FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Dana Andrews in one of the first cold war thrillers, THE IRON CURTAIN, as an imported Russian code-breaker who winds up trying to defect in Canada.

Dana Andrews in an early role, and the buried lead in Jean Renoir's swampy adventure melodrama SWAMP WATER here with fickle, antagonistic ingenue Virginia Gilmore.

Dana Andrews and Kieron Moore don't see eye to eye in this natural disaster flick meets doomsday nuclear cautionary tale: one's young and fears the worst; the other, dying and impatient, is about to cause a CRACK IN THE WORLD despite having the best intentions to replace world electricity with molten lava, sending a warhead into the earth's core to bring it up. Bad choice, and all Dana's. 

Dana Andrews and James Westerfield in THREE HOURS TO KILL, another of a handful of Westerns starring Dana featuring the hangman's noose: In this picture, he's almost strung-up, survives, escapes, and returns to town to find out who killed the man he was accused of killing in the first place. This handsome Western, directed by Alfred Werker, happens mostly in flashback.

Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger's LAURA, with a glib, sly grin after looking at the pretentious tribal masks owned by his first suspect, Waldo Lydecker played by Clifton Webb. Ironic that Webb resembles Robert Keith from The Masks TWILIGHT ZONE episode (two decades later). Dana's strong, silent Mike McPherson knew to stay clear, anyway, before strolling to Waldo's bathtub. Thankless job, that.

Dana Andrews sensing something is off in CURSE OF THE DEMON back to, twelve years earlier in LAURA, knowing something's off: he spent over a decade sneaking through shadows, from genres thriller to horror.

Let's continue to celebrate the New Year with Dana Andrews taking a shot in a Chuck Norris flick, GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK. Dana's the human McGuffin providing an 11th hour expository monologue about... just about everything Chuck (with Anne Archer, who had mentioned Dana's character earlier) had been fighting for and against.

Celebrating New Year getting stinking at Butch's bar, owned/played by Hoagy Carmichael, the uncle of real-life war vet Harold Russell, coached during the filming of THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES by Dana Andrews, whose Fred Derry is the film's true lead.