FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Another Happy Birthday and Happy New Years both for DANA ANDREWS, born on Jan 1, 1909, a long time ago, but his movies carry on, as his minimalist style of acting seems brand new... here in THE FEARMAKERS (colorized photo) directed by Dana's CURSE OF THE DEMON and CANYON PASSAGE auteur Jacques Tourneur. 

Another year celebrating the double-birthdays of two great characters from LAURA including Laura herself, Gene Tierney, and her obsessed would-be suitor Clifton Webb as Waldo, questioned by Dana Andrews in the Otto Preminger classic featuring towering womanizing buffoon Vincent Price.

Ushering in 2025, it's the yearly Happy New Year/Birthday for Dana Andrews, and it's also the birth date of his FALLEN ANGEL retired-cop nemesis Charles Bickford.

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.

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.

Birthday of two important directors for Dana Andrews: first and foremost being OTTO PREMINGER, and both shared a game-changing noir as directed instead of just producing the film noir LAURA while making Dana's cop character more tough and classy than the usual grungy gumshoe sleazeball; later he'd direct LAURA stars Dana and Gene Tierney in an edgier noir of the "bad cop" nature, WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS and between is their best, FALLEN ANGEL followed by DAISY KENYON...  Otto's film noirs covered 1944 to 1950 when another European director, Fritz Lang, during the late 1950's piloted a few starring Dana; the news-desk/serial-killer-thriller WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS and the courtroom drama BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT... 

The third and final Dana Andrews and director Jacques Tourneur collaboration, and for which this blog got its title, THE FEARMAKERS, a cold-war, desk-set noir thriller from 1958, is finally out on Blu Ray...

Dana Andrews as a strangely-named priest, Roth... Father Roth... in Mark Robson's Catholic Noir EDGE OF DOOM the same year he'd play a tough cop in WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS. Now THAT is versatile.

  The 19th of November always rolls around and is the birthday of both Clifton Webb and Gene Tierney in the Film Noir classic LAURA starring Dana Andrews, trying to get the titular starlet away from her friends, shady and flaky both.

Villains from THE FEARMAKERS include Dick Foran (looking very Ben Johnson) and his thug Kelly Thorsden.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes." Dana Andrews to Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger's LAURA.

Almost a decade before Marlon Brando yelled "Stella!", Dana Andrews as con artist Eric Stanton says it quieter, but equally as intense, hearing of Linda Darnell as Stella's death while newly married to rich girl Alice Faye, who quit movies entirely because Darnell, even dead, stole the scenes away from the first-billed singer/starlet in her first, and last, dramatic role, Otto Preminger's FALLEN ANGEL.

Here's an image, from Dana Andrews and director Otto Preminger's LAURA followup, FALLEN ANGEL, that epitomizes Film Noir: where Dana's Eric Stanton sulks near the cheap motel's neon sign, and though his new wife Alice Faye lies in the bed nearby, he's all alone.