Category Archives: Movie of the Week

The rebellious daughter of an army general gets involved with a Communist agitator, mainly to annoy her father. He arranges to have her kidnapped and taken to Mexico–hoping that she will forget her “Red” boyfriend–by a young, handsome soldier named Jeff who, while somewhat of a goof-up, the general believes is still better for her.

After opening a convent in the Himalayas, five nuns encounter conflict and tension – both with the natives and also within their own group – as they attempt to adapt to their remote, exotic surroundings.

Zulu is a 1964 historical war film depicting the Battle of Rorke’s Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War where 150 British soldiers, many of which were sick and wounded as patients at that field hospital, successfully held off an army of 4000 Zulu warriors.

The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (also called The St. Louis Bank Robbery, the film title in the opening credits) is a 1959 heist film shot in black and white. The noir film stars Steve McQueen as a college dropout hired to be the getaway driver in a bank robbery. The film is based on a 1953 bank robbery attempt of Southwest Bank in St. Louis.

Charles Laughton had only one choice to play the role of psycho-reverend- con man for his adaptation of Night of the Hunter and it was Robert Mitchum. When he’s on the screen Mitchum fills it with malevolence.

The Buccaneer is a 1958 War film, made by Paramount Pictures like the 1938 version and shot in Technicolor and VistaVision. It takes place during the War of 1812, and tells a heavily fictionalized version of how the pirate Jean Lafitte helped in the Battle of New Orleans and how he had to choose between fighting for America or for the side most likely to win, the United Kingdom.

The 1951 British (black and white) version of Scrooge. Directed by Brian Desmond Hurst. Starring Hermione Baddeley, Alastair Sim, Kathleen Harrison. An old bitter miser is given a chance for redemption when he is haunted by ghosts on Christmas Eve.

White Christmas is a 1954 American musical film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Vera-Ellen, and Rosemary Clooney. Filmed in Technicolor, White Christmas features the songs of Irving Berlin, including the title song, “White Christmas”. Distributed by Paramount Pictures, the film is notable for being the first to be produced and released in VistaVision, a wide-screen process developed by Paramount that entailed using twice the surface area of standard 35mm film. This large-area negative was used to yield finer-grained standard-sized 35 mm film prints.