FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Hoagy Carmichael goes cutthroat fishing with his genuinely blind musician friend Dana Andrews, his co-star in CANYON PASSAGE and then THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, and a faking-blind Merle Oberon in NIGHT SONG.

Dana Andrews in Fritz Lang's WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS as an anchorman/reporter on the trail of a killer, who saves his intensity till the end: the rest of the picture he's dead drunk and, according to some sources, he was "blasted" during the entire production.

This Fritz Lang newspaper thriller is strange and uneven, which is often the charm, and plot-wise doesn't always fit into the typical Film Noir trappings but sporadically has that inarguable look and vibe, like this shot of the cop, Howard Duff, working with the reporter, Dana Andrews, to find a serial killer who strikes at the same time the newspaper is working to find him: WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS.

Dana Andrews as a blind piano player in the post-war melodrama NIGHT SONG opposite smitten rich girl Merle Oberon, who feigns her own blindness to get close to who's one of Dana's most stubborn and angry characters, and he's play a few, but here with a reason...

Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward reunite for MY FOOLISH HEART, based on a very angry J.D. Salinger short story and directed by Val Lewton underling Mark Robson, who edited CAT PEOPLE for director Jacques Tourneur, who, after his own Lewton tenure, made CANYON PASSAGE starring this later feature's doomed couple, Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward.

Before Vincent Price was spooky, he played Shelby Carpenter, a wimpy playboy who lives in wealth but has no money, and sustains a lie through most of the Film Noir classic LAURA while Dana Andrews, as Detective Mike McPherson, keeps narrowed eyes on him.

Dana Andrews and Eleanor Parker work on MADISON AVENUE where Dana builds up fledgling advertising company owner Parker to milk magnate Eddie Albert while juggling a sporadic romance with his third-time collaborating ingenue Jeanne Crain. 

In their second of four film collaborations, Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain go to Africa, kind of: some shots, like these, are superimposed from the British studio and others, mostly wider shots, are the real deal in George Marshall's DUEL IN THE JUNGLE.

With British ingenue Peggy Cummins in the background, Dana Andrews as John Holden finds the parchment in his jacket, which means he's doomed by that CURSE OF THE DEMON, a part Horror with Noir stylings directed by Horror/Noir stylist, Jacques Tourneur, who'd direct Dana the following year in THE FEARMAKERS.

As far as villains go, Niall MacGinnis is certainly no clown, although as Doctor Karswell, head of a large Satanist Cult in England, he dresses as one called Dr. Bobo: The Magnificent, performing magic tricks for children while trying to keep Dana Andrews from publishing a disparaging article he was sent from America to write, replacing ingenue Peggy Cummins' uncle, who began the film being lethally plowed-down by the titular CURSE OF THE DEMON.

Janette Scott is one of the prettiest Dana Andrews' starlets, playing his fellow scientist wife in CRACK IN THE WORLD, in color, and in the B&W British airplane disaster NO HIGHWAY IN THE SKY she's the daughter of another neurotic scientist, James Stewart. The movie harbors two more future Dana co-stars, Niall MacGinnis from CURSE OF THE DEMON (pilot on the bottom right) and Wilfrid Hyde-White from DUEL IN THE JUNGLE. Meanwhile, in a few years, Dana would begin his own airline disaster career including ZERO HOUR, THE CROWDED SKY and AIRPORT 1975.

Dana Andrews sees Jeanne Crain off their first ride that introduces the pair who'd go through a rollercoaster of three more films after STATE FAIR including a DUEL IN THE JUNGLE, a trip to MADISON AVENUE and battling HOT RODS FROM HELL.

The title for THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES comes from the caustic, antagonistic hottie Virginia Mayo as Dana Andrews's shallow wife, and here's a screen capture to prove it.

Been reading from a few morons online who comment that Dana Andrews was too old to play Fred Derry in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, but he's perfect, the perfect age, and wasn't too old at all. If he were a kid, there'd be no reason for the token kid, Harold Russell, bookended by middleman Dana and token old-timer Fredric March. Some people, uh. Anyhow here's Andrew with "a drunkard's dream if I ever did see one," Teresa Wright.

A year before BERLIN CORRESPONDENT, where Dana Andrews and Virginia Gilmore played a German ingenue teamed up with, after spying on, Dana Andrews, they were boyfriend and girlfriend in a fickle relationship in SWAMP WATER.

THE IRON CURTAIN, about a Russian code-breaker defecting in Canada, and one of the first Cold War movies ever made, was directed by William A. Wellman, who gave Dana Andrews his first important role in THE OXBOW INCIDENT almost a decade earlier.

Another picture of Dana Andrews in BERLIN CORRESPONDENT which, like ASSIGNMENT PARIS a decade later, he plays an imprisoned reporter, only in different wars: One Nazi, one Cold. 

Märta Torén starred with Dana Andrews in SWORD IN THE DESERT a few years earlier, and here they are in ASSIGNMENT: PARIS as both play rival yet allied reporters during The Cold War.

One of the great villains of Dana Andrews Cinema, known as Danantagonists on the Facebook Fan Page , German actor Martin Kosleck spent World War II playing Nazi tyrants, and here in BERLIN CORRESPONDENT he all but steals the show.

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. 

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. 

Not a movie more aesthetically prickly and scratchy and woody and reedy than SWAMP WATER directed by Jean Renoir, his first American film, and with Dana Andrews fourth billed, he's the true lead as Tom Regan, who finds a friendly, falsely-accused renegade while searching for his dog, Trouble, who lives up to his name.

Marilee Earle discusses an 11th hour plan in THE FEARMAKERS, a Washington D.C. set Film Noir sparsely directed Dana Andrews's collaborator Jacques Tourneur. And this is our first post with Marilee, a personal favorite Dana dame. That face!