FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

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.

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.

Birthday Otto Preminger, who was to Dana Andrews what Alfred Hitchcock was to James Stewart or Cary Grant, only better: from LAURA to FALLEN ANGEL to WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS and then a reunion for IN HARM'S WAY.

Twilight Time's SWAMP WATER is one of several Dana Andrews movies given their limited edition Blu Ray treatment, and now prices over seventy bucks: Directed by French import Jean Renoir (escaped from Nazi occupied France) sans a few studio inserts, it's pretty entertaining, taking place in a rural town nearby a dangerous southern swamp, where nothing survives but escaped convict Walter Brennan, taking in Dana... the stubborn but kindhearted son of equally stubborn Walter Huston... who eventually realizes his future FALLEN ANGEL cohort John Carradine holds all the cards.

  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.

  Dana Andrews as a bitter blind pianist lights a smoke in John Cromwell's melodrama NIGHT SONG.

Anne Baxter (who'd also appear with Dana Andrews in THE NORTH STAR) desperately holds the last of a bagful of kittens in Jean Renoir's SWAMP WATER, where they're about to be thrown into by Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams and Ward Bond, the dicks. 

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.

Today is the same birthday for LAURA stars GENE TIERNEY and CLIFTON WEBB, the beauty and the brain that muscular (and smart) cop Dana Andrews fights in-between. "You seem to be completely disregarding something more important than your career: my lunch."  

Juxtaposition of Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain starting in STATE FAIR screaming on a rollercoaster then demoted to HOT RODS TO HELL screaming on the highway.

Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward in MY FOOLISH HEART directed by Mark Robson, who worked for producer Val Lewton along with Jacques Tourneur, who directed the previous Andrews/Hayward collaboration, CANYON PASSAGE.

Dana Andrews about to lose his dog Trouble (till he finds him later) on a gator hunt in SWAMP WATER with father Walter Huston by his side, and bullfrog-voiced Eugene Pallette rowing from behind.

Virginia Gilmore, credited before Dana Andrews in the World War II thriller BERLIN CORRESPONDENT, played his spurned girlfriend in SWAMP WATER the year before: ironically she's good here despite working for Nazis, and bad there as an All-American Girl.

Peter Whitney, the shady bartender from THE BIG HEAT, was also an eclectic Dana Andrews actor, playing a clumsy banker in CANYON PASSAGE and then a formidable guard in THE IRON CURTAIN, motioning for Dana to turn around... how demeaning!

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.

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