As anyone reading this Blog over the years will realise, I am a great fan – always was – of these Cinema Double Feature.

Didn’t they look exciting

Cinema Double Features ABOVE Two Later ones from Hammer – Still with Christopher Lee as Count Dracula

Cinema Double Features ABOVE – From the USA Two good films

ABOVE – I really like ‘The Maze’ – a very intriguing story

ABOVE – A very early and memorable role from Oliver Reed. Also thinK that ‘The Shadow of the Cat’ looks quite scary

ABOVE = TWO Adventure films from Hammer

Cinema Double Feature – These two look to be a good pairing

Ken Annakin in his Autobiography and Richard Todd in some of his later interviews were particularly unkind in their remarks about Joan Rice after she had been the leading lady in ‘The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men’ which as we all know Ken Annakin Directed and Richard Todd starred in.

They thought that she was a poor actress.

Walt Disney on the other hand was her admirer – he knew that she just looked the part and was determined that she would be IN. What he said went. He knew his audience so well – he knew that they would love her in the role – and we all did.

The film was a financial success worldwide

Next from Walt Disney came ‘The Sword and the Rose’ and then ‘Rob Roy The Highland Rogue’ – Ken Annakin directed the first one and Richard Todd starred in them both. They both had Glynis Johns in the lead who was well approved of by these two.

However neither film performed well at the Box Office – Rob Roy did OK in Britain but fared less well in the USA and other parts of the World.

So it seems that Ken Annakin and Richard Todd were pretty poor judges on actor’s abilities and their Box Office pulling power

Rob Roy was chosen for the Royal Film Premier that year – 1953. It was later reported that the Queen had not been particularly impressed by it – it is an opinion of mine that in the film the King was referred to by Rob Roy as ‘German Geordie’ – I have a feeling that the Queen would not have liked that

This was a good British Thriller that had a strong storyline and actors who were well up to the task of setting the ‘creepy’ scenes’ and making us all quite uneasy.

Natasha Parry, I always liked and thought how attractive she was

Crow Hollow is home to a somewhat eccentric family – and in that family is a Doctor who takes his newlywed bride to live there.The home is largely occupied by his Aunts ,an outwardly genial but really rather peculiar breed.One is a devoted spider collector ,having several large poisonous specimens around the house ,another busies herself with “good works”and one is a home maker with an obsessive interest in order and tidiness.

Soon the new bride begins to feel unwelcome -not surprising given she has a close encounter with a venomous spider and is fed poisoned drinks .It appears that for whatever reason, members of the family want rid of her and to see her replaced by a nubile young woman named Willow

It is very much a watchable B movie – I imagine that it would have gone out as a good supporting film on the cinema circuit

Back to the story – Dr. Armour Donald Houston, marries Ann and then barely shows her any attention at all and completely dismisses her concerns–and she has plenty! It’s obvious this is no match made in heaven. So why did the Doctor marry her and exactly what is going on in this weird mansion filled with his strange people?

Could someone really be attempting to kill her?

This is a pretty good mystery/suspense picture which is quite exciting and with a nice ending. Worth seeing with strong performances all around and a well written story.

I seem to have quite a regard for Lash Larue in many ways because he created a sort of brand from what was a small number of B films to such an extent that there were Lash Larue comics and other merchandise – all very popular at the time. With a better manager he could have really capitalised on this but I doubt that he ever did to any great extent. He was clever enough to see the potential of the bullwhip which made him stand out from the other cowboys of the time and helped him achieve a film career and made him well remembered

Directed by Ray Taylor
Starring Lash La Rue, Fuzzy St. John, Dan White, House Peters, Jr., Nancy Saunders

Outlaw Country (1949) is one of the later Lash pictures, and at 72 minutes, one of the longest. It features Lash La Rue’s long-lost twin brother, the Frontier Phantom — who turns up again the last Lash/Fuzzy film, The Frontier Phantom (1952).

The film was made for Western Adventure Productions, these had even lower budgets than the previous PRC pictures.

ABOVE – Lash Larue – Now here is someone who had the most famous and popular of all the ‘film themed’ comics for quite a few years. He invented a style and developed it in a range of films that did well at the Box Office and when these comics came out they proved to be one of the most successful ones – if not THE most successful.  They are still very collectable today.

I have just looked on ebay , and there are over 500 Lash Larue Comics on sale with prices up to £ 48 Pounds Sterling

Another Technicolor Western with great locations

This film was made a few years after Jeff Chandler played Cochise in Broken Arrow (1950), this time the Apache chief is played by John Hodiak. In Tucson, ranchers are being raided by the Apache and Comanches.

