FEARMAKERS CINEMA OF DANA ANDREWS

Dana Andrews in THE CROWDED SKY: a poker game moment leading to a very quick fist fight and, with Dana's usual brooding glare, it's one of many flashbacks that takes up about half a film that juggles past melodrama with present time airline disaster.

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.

A lobby card for THE CROWDED SKY from a deleted scene showing what looks like the wedding party of Rhonda Fleming and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., which makes no sense since their marriage was supposed to be kept secret except for their friend Caesar (Ed Kemmer).

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

By far the best lobby card from THE CROWDED SKY, showing John Kerr punching Dana Andrews, co-pilot socking pilot, isn't in the film since the moment is more close-up and at an angle, so this must have come from a still photographer as Dana recovers below. 

Another screen capture from the opening of CANYON PASSAGE showing Dana Andrews riding in soaking wet from the Northwestern rain into Oregon, where the movie's both filmed and takes place.

Our second capture from the Kino Lorber Blu Ray of Jacques Tourneur's gorgeous Western CANYON PASSAGE has Dana Andrews riding into town in the rain at the film's opening.

Dana Andrews stands firm all though CANYON RIVER, and here's the first shot from the Kino Lorber Blu Ray that just came out on Tuesday, and is worth the time and purchase.

Finally, Dana Andrews's greatest Western, CANYON PASSAGE, directed by his future CURSE OF THE DEMON and THE FEARMAKERS collaborator Jacques Tourneur, fresh from horror b-pictures for Val Lewton, is on Blu Ray... for a while only available on DVD with another Western, or a Spanish Blu Ray import that was good, but this will be better: although not the cover, which, as proven below, are always superior when foreign.

"What kind of animals are those?" is what Dana Andrews shouts at a trio of hot-rodders in HOT RODS TO HELL after car moll Mimsy Farmer throws a full can of beer at Dana's son, leaving his daughter Laurie Mock stunned by her new desert-dwelling contemporaries.

A scene and scenario straight out of GIANT in THE CROWDED SKY has Dana Andrews as a lifelong airline pilot forcing his frowning toddler son to get used to flying on a carnival plane ride, like when Rock Hudson throws his wailing, tortured only son on a horse.

Dana Andrews and John Kerr at the tail-end of THE CROWDED SKY: Dana saved the plane from crashing, but it was his fault the bird almost went down in the first place, and he's getting guilted into submission by Kerr's bitter and dickish co-pilot.

A miscast John Kerr, supposedly having flown "over a million miles" with Dana Andrews yet is hardly past his twenties, with character-actor Joe Mantell, channeling Henny Youngman and  Jimmy Durante, as the doomed throttle jockey in THE CROWDED SKY.

Dana Andrews faces proverbial-spouting Ed Prentiss in THE CROWDED SKY: Dana's a pilot who the brass wants as more brass; but pilots will be pilots, especially Dana, who's played plenty.  

Interestingly, Dana Andrews's bitter and reluctant, pay-for-hire sea captain character brings up the ship Exodus, which would be a novel... adapted to a movie by his multi-director Otto Preminger a decade after George Sherman's SWORD IN THE DESERT with Jeff Chandler, Stephen McNally, and the lovely Marta Toren, who would later play Dana's love interest in ASSIGNMENT: PARIS.

"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.

Dana Andrews reluctantly answered the call when asked "does anybody know how to fly a plane?" by stewardess Peggy King in the original/straight version of AIRPLANE titled ZERO HOUR.

As the title finally shapes up into the third act of DUEL IN THE JUNGLE, Dana Andrews, as breezy yet intrepid insurance investigator Scott Walters, shows his hand with a gun, and target. 

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.

Dana Andrews angrily stands up to the swamp-surrounded small town bullies in Jean Renoir's first American-directed feature, SWAMP WATER, with Eugene Pallette as a crooked sheriff backing Dana's CANYON PASSAGE enemy Ward Bond.

Fifteen-years may not sound like a long time now, but from 1950 to 1965 many things changed, including the overall culture, and the Film Noir medium, in which Dana Andrews acted under Otto Preminger from LAURA to WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, were in the past; ironically, so were patriotic war films like IN HARM'S WAY as Dana played Admiral Broderick, a detested leader Wayne replaces during and after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

Strangely enough, this gorgeous, high-cheek-boned starlet was a model... on the radio! And Doris Fesette provides a non-speaking, uncredited cameo as a "Club Patron" Dana Andrews buys a drink for, just to get her to stop flirting, in MADISON AVENUE.

