In the 1942 film "This Gun For Hire," he was only a supporting actor. But his portrayal of a cold, ruthless killer with a core of gentle sadness had an impact on audiences everywhere. Teamed with diminutive Veronica Lake, he became an immediately saleable commodity, and in the process helped launch the age of film noir. By 1954, Photoplay Magazine voted him the world's most popular male film star; his fellow award-winner was Marilyn Monroe. But Alan Ladd's fabulous success already contained within it the mechanism to self-destruct.
03-04-1999
58 min
THIS
HELLA
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Main Cast
Movie Details
Production Info
Director:
Gene Feldman
Writer:
Gene Feldman
Production:
Janson Media, Wombat Productions
Key Crew
Executive Producer:
Stephen Janson
Producer:
Suzette Winter
Producer:
Gene Feldman
Locations and Languages
Country:
US
Filming:
US
Languages:
en
Main Cast
Alan Ladd
Alan Walbridge Ladd was an American actor and film and television producer. Ladd found success in film the 1940s and early 1950s, particularly in Westerns and film noirs where he was often paired with Veronica Lake, as she was one of the few Hollywood actresses shorter than he. His popularity diminished in the late 1950s, though he continued to appear in popular films until his death from cerebral edema in January 1964.
Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but later relocated to North Hollywood, California when his mother re-married. He worked briefly as a studio carpenter (as did his stepfather) and for a short time was part of the Universal Pictures studio school for actors. Intent on acting, he found work in small theatres. He had short term stints at MGM and RKO, and eventually started getting steady work on radio. Ladd began by appearing in dozens of films in small roles, including Citizen Kane , before reaching recognition for his 1942 appearance in This Gun for Hire, invigorating Hollywood's desire for gangster-crime features. His cool, unsmiling persona proved popular with wartime audiences, and he was quickly established as one of the top box office stars of the decade.
Anthony Caruso (April 7, 1916 – April 4, 2003) was an American character actor in more than one hundred American films, usually playing villains and gangsters, including the first season of Walt Disney's Zorro as Captain Juan Ortega.
Jeff Corey (August 10, 1914 – August 16, 2002) was an American stage and screen actor and director who became a well-respected acting teacher after being blacklisted in the 1950s.
Edward Dmytryk (September 4, 1908 – July 1, 1999) was an American film director who was amongst the Hollywood Ten, a group of blacklisted film industry professionals who served time in prison for being in contempt of Congress during the McCarthy-era 'red scare'.
Although born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada, Dmytryk grew up in San Francisco when his Ukrainian parents moved to the United States. At the age of 31, he became a naturalized citizen.
His best known films from the pre-McCarthy period of his career were film noirs Crossfire, for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination, and Murder, My Sweet, the latter an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. In addition, he made two World War II films: Hitler's Children, the story of the Hitler youth and Back to Bataan starring John Wayne.
The late 1940's was the time of the Second Red Scare, and Dmytryk was one of many filmmakers investigated. Summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he refused to cooperate and was sent to jail. After spending several months behind bars, Dmytryk made the decision to testify again, and give the names of his fellow members in the American Communist Party as the HUAC had demanded. On April 25, 1951, Dmytryk appeared before HUAC for the second time, answering all questions. He spoke of his own Party past, a very brief membership in 1945, including the naming of twenty-six former members of left-wing groups. He explained how John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott, Albert Maltz and others had pressured him to include communist propaganda in his films. His testimony damaged several court cases that others of the so-called "Hollywood 10" had filed. He recounted his experiences of the period in his revealing 1996 book, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL).
For a time, Dmytryk moved to England, and Stanley Kramer hired him to direct a trio of low-budget films before handing Dmytryk The Caine Mutiny. He made films for major studios Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM and Paramount Pictures, including, among others, Raintree County, The Left Hand of God, The Young Lions, a remake of the Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel, and The Carpetbaggers. Later into the 60' and 70's, he directed Where Love Has Gone, Anzio, Alvarez Kelly, Shalako, and his final film Bluebeard. The films which he directed featured stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Gene Tierney, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda.
After his film career tapered off in the 1970s, he entered academia and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the University of Southern California. He wrote several books on the art of filmmaking (such as "On Film Editing") and lectured at various colleges and theaters, such as the Orson Welles Cinema. Dmytryk died from heart and kidney failure on 1 July, 1999, aged 90, in Encino, California.
Edith Fellows was born on May 20, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts. When she was a year old, she and her father and grandmother moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. As a toddler, Edith was pigeon-toed and had trouble walking, and one doctor suggested that dance lessons might cure this condition. At age four, Edith entered Henderson's School of Dance, where she was spotted by a man claiming to be a talent scout, who told her grandmother that he could get Edith into show business for a fifty-dollar fee. The dance school raised the money, but when Edith and her grandmother arrived in Hollywood, they discovered that the address the man had given them did not exist, and they realized he was a fraud. Stranded in Hollywood with no means to return to North Carolina, Edith's grandmother began doing housework to earn a living. While she worked, she left Edith with a neighbor and her young son. One day Edith was taken along when the neighbor's son had an audition for the film Movie Night (1929), and she ended up getting the part. Although she never become a child star, Edith appeared in many popular films of the 1930s, most notably Pennies from Heaven (1936). She also proved herself to be a very versatile actress, playing roles ranging from a spoiled rich girl, as in Heart of the Rio Grande (1942), to a poor orphan girl, as in Pennies from Heaven. Edith was even given her own series, The Five Little Peppers, while under contract to Columbia, and she made four of the Pepper films (the first was Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1939)) in two years. Between 1929 and 1954, Edith appeared in some fifty films, mostly in juvenile roles due to her short 4' 10" stature. But her career suddenly slowed down in the mid-1950s. Between 1955 and 1980, she appeared in only one film, Lilith (1964), in which she had a bit part. During this time, Edith chose to focus on her family life; she had married producer Freddie Fields in 1946, and their only child, daughter Kathy, was born in 1947. But Edith and Fields divorced in 1955, and the end of her marriage, coupled with other factors, caused Edith to have a nervous breakdown. She recovered, and in 1981, she returned to acting in numerous supporting roles on television. In 1985, fellow former child actor Jackie Cooper announced plans to make a TV movie based on Edith's life, but this project never happened.
