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Actor and singer who started out in westerns, moved on to TV soaps and then became a star of Broadway musicals

The diverse show-business career of Anne Jeffreys, who has died aged 94, can be divided into three distinct domains. In the 1940s she was the spirited heroine of low-budget westerns and B- picture thrillers; from the 50s onwards she appeared on television in soap operas and sitcoms, including the supernatural comedy series Topper (1953-55), in which she was known as the “ghostess with the mostest”, and the long-running General Hospital; and she was a singing star in Broadway musicals, notably as Lilli Vanessi in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate (1950-51).

During the first period, Jeffreys starred opposite Robert Mitchum in Nevada (1944) and Frank Sinatra in Step Lively (1944). In the former, she played a saloon singer who seduces the hero and is later fatally wounded by gunfire while protecting him; in the latter,...

This week has seen '70s crime classic and Playlist favorite “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” get the Criterion upgrade to Blu-Ray. Peter Yates’ film has been undervalued for too long, but its cult has been growing in recent years, and the new 1080p release is a welcome one, not least because it gives us another chance to watch one of the finest performances from a true cinematic legend: Robert Mitchum. A Connecticut native who had a troubled adolescence, including time on a Georgia chain gang that he claimed to have escaped from, Mitchum got into acting after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, and swiftly got work in B-movie westerns before finding sudden fame in “Nevada” and “The Story Of G.I. Joe.” The actor soon became a leading figure in film noir pictures, and his career survived an arrest and brief prison spell for marijuana possession (a...

Howard Hughes movies (photo: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in 'The Aviator') Turner Classic Movies will be showing the Howard Hughes-produced, John Farrow-directed, Baja California-set gangster drama His Kind of Woman, starring Robert Mitchum, Hughes discovery Jane Russell, and Vincent Price, at 3 a.m. Pt / 6 a.m. Et on Saturday, November 8, 2014. Hughes produced a couple of dozen movies. (More on that below.) But what about "Howard Hughes movies"? Or rather, movies -- whether big-screen or made-for-television efforts -- featuring the visionary, eccentric, hypochondriac, compulsive-obsessive, all-American billionaire as a character? Besides Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a dashing if somewhat unbalanced Hughes in Martin Scorsese's 2004 Best Picture Academy Award-nominated The Aviator, other actors who have played Howard Hughes on film include the following: Tommy Lee Jones in William A. Graham's television movie The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), with Lee Purcell as silent film star Billie Dove, Tovah Feldshuh as Katharine Hepburn,...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. I am including documentaries, short films and mini series, only as special mentions – along with a few features that can qualify as horror, but barely do.

Come Back Tonight To See My List Of The 200 Best!

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Special Mention:

Wait until Dark

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Robert Carrington

USA, 1967

Directed by Terence Young,...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Twilight Time has released the 1975 gut-busting Western Bite the Bullet as a limited edition (3,000 units)  Blu-ray edition. The film, directed by Richard Brooks (one of the most truly macho filmmakers of his day) centers on a disparate group of cowboys who are competing in a 700 miles endurance horse race in hopes of winning the $2,000 prize. I saw the film when it was first released but it made no impression on me whatsoever. Thus, watching it on Blu-ray afforded me the opportunity to re-evaluate a movie that I remembered literally nothing about. Maybe it's just the wisdom that comes with age or the fact that we can't take for granted films boasting this type of cast, but this time around I really enjoyed Bite the Bullet. This is the type of Western that was produced by studios on a routine basis. Nowadays, however, good Westerns are hard to...

Rest your wallets, folks, there are hardly any new major horror releases this week. Instead we're getting mostly re-released Blu-ray and 3D Blu-rays. Really the only thing that's piquing our curiosity is RoboGeisha!

And if you are a gamer, soundtracks to your favorite zombie killing video games are now available for playing outside of the game consoles. Excited? Not even a little?

Clash of the Titans Blu-ray 3D

Directed by Louis Leterrier

Starring Sam Worthington, Gemma Arterton, Mads Mikkelsen, Alexa Davalos, Ralph Fiennes

If you hadn't had enough of this 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans (review) on Blu-ray DVD or in the theaters (review), this is your chance to get double- (triple-?) dip on the title with a Blu-ray 3D version. Or you can just relive it all on our Clash of the Titans page instead. Don't say we didn't warn you. If you don't already know, Clash of the Titans...

After such success with this last year, today comes the first in a multi-chapter look at the various cinematic releases hitting the U.S. in 2010.

Each 'Volume' contains brief descriptions and editorial opinion/analysis of around 25-30 films, and at present it's looking to run around nine volumes in length.

Expect the remaining ones to go up between now and the first official weekend of releases on January 8th.

13

Opens: 2010

Cast: Jason Statham, Alexander Skarsgard, Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, 50 Cent

Director: Géla Babluani

Summary: A remake of 2005 French thriller "13 (Tzameti)". A naive young man assumes a dead man's identity and finds himself embroiled in an underground world of power, violence, and chance where men gamble behind closed doors on the lives of other men.

Analysis: Remakes are very common, the same director remaking his own film in English is rarer but still not unheard of ("Funny Games," "Bangkok Dangerous," "The...

After such success with this last year, today comes the first in a multi-chapter look at the various cinematic releases hitting the U.S. in 2010.

Each 'Volume' contains brief descriptions and editorial opinion/analysis of around 25-30 films, and at present it's looking to run around nine volumes in length.

Expect the remaining ones to go up between now and the first official weekend of releases on January 8th.

13

Opens: 2010

Cast: Jason Statham, Alexander Skarsgard, Mickey Rourke, Ray Winstone, 50 Cent

Director: Géla Babluani

Summary: A remake of 2005 French thriller "13 (Tzameti)". A naive young man assumes a dead man's identity and finds himself embroiled in an underground world of power, violence, and chance where men gamble behind closed doors on the lives of other men.

Analysis: Remakes are very common, the same director remaking his own film in English is rarer but still not unheard of ("Funny Games," "Bangkok Dangerous," "The...