FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Elizabeth Taylor realizes marriage to a multi-millionaire isn't all it's cracked up to be, although if watching movies from the 1950's, she'd know it's always a bad decision: In fact, two years later, Taylor would  play another independent, strong-willed woman ending up with another stubborn man with a ton of land, but in Texas, not ELEPHANT WALK, Ceylon... but that's a tale we've covered ...

As Dana Andrews prepares to build-up fledgling advertising agency owner Eleanor Parker in MADISON AVENUE, he thinks twice about the time it'll take to smoke a cigarette and the job he needs getting done: in one of Dana's best performances of the 1960's, and with his old energy back. Cool boat painting too!

RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP didn't star Dana Andrews, but HOT RODS FROM HELL did, and in that movie his daughter, Laurie Mock , was the good teenage girl, while the bad girl was Mimsy Farmer with her bad guy friend Gene Kirkwood : All three changing places in RIOT as Mimsy plays the good girl daughter of another veteran actor, Aldo Ray, while this time it's Laurie Mock and again, Gene Kirkwood as the rebels. Not only that, but while HOT RODS featured Mickey Rooney Jr.'s band during the third act, the young cast of RIOT is rounded out with Mickey's other son, Tim Rooney.

Eyes faced down upon and away from each other at her uncle's funeral, Dana Andrews and Peggy Cummins begin a spooked relationship in NIGHT OF THE DEMON, the British Version of what America called CURSE OF THE DEMON. The two Noir actors plus director Jacques Tourneur make this a kind of Horror Noir, and both versions are fantastic. 

Gene Kirkwood, who'd one day produce ROCKY, with Paul Bertoya and cult actress Mimsy Farmer, soon to adorn a personal favorite Pink Floyd album, the soundtrack for the movie MORE in which she stars as a different kind of hippie girl than the loony instigator in HOT RODS TO HELL, making Dana Andrews' life a living... just that.

As the lyric goes, "'Cause I just can't seem to drink it off my mind," and it takes a great actor to convincingly fall in love with a portrait, so by the time Gene Tierney's LAURA comes back to life, Dana Andrews as Detective Mark McPherson has already been through a ringer, or two.

Dana Andrews plays a slick lawyer in DAISY KENYON, and the movie's not about the law, say, like BOOMERANG, but is a romantic triangle melodrama where Dana, who calls everyone "baby" or "honey bunch," either male or female, remains cool and manly: and you might just be rooting for him despite the fact you're not supposed to.

Alice Faye stares down Dana Andrews as he paces the room of the newly married home: About to be thrust from a con man Noir to a Wrong Man Noir in Otto Preminger's FALLEN ANGEL.

In FALLEN ANGEL, bad boy Dana Andrews takes good girl Alice Faye on a date, and ditches the movie before it's finished... The title NORTH WINDS, made up especially for the movie: this movie.

"He drank it, let him pay for it," Linda Darnell tells one of several mad crushes, the diner owner in FALLEN ANGEL where, soon enough, Dana Andrews ALSO falls into her trap,  and is soon wrapped-up in her moonlit murder in this Otto Preminger directed con-man Noir.