FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Birthday for two important directors involving Dana Andrews: Otto Preminger the most important as LAURA made he and Dana famous, followed up by the film noirs FALLEN ANGEL, DAISY KENYON and WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (and years later, the war film IN HARM'S WAY) while in-between Dana worked with Fritz Lang in the 1950's double-noirs WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS and BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, each involving crime and punishment.

Not long after the double-birthdays of LAURA actors Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb is musician and actor Hoagy Carmichael, who appeared in three films with Dana Andrews, including Jacques Tourneur's character-driven western CANYON PASSAGE (pictured with Lloyd Bridges and Andy Devine), the post-war classic THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and their true collaborating combination as fellow musicians in the melodrama NIGHT SONG.

It's that time of the year, for the double-birthday of the killer dame and the killer journalist, Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb, from Otto Preminger's LAURA: with only alpha male cop Dana Andrews in-between.

Birthday of Golden Age singer and actress ALICE FAYE, the good girl in Otto Preminger's underrated film noir FALLEN ANGEL with Dana Andrews... and since Linda Darnell's femme fatale character got so much attention while some of Alice's scenes were cut... in Hollywood, Alice didn't live there anymore... until a 1960's TV-version of STATE FAIR, which Dana starred in the best known theatrical released the same year as this movie, 1945.

By 1954, while struggling with alcoholism, Dana Andrews was back to playing the secondary male lead, who almost gets the girl but ultimately doesn't, here in ELEPHANT WALK opposite Elizabeth Taylor, wife of aloof multi-millionaire tea-plantation owner Peter Finch, in what's a cross between Alfred Hitchcock's REBECCA and, ironically, Taylor's following year epic GIANT.