FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Dana Andrews was often billed second, third or even fourth in movies where he's the main character; he lands third in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES where Dana's Fred Derry sets the stage: At an airport, having just returned from World War II, he goes up against soft tyranny from a man committing two of Hollywood's biggest sins: Using a black man to carry his bag, and that bag being for the maligned game of golf. And you thought the "Japs" were tough!

The expression of Dana Andrews in the "bad cop" Film Noir WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS speaks volumes, and is probably the best performance in his career. Although he also played a determined, serious cop in his first Otto Preminger collaboration, LAURA, this, his third, made some consider Dana "the face of Noir."

"I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes," Mark McPherson, played by Dana Andrews, tells LAURA : Which isn't in this scene, but the dopes are present: Vincent Price as flaky playboy Shelby Carpenter and deserved Oscar-winning and scene-stealer Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker: Both making Mark and Gene Tierney's title character that much more of a perfect couple.

"Insider Trading, honey bunch?" No, not that Martha Stewart. The actress. And here she is as Joan Crawford's magazine ad-layout model in DAISY KENYON, the third of five features with director Otto Preminger and second of three with Henry Fonda.

"You put it there, didn't you?" Dana Andrews asks Vincent Price about a key in LAURA, and it seems quite unnatural for everyone who knows Price's later horror films that here, he's anything but... a playboy womanizer named Shelby Carpenter, both guilty and innocent in the Otto Preminger's Film Noir classic.

Dana Andrews as title character JOHNNY RENO, a U.S. Marshall taking Joe Connors, played by Tom Drake, in for whatever lawful justice is necessary, but the small town, blaming him for an Indian's death which could  bring savagery and revenge, wants what happens or almost happens in all Westerns starring Dana Andrews... a kangaroo court trial and hanging.

Rhonda Fleming had been around since OUT OF THE PAST, directed by Dana Andrews's CANYON PASSAGE and future CURSE OF THE DEMON and THE FEARMAKERS collaborator Jacques Tourneur, so thirteen-years later in Joseph Pevney's THE CROWDED SKY, she got second-billing under star Andrews despite only sharing a few scenes with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who wants to keep daughter Karen Green safe from her trampy mother.

Dianne Foster plays feisty redhead Chris Palmer in THREE HOURS TO KILL, a vengeance Western starring Dana Andrews as a falsely-accused man who returns to his hometown to find the real killer. Meanwhile, Chris wants his investigation to end for them to run off together. And doesn't take rejection lightly.

Dana Andrews' character has found out he has only a few days to live, and within the space of walking from one room to another, must change his countenance from grave to assertive as he orders the nuclear missile into the Earth's core, for hopeful environmental reasons but that inevitably causes a CRACK IN THE WORLD.

British beauty Janette Scott played Dana Andrews' wife in 1965: Seven-years earlier, Andrews had a co-star in musician Mel Tormé from THE FEARMAKERS: an office geek who doesn't get the girl: But in real life, Janette Scott would be married to Tormé not long after playing Dana's trophy in CRACK IN THE WORLD.