FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Dana Andrews dines with Donald Pleasence in the espionage action flick INNOCENT BYSTANDERS starring Stanley Baker, with Dana basically a Bond-villain type here.

From Woody Allen's RADIO DAYS: A group of boys, including Seth Green as young Woody Allen, basically, are talking about their favorite starlets. "I like Rita Hayworth." "I like Betty Grable." "I like Dana Andrews." "Are you kidding, Dana Andrews is a man... Haven't you seen Crash Dive?" "A man... with a name like Dana?"

Watching BACK TO THE FUTURE PART III where Christopher Lloyd, back in a simpler time in a rural small town, falls for a seemingly doomed school teacher, brought Dana Andrews's NO TIME LIKE THE PAST to mind: a time-traveler who falls for doomed school teacher Patricia Breslin.

It's bad quality from YouTube but either way, DeForest Kelley let his friend Michael Landon, who was hot on BONANZA before STAR TREK even started, do his dirty work, stunt-doubling a fight with Dana Andrews in TOWN TAMER. 

Anne Baxter (who'd also appear with Dana Andrews in THE NORTH STAR) desperately holds the last of a bagful of kittens in Jean Renoir's SWAMP WATER, where they're about to be thrown into by Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams and Ward Bond, the dicks. 

Dana Andrews gets his classy hat back from, at this point, two time (following STATE FAIR and later, eventually four time) co-star, Jeanne Crain, in George Marshall's British production, DUEL IN THE JUNGLE.

Charles Bickford to Dana Andrews, Fallen Angel: "You're an expert, Mr. Stanton... You know the exact value of a man's word against facts."

Today we open a bottle of Black Pony (with Dorothy Adams, not ashamed to be a domestic) for the birthday of Dana Andrews's most important collaborator/director, Otto Preminger: the classic Film Noir LAURA game-changed both their careers.

Today is the same birthday for LAURA stars GENE TIERNEY and CLIFTON WEBB, the beauty and the brain that muscular (and smart) cop Dana Andrews fights in-between. "You seem to be completely disregarding something more important than your career: my lunch."  

Rest in Peace to RHONDA FLEMING, dead at 97, who appeared in two Dana Andrews' movies as cheating wives in both, but sharing no scenes with Dana in either: unfaithful to Dana's LAURA co-star Vincent Price in WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, then to a jet fighter plane pilot in THE CROWDED SKY, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., crashing into Dana's big plane and who'd pay the favor back, in reverse, in AIRPORT 1975.

Juxtaposition of Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain starting in STATE FAIR screaming on a rollercoaster then demoted to HOT RODS TO HELL screaming on the highway.

Dana Andrews, who was Elia Kazan's leading man in BOOMERANG decades earlier, shares a scene with Kazan's new lead Robert De Niro in THE LAST TYCOON.

Another film with Dana Andrews and Farley Granger, right after EDGE OF DOOM is the cold war/anti war for it's time, I WANT YOU, about young men being called to the Korean War, reluctantly.

Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward in MY FOOLISH HEART directed by Mark Robson, who worked for producer Val Lewton along with Jacques Tourneur, who directed the previous Andrews/Hayward collaboration, CANYON PASSAGE.

Kirk Douglas took no credit for executive producing the breezy romance SPRING REUNION starring two too-old-for-the-role grownups Betty Hutton and Dana Andrews... So then, a decade later, Dana would scold Kirk in IN HARM'S WAY — but without mentioning that high school reunion!

Though many are back-projected, here's an ELEPHANT WALK scene with Dana Andrews as Dick Carver (while Dana's real name is Carver Dana Andrews) with real fields and workers behind him: he's about to turn and bark orders, taking over for a wounded Peter Finch while wanting his wife, Elizabeth Taylor... who wouldn't?

Dana Andrews about to lose his dog Trouble (till he finds him later) on a gator hunt in SWAMP WATER with father Walter Huston by his side, and bullfrog-voiced Eugene Pallette rowing from behind.

Virginia Gilmore, credited before Dana Andrews in the World War II thriller BERLIN CORRESPONDENT, played his spurned girlfriend in SWAMP WATER the year before: ironically she's good here despite working for Nazis, and bad there as an All-American Girl.

