Top Ten Contributors - The Big Steal (1949)
Because Mitchum and Greer were so popular from Out of the Past, the studio decided to pair them up again for this film noir. It receives a 7.1 IMDb rating. The director and three leading actors all have their own top ten lists created by me.
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- Richard Wormser was born on 2 February 1908 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for The Big Steal (1949), Sworn Enemy (1936) and Tulsa (1949). He was married to Jewel St. Leger Aldrich. He died in July 1977 in Tumacacori, Arizona, USA.wrote original story - The Road to Carmichael's
- Director
- Producer
- Editorial Department
Don Siegel was educated at Cambridge University, England. In Hollywood from the mid-'30s, he began his career as an editor and second unit director. In 1945 he directed two shorts (Hitler Lives (1945) and Star in the Night (1945)) which both won Academy Awards. His first feature as a director was 1946's The Verdict (1946). He made his reputation in the early and mid-'50s with a series of tightly made, expertly crafted, tough but intelligent "B" pictures (among them The Lineup (1958), Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)), then graduated to major "A" films in the 1960s and early 1970s. He made several "side trips" to television, mostly as a producer. Siegel directed what is generally considered to be Elvis Presley's best picture, Flaming Star (1960). He had a long professional relationship and personal friendship with Clint Eastwood, who has often said that everything he knows about filmmaking he learned from Don Siegel.asked by RKO pictures to direct- Writer
- Additional Crew
Daniel Mainwaring was born on 27 February 1902 in Oakland, California, USA. He was a writer, known for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Out of the Past (1947) and Against All Odds (1984). He died on 31 January 1977 in Los Angeles, California, USA.wrote the screenplay as he did Out of the Past- Composer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Academy Award-winning composer (score, Pinocchio (1940), conductor, songwriter ("When You Wish Upon a Star" [Academy award, Best Song, 1940) and arranger Leigh Harine was educated at the University of Utah. He was a music student of J. Spencer Cornwall. He arranged the first transcontinental broadcast from Los Angeles in 1932, and that year joined the Walt Disney Studios. From 1941 he freelanced among various Hollywood studios. He joined ASCAP in 1940. His other popular song compositions include "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee", "Give a Little Whistle" and "Jiminy Cricket".behind the musical score- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Harry J. Wild was born on 5 July 1901 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a cinematographer, known for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Army Girl (1938) and Murder, My Sweet (1944). He died on 25 February 1961 in Los Angeles, California, USA.director of photography- Actor
- Producer
- Writer
Robert Mitchum was an underrated American leading man of enormous ability, who sublimated his talents beneath an air of disinterest. He was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Ann Harriet (Gunderson), a Norwegian immigrant, and James Thomas Mitchum, a shipyard/railroad worker. His father died in a train accident when he was two, and Robert and his siblings (including brother John Mitchum, later also an actor) were raised by his mother and stepfather (a British army major) in Connecticut, New York, and Delaware. An early contempt for authority led to discipline problems, and Mitchum spent good portions of his teen years adventuring on the open road. He later claimed that on one of these trips, at the age of 14, he was charged with vagrancy and sentenced to a Georgia chain gang, from which he escaped. Working a wide variety of jobs (including ghostwriter for astrologist Carroll Righter), Mitchum discovered acting in a Long Beach, California, amateur theater company. He worked at Lockheed Aircraft, where job stress caused him to suffer temporary blindness. About this time he began to obtain small roles in films, appearing in dozens within a very brief time. In 1945, he was cast as Lt. Walker in Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor. His star ascended rapidly, and he became an icon of 1940s film noir, though equally adept at westerns and romantic dramas. His apparently lazy style and seen-it-all demeanor proved highly attractive to men and women, and by the 1950s, he was a true superstar despite a brief prison term for marijuana usage in 1949, which seemed to enhance rather than diminish his "bad boy" appeal. Though seemingly dismissive of "art," he worked in tremendously artistically thoughtful projects such as Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and even co-wrote and composed an oratorio produced at the Hollywood Bowl by Orson Welles. A master of accents and seemingly unconcerned about his star image, he played in both forgettable and unforgettable films with unswerving nonchalance, leading many to overlook the prodigious talent he can bring to a project that he finds compelling. He moved into television in the 1980s as his film opportunities diminished, winning new fans with The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988). His sons James Mitchum and Christopher Mitchum are actors, as is his grandson Bentley Mitchum. His last film was James Dean: Race with Destiny (1997) with Casper Van Dien as James Dean.plays Lt Duke Haliday- Actress
- Soundtrack
As a baby, she was winning beauty contests; as a teenager, with good looks and an attractive contralto voice, she was singing with big bands (most notably Enric Madriguera's orchestra in Latin Club Del Rio in Washington, D.C.. She met Rudy Vallee, her first husband, on the radio where she also enjoyed a brief stint as a singer. At age 15, an attack of palsy left her face partially paralyzed. She claimed that it was through facial exercises to overcome the paralysis that she learned the efficacy of facial expression in conveying human emotion, a skill she was renowned for using in her acting.plays Joan Graham- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
William Bendix was not a son of Brooklyn, New York, although because of his stereotypical "Brooklyn accent" it has been widely supposed that he was. Bendix was actually born in the Borough of Manhattan (New York City proper), in a midtown flat hard by the tracks of the long-since defunct Third-Avenue Elevated Railway. (Manhattan sections of the "El," as New Yorkers called it, were demolished circa 1956.)
Jut-jawed, broken-nosed and burly, Bendix began his acting career after the ravages of the Great Depression had killed his erstwhile grocery business. Having performed in nightclubs even while grocer, and having portrayed taxicab drivers in a series of Broadway flops, he enjoyed his first notable performance on the Broadway stage in 1939, portraying the cop Krupp in William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life." His Hollywood feature debut came about in one of his few starring roles, in Hal Roach's Brooklyn Orchid (1942). But more often than not, in his movies Bendix received less than top billing, inasmuch as so many of his film assignments involved supporting roles. Despite (or perhaps on account of) his looks he was often called upon to supply comedic support, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), when, portraying Sir Sagramore of King Arthur's Round Table in full suit of armor and pageboy wig, he waxeth eloquent, in his Brooklyn accent but in the most incongruent of Middle English dialects! On the other hand, that same craggy appearance had him in such roles as that of the thug Jeff in The Glass Key (1942), in which he repeatedly and gleefully uses his fists to beat star Alan Ladd's face to a pulp and then sadistically challenges Ladd, once he is healed, to come back and receive further "treatment"! Although he will always be fondly remembered for his light-comedy portrayals (in *three* of the mass media!) of Chester A. Riley in The Life of Riley (1949) and The Life of Riley (1953), perhaps William Bendix's finest and most memorable dramatic performance came in Lifeboat (1944), when he touchingly interprets the role of Gus, the shipwreck survivor whose gangrenous limb has to be removed, the absence of anesthesia notwithstanding.plays Capt. Vincent Blake- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Ramon Novarro was born José Ramón Gil Samaniego on February 6, 1899 in Durango, Mexico, to Leonor (Gavilan) and Dr. Mariano N. Samaniego Siqueiros, a prosperous dentist. Ramon and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1913, as refugees from the Mexican Revolution. After stints as a ballet dancer, piano teacher and singing waiter, he became a film extra in 1917. For five years he remained an extra until director Rex Ingram cast him as Rupert in The Prisoner of Zenda (1922). He was cast with Lewis Stone and Ingram's wife, Alice Terry (Ingram was also the person who suggested that he change his name to Novarro). He worked with Ingram in his next four films and was again teamed with Terry in the successful Scaramouche (1923). Novarro's rising popularity among female moviegoers resulted in his being billed as the "New Valentino". In 1925 he appeared in his most famous role, as the title character in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and later co-starred with Norma Shearer in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927). His first talking picture was Call of the Flesh (1930), where he sang and danced the tango. He continued to appear in musicals, but his popularity was slipping. He starred with Greta Garbo in the successful Mata Hari (1931), but his career began to fade fast. In 1935 he left MGM and appeared on Broadway in a show that quickly flopped. His later career, when he was able to find work in films, consisted mostly of cameos. On October 30th, 1968, Ramon Novarro was savagely beaten in his North Hollywood home by two young hustlers. They had heard - in error - that he had thousands of dollars locked away somewhere in his home. They never found any money, and Ramon was discovered dead the next day by his servant.Inspector General Oretega- Actor
