Joan ShawleeFilmography

City Heat

Actors: Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn

Synopsis: This standard, tongue-in-cheek, gangsters and good guys saga is carried on the star power and screen presence of Clint Eastwood as Lt. Speer, a taciturn, tough, play-it-by-the-book cop, and on Burt Reynolds as Mike Murphy, Speer's old friend in the force, now turned private eye but still a Read More

The Child Bride of Short Creek

Synopsis: Originally made for television and based on a true story from the '50s, this film concerns a rural Arizona town that deals in polygamy. Specifically, a boy is shocked that his father (Christopher Atkins), a veteran of the Korean War, wishes to take a 15-year-old girl for another wife. ~ John Bush Read More

Buddy Buddy

Actors: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Paula Prentiss, Klaus Kinski, Dana Elcar

Synopsis: As if in some way Billy Wilder sensed that Buddy Buddy would ultimately turn out to be his final feature film, Wilder lets loose scatter-shot stingers at a wide range of pop-culture targets -- from sex clinics, to 60 Minutes, to movie references, to disco, to Betamax video recorders. Based on Read More

Quincy, M.E.: No Way to Treat a Body

Synopsis: While renovating her new apartment in an old Victorian mansion, Quincy's girlfriend Jenny Drake (Marj Dusay) unearths the mummified remains of two women. Later on, two other female corpses are found within the same walls. After a thorough examination, Quincy (Jack Klugman) concludes that three of Read More

Never Con a Killer

Synopsis: Filmed as the 72-minute pilot episode for the weekly ABC adventure series, The Feather and Father Gang, Never Con a Killer was held back from view until May 13, 1977, by which time the series proper had already been on for two months...and had already been canceled. Stefanie Powers and Harold Gould Read More

Emergency!: The Nuisance

Synopsis: Injured in a hit-and-run accident, John (Randolph Mantooth) ends up in a Rampart hospital bed, where he proceeds to drive the staff crazy. Meanwhile, Roy is saddled with John's replacement Craig Bice (John R. Richardson in his first series appearance), an unsufferable perfectionist whose strict Read More

Farewell, My Lovely

Actors: Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles, Jack O'Halloran

Synopsis: Previously filmed in 1942 as The Falcon Takes Over and in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet, Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely was given its third cinematic go-round under its original title in 1975. Spouting the Chandlerish prose as if it were second nature, Robert Mitchum stars as 1940s private eye Read More

Flash and the Firecat

Synopsis: A duo of daring lawbreakers, who call themselves Flash (Roger Davis) and Firecat (Tricia Sembera), speed, steal, and evade the grasp of the local law enforcement officers as they high-tail it around California in their dune buggy. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide Read More

Emergency!: Messin' Around

Synopsis: Victimized by one of Chet's (Tim Donnelly) practical jokes, John (Randolph Mantooth) maps out a sweet revenge. The rest of the Rampart team is kept busy with Old Bill, a chronic "faker" who continually figures out ways to get checked into the hospital in order to entertain the kiddie patients--and Read More

Willard

Actors: Bruce Davison, Ernest Borgnine, Elsa Lanchester, Sondra Locke, Michael Dante

Synopsis: This film is based on the novel Ratman's Notebooks, by Stephen Gilbert. Bruce Davison is Willard Stiles, a 27-year-old mama's boy whose repressions are bottled up inside and come to the fore in his nervous nail-biting. As one character describes Willard, "Willard is basically an extrovert, but Read More

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Synopsis: Photographer Christopher George is mistaken for an assassination target by paid killers. Since the actual victim-to-be is now safe, George cannot count on the protection of the authorities, so he takes it on the lam. He is sheltered by former girlfriend Judy Carne, who is kidnapped and threatened Read More

One More Train to Rob

Synopsis: In this western, a train robber is framed by a fellow gang member and sent to prison. The gang member betrayed him so that he could marry the robber's love. To get his revenge, the robber helps out a gang of Chinese whose father, the other guy kidnapped. A showdown between the two leads ensues. Read More