Second entry of Doris Fesette, the blonde who Dana Andrews buys a drink for at the Filibuster Bar in MADISON AVENUE. 

Peter Whitney, the shady bartender from THE BIG HEAT, was also an eclectic Dana Andrews actor, playing a clumsy banker in CANYON PASSAGE and then a formidable guard in THE IRON CURTAIN, motioning for Dana to turn around... how demeaning!

As mentioned in the Cult Film Freak review , Dana Andrews's performance in WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS is breezy, on cruise-control, making his best scenes with lawmen Howard Duff since Dana, as a classy award winning newscaster, can partake in some of his most natural kind of roles: of the hard-boiled investigatory nature.

In both THE CROWDED SKY and before that, WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, Rhonda Fleming plays a cheating wife, but not of Dana Andrews: In both, she and Dana never share a single scene, and yet they're first and second in the credits: And here she is in the latter, warming up to Dana's LAURA foe, Vincent Price.

The famous portrait from LAURA of Gene Tierney's title character that Dana Andrews initially thinks is "not bad" to Clifton Webb's snooty chagrin: particularly protesting the word "dame" for Laura, to whom he provided a personal Pygmalion transition.

Dana Andrews in THE CROWDED SKY: a poker game moment leading to a very quick fist fight and, with Dana's usual brooding glare, it's one of many flashbacks that takes up about half a film that juggles past melodrama with present time airline disaster.

Here to note the strange, screwy times we're living and dying in as Dana Andrews enters a home that's not so quaint while we're stuck in our own particular cages during a pandemic, on Easter, and the news media is our very own version of THE FEARMAKERS.

A lobby card for THE CROWDED SKY from a deleted scene showing what looks like the wedding party of Rhonda Fleming and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., which makes no sense since their marriage was supposed to be kept secret except for their friend Caesar (Ed Kemmer).

Dana Andrews questions Gene Tierney's title character in LAURA, before he realizes "dames are always pulling a switch on you."

By far the best lobby card from THE CROWDED SKY, showing John Kerr punching Dana Andrews, co-pilot socking pilot, isn't in the film since the moment is more close-up and at an angle, so this must have come from a still photographer as Dana recovers below. 

Another screen capture from the opening of CANYON PASSAGE showing Dana Andrews riding in soaking wet from the Northwestern rain into Oregon, where the movie's both filmed and takes place.

Our second capture from the Kino Lorber Blu Ray of Jacques Tourneur's gorgeous Western CANYON PASSAGE has Dana Andrews riding into town in the rain at the film's opening.

Dana Andrews stands firm all though CANYON RIVER, and here's the first shot from the Kino Lorber Blu Ray that just came out on Tuesday, and is worth the time and purchase.

Finally, Dana Andrews's greatest Western, CANYON PASSAGE, directed by his future CURSE OF THE DEMON and THE FEARMAKERS collaborator Jacques Tourneur, fresh from horror b-pictures for Val Lewton, is on Blu Ray... for a while only available on DVD with another Western, or a Spanish Blu Ray import that was good, but this will be better: although not the cover, which, as proven below, are always superior when foreign.

"What kind of animals are those?" is what Dana Andrews shouts at a trio of hot-rodders in HOT RODS TO HELL after car moll Mimsy Farmer throws a full can of beer at Dana's son, leaving his daughter Laurie Mock stunned by her new desert-dwelling contemporaries.

A scene and scenario straight out of GIANT in THE CROWDED SKY has Dana Andrews as a lifelong airline pilot forcing his frowning toddler son to get used to flying on a carnival plane ride, like when Rock Hudson throws his wailing, tortured only son on a horse.

Dana Andrews and John Kerr at the tail-end of THE CROWDED SKY: Dana saved the plane from crashing, but it was his fault the bird almost went down in the first place, and he's getting guilted into submission by Kerr's bitter and dickish co-pilot.

A miscast John Kerr, supposedly having flown "over a million miles" with Dana Andrews yet is hardly past his twenties, with character-actor Joe Mantell, channeling Henny Youngman and  Jimmy Durante, as the doomed throttle jockey in THE CROWDED SKY.