Major Tom Burke (Robert Stack) is sent to stop the violence and establish peace with Cochise.

While he’s there, Burke becomes romantically very interested in Consuelo de Cordova (Joy Page).

ABOVE – Towards the end of the film when I would imagine the location work had been done, this studio set and pretty poor painted backdrop was not really very good.

Cochise also wants peace, but the Comanches do not, which leads to trouble. Joy Page;s character is captured by the Apaches and held hostage, with Robert Stack working to free her as she and Kodiak fall in love.

It’s a short picture, running just 70 minutes, with more talk than action — and Castle’s direction seems uncharacteristically stiff.

The picture’s greatest asset is certainly its cast. John Hodiak is quite good as Cochise, making the usual stilted Indian-speaking-white-man’s-tongue dialogue work. It’s his film really. Robert Stack is a stoic hero here, a bit like his Elliott Ness on The Untouchables. Joy Page is lovely. She and Robert Stack had been paired earlier in  Bullfighter And The Lady (1951). 

The cast and crew spent a lot of time at Vasquez Rocks, about an hour from the Columbia lot

They also shot some scenes at the Corrigan Ranch. Director Of Photography Henry Freulich captures it all in gorgeous Technicolor.

Katzman’s cost-cutting is painfully obvious, the history is questionable, the ending is too abrupt and Castle doesn’t seem to have found much inspiration in the script he was handed. However it is a film that, all in all, I really like.

The film really comes to life the final reel in which Cochise is sentenced to suffer three tortures – scalded by hot steam, then sliced with knife blades, and finally burned by fire.

Robert Stack makes takes the role as the hero and plays it well

The Colour photography just has to be good and it is in Technicolor – just about as good as it gets !!

The year before this, I well remember ‘Battle at Apache Pass’ with Jeff Chandler again as Cochise as he was in ‘Broken Arrow’

That was a good film.

Both of these were in Technicolor and Widescreen

Doris Day stars in this film and injects her usual happy and lively personality into it. For me she virtually carries the film even though she is surrounded by first rate, well known actors such as Ethel Barrymore and the excellent Gig Young

Of course, Frank Sinatra also starred but to me gave a particularly down-beat performance – maybe that was the character he was playing but it made the romance with him implausible to my way of thinking

Just look ABOVE Doris Day so bright and appealing – Frank Sinatra dour

Doris Day with her family ABOVE

ABOVE – Doris Day with Gig Young – he seemed much more lively

Doris Day and her family

ABOVE – Frank Sinatra lights yet another cigarette – he did way too much of that I thought

ABOVE – Ethel Barrymore keeps a watchful eye on her three girls including Doris Day as she shows of her engagement ring from Gig Young – that didn’t last long !!

Doris Day with Frank in the seedy little flat they rented

Doris Day – Christmas at home with the family

Doris Day – ( ABOVE with Frank Sinatra) made quite a few films with Gig Young in the fifties including ‘Tunnel of Love’ , ‘Teachers Pet’ and this one ‘Young at Heart’.

I remember Gig Young coming over to England much later – in fact in 1967 – making a great horror film we probably all remember ‘The Shuttered Room’ Excellent and very scary

I can’t say that I know much about this actress who had a long life although she does seem to have been around a great deal in the Forties and Fifties particularly in Westerns

Barbra Fuller
(July 31, 1921 – May 15, 2024)

Actress Barbra Fuller has died recently at the great age of 102.

Republic put her under contract in 1949 and put her in pictures like The Savage Horde (above, with Bob Steele), Rock Island Trail (1950) and Lonely Heart Bandits (all 1950). The Savage Horde, starring William Elliott, is excellent.

She was on the radio soap opera One Man’s Family from 1945 till 1959 and spent the late 50s working in TV quite a bit (Perry Mason, My Three Sons, etc.). She was in a 1953 episode of Adventures Of Superman.

Hers was one of the best known voices on the airwaves. By the age of 18, Barbra Deane Fuller had been featured in 25 radio serials and had by her own count portrayed more than 1000 different characters. Though having earlier aspired to become a maths teacher, she went into show biz instead and made her first radio broadcast at 11 years of age. Two years later, she was playing more ingénues in Chicago soap operas than any other teenager. Barbra was a regular performer on The Theater of Famous Radio Players, described by an authority on the subject as “a repertory company of radio’s best professional actors.” Her most popular roles included Claudia in One Man’s Family (a role she went on to play for 14 years) and Barbara Calkins in Scattergood Baines for the Mutual Broadcasting System. In 1942, she moved to New York, where she set up base for two and a half years.