Great colors in this shot from DUEL IN THE JUNGLE, a romantic adventure starring Dana Andrews as an insurance investigator from New York in London, with Jeanne Crain, and with his clothes and expressions, and those wall shadows, this shot has a touch of Noir. 

Added some sepia to Dana Andrews looking at himself as a con artist named Eric Stanton, who enters a seacoast Northern California small town on a bus, with a dollar in his pocket, and might just leave with a rich wife in Otto Preminger's LAURA followup, with even more creative camera shots and a neater Noirish title, FALLEN ANGEL.

Dana Andrews's return with director Otto Preminger after fifteen years brought him into the Pearl Harbor drama IN HARM'S WAY that included Kirk Douglas, Burgess Meredith, Brandon DeWilde and Patrick O'Neal. Like happens with former leading men, Dana would often play bad guys, but his Admiral Broderick is more an unqualified leader whom the characters talk about more than talk to.

A personal favorite scene on a personal favorite movie, and this blog's namesake, THE FEARMAKERS, when Dana Andrews tells Mel Torme how to take surveys the right and honest way.

Dana Andrews worked again with director Otto Preminger, fifteen-years after WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS; as Admiral Broderick in IN HARM'S WAY that also features Dana and Otto's DAISY KENYON actor Henry Fonda. Dana's character, pictured with Franchot Tone, is a despised Pearl Harbor admiral showing up again in a scene with Kirk Douglas, and then Kirk and John Wayne.

Katharine Smith is the daughter of Dana Andrews, and among others she grew up knowing her dad's friend and collaborator Jacques Tourneur, one of the all-time great directors, bringing perfection to Val Lewton now-iconic b-horrors and collaborating with Dana in the Western CANYON PASSAGE, CURSE OF THE DEMON and THE FEARMAKERS, and here they are on a sailing trip to Mexico. Thank you Katharine for this photograph. It's legendary. 

It's never clear what the perturbed customer was talking about in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, forcing (birthday of) Harold Russell to snap off a shirt pin with his hook-hand and Dana Andrews to hop from behind his soda jerk fountain and pummel the jerk into glass, but it's most likely the fella abhors Communists more than Nazis.

When Ronald Reagan was in The White House, his ex-wife Jane Wyman played a villainous winemaker on the nighttime soap FALCON CREST, butting heads with Robert Foxworth, who uses Dana Andrews as a senator for some kind of dramatic twist: He appeared on the series twice during the first and second season. 

In the same year, Dana Andrews plays characters whose sudden heart attacks moved the story forward. Here in TAKE A HARD RIDE it sends partner Jim Brown the titular trek, and the death in AIRPORT 1975 causes Dana's small plane to crash into Efrem Zimbelist Jr's large one: the opposite of THE CROWDED SKY.

Venturing into the New Year named after perfect vision, here's a cabin-fevered Vincent Prince questioned by Dana Andrews, who socks him in the gut later on, knowing Gene Tierney's title character is much too good for the flaky loser in LAURA.

Happy birthday to Dana Andrews, born 1909 on New Years Day, January 1rst, and here he's with Jeanne Crain in STATE FAIR, one of four total together.

"You're probably half drunk, and want me to play a song that REMINDS you of some GUY!" says bitter, blind Dana Andrews, with an inflection like no other, in NIGHT SONG with Merle Oberon.

Harold Russell strikes anew after lighting up for Dana Andrews and Fredric March, because he's never been in a plane and it's bad luck... and Happy Veterans Day from THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES.

In 1958, the same year as THE FEARMAKERS was another Cold War Thriller, albeit of the Disaster kind, and both featured the beautiful Marilee Earle: The first she's the leading lady opposite Dana Andrews, and in THE LOST MISSILE she's the pregnant wife of a secondary lead, extremely underused but still looking fantastic.

Dick Foran, always the movie villain, keeps on eye on secretary Marilee Earle as she sympathizes with Dana Andrews in Jacques Tourneur's desk-set late noir, THE FEARMAKERS.

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney finished a five film team-up with Otto Preminger's WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS, which might seem similar to LAURA, where a tough cop and a beautiful women are entangled in a murder, but couldn't be more different: she's protecting him this time, and yet, she doesn't even know it.