Monica Elizabeth "Mona" Freeman (June 9, 1926 – May 23, 2014) was an American actress and painter. A professional model while still in high school, Mona Freeman was signed to a movie contract by Howard Hughes, who then proceeded to sell her contract to Paramount. Starting out in typical juvenile parts, she developed into a very competent actress. As she worked her way out of the teenage ingénue role, however, she found that she had less success in adult roles, and instead of landing parts in "A" pictures she found herself relegated to "B" westerns and somewhat tawdry crime dramas. She basically retired from film work in the late 1950s, but worked steadily in television for quite some time after that.
Samuel John Goldwyn Jr. (September 7, 1926 – January 9, 2015) was an American film producer.
Samuel Goldwyn Jr. was born on September 7, 1926, in Los Angeles, California, the son of actress Frances Howard (1903–1976) and the pioneer motion picture mogul Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974). He attended Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado and the University of Virginia. He was raised Catholic like his mother, at her insistence.
After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he worked as a theatrical producer in London and for Edward R. Murrow at CBS in New York. He then followed in his father's footsteps and founded the motion picture production companies Formosa Productions, The Samuel Goldwyn Company and Samuel Goldwyn Films.
In 1950 Goldwyn married actor Jennifer Howard (1925–1993), the daughter of prominent author and screenwriter Sidney Howard. The couple had four children including actor Tony Goldwyn and studio executive John Goldwyn. They divorced in 1968 and he then married Peggy Elliot, with whom he had two children, including Liz Goldwyn. His second marriage also ended in divorce. At the time of his death he was married to his third wife, Patricia Strawn.
Peter Franklin Hansen (December 5, 1921 – April 9, 2017) was an American actor, best known for his long running role as lawyer Lee Baldwin, on the soap opera General Hospital, appearing in the role from 1963 to 1986, briefly in 1989-90, and returning to the role from 1992 to 2004.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Patricia Paz Maria Medina (born 19 July 1920) is an English actress, born in Liverpool, England to a Spanish father (Ramón Medina Nebot from Canary Islands) and English mother. She began acting as a teenager in the late 1930s. She worked her way up to leading roles in the mid-1940s, whereupon she left for Hollywood.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Patricia Medina, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia
Donald Patrick "Don" Murray (July 31, 1929-February 2, 2024) was an American actor.
Murray was born in Hollywood, California. He attended East Rockaway High School (class of 1947) in East Rockaway, New York where he played football and track, was a member of the student government and glee club and joined the Alpha Phi Chapter of the Omega Gamma Delta Fraternity. From high school he went on to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Murray had a long and varied career in films and television, including his role as Sid Fairgate in the long-running prime-time soap opera Knots Landing from 1979 to 1981. He was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor in Bus Stop (1956) in which he co-starred with Marilyn Monroe.
He starred as a blackmailed United States senator in Advise & Consent (1961), a film version of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Allen Drury that was directed by Otto Preminger and cast Murray opposite Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton. He also co-starred with Steve McQueen in the film Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) and played the ape-hating Governor Breck in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972).
In addition to acting, Murray directed a film based on the book The Cross and the Switchblade (1970) starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada, and he scripted two episodes of Knots Landing ("Hitchhike" parts 1 & 2) in 1980.
Murray starred with Otis Young in the ground breaking ABC western television series The Outcasts (1968-69) featuring an interracial bounty hunter team in the post-Civil War West.
Murray decided to leave Knots Landing after two years to concentrate on other projects, although some sources say he left over a salary dispute. The character's death was notable at the time because it was considered rare to "kill off" a star character. The death came in the second episode of season three, following up on season two's cliffhanger in which Sid's car careered off a cliff. To make viewers off doubt the character would actually die, Murray was listed in the newly created credit sequence for season three; the character survived the plunge off the cliff (thus temporarily reassuring viewers), but died shortly afterwards in hospital.
Although he effectively distanced himself from the series after his exit in 1981, Murray later contributed an interview segment for Knots Landing: Together Again, a non-fiction reunion special made in 2005.
Murray was the first husband of actress Hope Lange. They had two children, including actor Christopher Murray.
Lizabeth Virginia Scott, born Emma Matzo (September 29, 1922 – January 31, 2015) was an enigmatic American film actress, known for her captivating presence in film noir during the 1940s and 1950s. Her sultry voice and smoky allure made her a notable figure in Hollywood. After understudying the role of Sabina in the original Broadway and Boston stage productions of The Skin of Our Teeth, she emerged internationally in such films as The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Dead Reckoning (1947), Desert Fury (1947) and Too Late for Tears (1949). Of her 22 feature films, she was leading lady in all but one. Her portrayal of complex, femme fatale characters left a lasting impact. In addition to stage and radio, she appeared on television from the late 1940s to early 1970s. Despite a relatively brief filmography, her talent and contribution to the noir genre solidified her as an iconic figure in cinematic history. Scott's legacy endures through her timeless performances, forever etched in the annals of classic Hollywood.
