordova) and his gang. Alvarez plans to use the ransom money to help finance the revolution, but Mary manages to orchestrate governmental resistance against the bandit's schemes. Eventually, however, she realizes that Alvarez is a man of honor and patriotism. Conversely, Don Miguel Navarro (Zachary Scott), the heroic overseer of a silver mine owned by Mary, is actually a double-dyed villain, finally showing his hand in the film's spectacular finale. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide.