Robert Young

They Won’t Believe Me

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Larry and Verna

Robert Young forever played a good guy and wound up on TV as nice doctor Marcus Welby MD. In They Won’t Believe Me he doesn’t and the film really benefits from the against-type casting. As we meet his character, Larry Ballantine, he’s in the dock in court, where his own lawyer is describing him as “heartless, shameful, sordid and cruel”. Larry is a relentlessly womanising male of the first water and he’s now in court accused of murdering his girlfriend, or is it his wife? This incredibly twisted, brilliantly dovetailing plot is about a bad man being caught out by fate, which seems to have stepped in to intervene because Larry has simply … Read more

Crossfire

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Robert Mitchum in army uniform

In 1947’s swift noirish crime drama Crossfire a bunch of Army guys in the process of being demobbed meet a guy in a bar. By the end of the evening the guy is dead. But who did it and why? Director Edward Dmytryk opens with the death happening in shadowplay against a wall, as the unfortunate Samuels (Sam Levene) is worked over in a room by two assailants we never see. Samuels goes down, the men flee, the cops arrive. The questioning starts, and it’s a strange affair, with no names being asked for by the cop, and the guy he’s questioning not surrendering any either, it’s just “this man”, “this fella”, “two … Read more

Western Union

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Randolph Scott in hat

A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to coast, telegraph company Western Union helped forge the country into a more solid political entity. Three men dominate the action – Randolph Scott as Vance Shaw, a loner former outlaw and fixer persuaded to join the drive to lay cable across terrain good and bad. Robert Young plays rich man’s son Richard Blake, an engineer who is also … Read more