Barbra’s father died when she was three. Raised by her mother, she went to school in Chicago and was said to have had a passion for reading non-fiction and travel books. Early in her career as a radio actress she would earn $12.50 per broadcast.

As her popularity grew, she changed the spelling of her first name from ‘Barbara’ to ‘Barbra’ “as an attention-getter”.

Barbra Fuller was married to Lash La Rue for a very short time – Lash was non too successful where marriage was concerned – I think he married 7 times but I have seen reports of ‘at least ten marriages’

They married in Yuma, Arizona on 23 February 1951 and divorced on 2 June 1952

William Whitney

William Witney
(May 15, 1915 – March 17, 2002)

William Witney was a genius, and his contribution the cinema has been and is greatly under-appreciated.

William Witney directed about 27 of the Roy Rogers films and lived close by him in the San Fernando Valley

William Witney belonged to a Hollywood which has long since disappeared. During the 1930s and 40s, he turned out dozens of B westerns and cliff-hanger serials.

In the 1950s and 60s, he was active in directing TV series, most of them westerns.

From 1935 to 1956, Witney’s workplace was Republic Pictures, where he practised the philosophy of “make ’em fast and make ’em cheap”. Witney directed more than 60 features, impossible for even the most prolific of directors today. In his autobiography, In A Door, Into A Fight, Out A Door, Into A Chase (1996), he said he was never satisfied with the stilted way movie fights were shot, and he is credited as the first director to choreograph screen fights.

ABOVE: Producer Eddie White, Roy Rogers, Director William Witney.

This is what William Witney had to say when discussing the Roy Rogers films he made :-

“Our producer, the greatest guy, Eddie White… was from New York. He didn’t know which end of a horse was which, but he had good taste. And they brought me along and put me with him. I’d been a horseman all my life. I’m a jumping horse rider, and I love horses. So, we made a very excellent team, the two of us. We became the best of friends.

ABOVE – Bells Of Coronado, 1950

Director William Witney (L) wearing hat, walks backwards as he directs Dale Evans and Roy Rogers during filming of Republic’s 1950s production of BELLS OF CORONADO.

William Witney’s Autobiography ABOVE

The Roy Rogers films that were directed by William Witney were of a much higher quality than the previous ones

Shooting location scenes ABOVE and BELOW

ABOVE Roy Rogers chatting in the Film Studio ABOVE

Willian Witney adds :- Republic was a small studio. I was under contract there for 28 years, and this studio, everybody used to say, was the hardest studio to work at in the world, but our crews were excellent. They had people in there that were just brilliant…

We’ve got a casting office, and they read the script and they make suggestions. You also have a book of actors, and you know actors after all these years. You got through the book and you say, ‘See if you can get him, I wanna interview him.’ And you’d interview these people to look at them. You knew their ability, most of them, because you’d worked with them before.

William Witney actually made his acting debut in 1933 ‘Fighting with Kit Carson’ in an uncredited role – or roles more accurately as he played a settler an Indian and a Trooper. In his Autobiography he said that working on this film – which was a serial when on BBC TV in the early fifties – that the actors and crew worked from dawn to dusk in demanding conditions. Much of the filming was at the Iverson Ranch which he said was awash with Rattlesnakes – I had never heard that before.

In England on the BBC in 1952, I am pretty sure it was called ‘Kit Carson and the Mystery Riders’

Just got back from a lovely weekend in Woodhall Spa that beautiful village in rural Lincolnshire with it’s strong links to the RAF and 617 Squadron The Dam Busters.

It does have a unique and very appealing cinema. The Kinema In The Woods.

The choice of films here is also very cleverly managed – we have of course all the New Releases but also special one-off showings

Inside the foyer we are treated to memorabilia from the film world

One-off showings as mentioned such as ‘Jaws’ folowed by a midnight swim in the Open Air pool close by – obviously a summer attraction.

Then of all things they showed a 1925 Buster Keaton silent film with piano

The Dam Busters is shown at least once every year plus films like ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’

The cinema is based in the Lincolnshire town of Woodhall Spa, sitting between Lincoln and Boston, being about a 30/35 minute drive from both

The Kinema has three screens, and each of them is quite different

Rounding off the screen is one of the famous organs, located right at the front of the screen.

Considering that Kinema is just a three-screen cinema, they do actually show a wide variety of films.