- Soundtrack
Fourteen-year-old Reginald Lawrence Knowles was being readied to take his place with other relatives in the family bookbinding business (in Leeds) when he ran off to become an actor. He was inevitably brought back home, but he made good his second escape a few years later - his willful Knowles Yorkshire origin would not be denied. What stage experience he had amounted to a few seasons in regional theater, but he started in British sound films early (1932), calling himself Patric Knowles. He was the proverbial tall, dark and handsome type and headed for romantic lead roles. He rose slowly rose up the ranks of featured players in an array of 14 British films that included one of director Michael Powell's early successes, The Girl in the Crowd (1934). The last of his British efforts was Crown v. Stevens (1936) which, being a British Warner Bros. production, was scouted for the studio's Hollywood home base. This and a few previous films that year were lead vehicles for Knowles, and for this last he was recommended for a Hollywood contract. His first American effort was the big-screen soap opera Give Me Your Heart (1936) with notable Warner players, in which he played a noble cad. His chance for a more romantic introduction came later in the year with The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), where he joined an already popular new Angle face, Errol Flynn. Knowles played his younger brother in this well received bit of revisionist historical drama.
Through the remainder of the 1930s Knowles had a few leads with second-tier featured stars, but more often he was second lead as strait-laced but engaging in comedies as well as dramas. There were other films with Flynn, most notably the classic The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) in which he played Will Scarlett (in bright red jerkin). Knowles was a licensed private pilot and during free time provided some white-knuckle moments for Flynn, whose on-screen derring-do cloaked several phobias including vertigo. Knowles preferred freelancing to the confinement of long contract associations--one means of dodging the pitfall of being typecast. He was at RKO to play - with great verve - the shallow and rich playboy on the ill-fated plane of Five Came Back (1939). At Twentieth Century-Fox he played - very effectively - one of the big brothers of the Morgan family in the classic How Green Was My Valley (1941). Of course, freelancing could also lead to typecasting. Knowles parked himself at Universal in 1943, condemned to play clean-up hero in its formula horror films, such as The Wolf Man (1941) and the less engaging Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). He also had to endure straight man duty to the insipid antics of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, among other indignities suffered as a utility player at Universal.
He continued through the 1940s to 1951 with a mix of capable first and second lead roles with other studios, but that somewhat bored and deepening grimness on his face perhaps reflected frustration with typecast characters, as well as the realization that big fame would never come his way. He continued to be game, though, and fairly leaped at the new live playhouse theater phenomenon of early television. Along with one or two movies a year, he worked in this pioneering small screen theater starting in 1951. He also embraced episodic TV and made the rounds of the popular western and private eye shows of the period. Big- and small-screen work gradually tapered off for him through the 1960s. In the late part of the decade he was playing dignified military officers, such as Lord Mountbatten in the hit The Devil's Brigade (1968). He spent time doing college lecturing, commercials, and wrote a novel called "Even Steven." Retiring to the north end of the San Fernando Valley in Woodland Hills, Knowles was close to the Motion Picture Country Home in Calabasas, where he spent much time volunteering to help with the various functions provided for the many elderly show business people, many of whom had not been as fortunate as Knowles to have graced nearly 125 film efforts.plays Jim Fiske