Actualités

No, not a blind Sherlock Holmes, but a blind Van Johnson, who directs his butler, his girlfriend Vera Miles and the London police to thwart a crime based on something he overheard in a bar. Henry Hathaway directs a complicated murder mystery that plays like a combo of Rear Window and Wait Until Dark, with a cranky Van Johnson as the central character.

23 Paces to Baker Street

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1956 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date February 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Van Johnson, Vera Miles, Cecil Parker, Patricia Laffan, Maurice Denham, Estelle Winwood, Liam Redmond, Isobel Elsom, Martin Benson, Queenie Leonard.

Cinematography: Milton Krasner

Film Editor: James B. Clark

Original Music: Leigh Harline

Written by Nigel Balchin from the novel Warrant for X by Philip MacDonald

Produced by Henry Ephron

Directed by Henry Hathaway

In the 1950s the murder mystery thriller came of age, as creakier older formulas...

Deborah Kerr movies: with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity Deborah Kerr Pt.2: Sexual Outlaw As an unhappily married woman having a torrid affair with an army officer shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Deborah Kerr is equally powerful in one of her best-remembered movies, From Here to Eternity (1953), stealing the romantic melodrama from her male co-stars. Fred Zinnemann’s Academy Award-winning blockbuster marked one of the rare times when Kerr’s physique played a part in her erotic persona, as she parades around Hawaii in Lana Turner-type shorts and frolics on the wet sand with brawny Burt Lancaster. Less obvious is Kerr’s headmaster’s wife in Tea and Sympathy (1956), who, despite her discreet clothing and demeanor, ends up seducing one of her husband’s teenage students. It’s all for a good cause, of course — the "sensitive" adolescent thinks he may be gay...

Van Johnson, the freckled, red-haired heartthrob of the ‘40s, who attempted to shake his boy-next-door image during the ‘50s in a slew of films, died Friday at 92, of natural causes, in Nyack, New York.