Adam-12: Log 131: Reed, the Dicks Have Their Job and We Have Ours

Synopsis: On today's docket for officers Jim Reed (Kent McCord) and Pete Malloy (Martin Milner) is a tense kidnapping situation, as a deranged young man (played by future soft-core filmmaker Zalman King) holds a baby at gunpoint while the child's terrified mother (Barbara Baldavin) looks on helplessly. And Read More

Live a Little, Love A Little

Actors: Elvis Presley, Michele Carey, Don Porter, Rudy Vallee, Dick Sargent

Synopsis: Singing stars from two very different generations appear in Live A Little, Love A Little. Elvis Presley plays Greg, a photographer who divides his time working for a skin magazine and a conservative newspaper. Rudy Valle plays Penlow, the veteran newspaper publisher. Lansdown (Don Porter) is the Read More

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Actors: Jason Robards, Jr., George Segal, Ralph Meeker, Jean Hale, Clint Ritchie

Synopsis: Schlockmeister Roger Corman produced this graphically violent chronicle of the Chicago gangster wars of the 1920s and the events that lead to the bloody title showdown between rival mobsters Al Capone (Jason Robards) and Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker) that marked a brutal end to a terrifying era. Fred Steiner Read More

The Reluctant Astronaut

Actors: Don Knotts, Leslie Nielsen, Joan Freeman, Jesse White, Jeanette Nolan, Arthur O'Connell

Synopsis: Roy Fleming (Don Knotts) is signed on to the space program at NASA by his father Buck (Arthur O'Connell), a gung-ho former World War I vet who is trying to make something out of his son. Roy becomes a janitor who is afraid of heights and mistaken for an astronaut through a series of comedic Read More

Tony Rome

Actors: Frank Sinatra, Jill St. John, Richard Conte, Gena Rowlands, Simon Oakland

Synopsis: Frank Sinatra brings a sneering Rat Pack ethos to his first hard-boiled detective role in Tony Rome. Tony is an ex-cop who lives on a houseboat off Miami, accepting fees for private-eye work. His former partner, Ralph Turpin (Robert J. Wilke), asks Tony for help in locating Diana Pines (Sue Lyon) Read More

The Wild Angels

Actors: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Lou Procopio, Michael J. Pollard, Coby Denton

Synopsis: This biker gang exploitation picture from director Roger Corman and co-writer and editor Peter Bogdanovich earned critical respect in Europe for its gritty documentary style. Peter Fonda stars as Heavenly Blues, the leader of a wild, roving band of leather-clad bikers. When his best friend Loser (Bruce Dern Read More

Guerrillas in Pink Lace

Synopsis: Hollywood movie star (and future ace cabinet maker) George Montgomery spent much of the early 1960s trying to establish himself as a producer/director. Like most of his directorial efforts, Guerillas in Pink Lace was lensed in the Philippines and suffers from cheesy production values, but all in Read More

The Dick Van Dyke Show: My Husband Is a Check-Grabber

Synopsis: Driving home after a night out, Rob (Dick Van Dyke) can't understand why Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) is so angry that she refuses to speak to him. Recounting the events of the evening, Rob can only remember that he and Laura ran into Buddy (Morey Amsterdam), Pickles (Joan Shawlee), Sally (Rose Read More

The Dick Van Dyke Show: The Sam Pomerantz Scandals

Synopsis: Rob (Dick Van Dyke), Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), Buddy (Morey Amsterdam), Pickles (Joan Shawlee), Sally (Rose Marie), and Mel (Richard Deacon) are invited to spend a weekend at the tourist lodge owned by Rob's old army buddy Sam Pomerantz (Henry Calvin). It so happens that the lodge has a floor Read More

The Dick Van Dyke Show: Divorce

Actors: Joan Shawlee, Charles Cantor, Marian Collier, Arthur Batanides

Synopsis: Rob (Dick Van Dyke) is stuck in the middle as usual when Buddy (Morey Amsterdam) announces that he intends to divorce his wife Pickles (Joan Shawlee). The grounds? Buddy has found a bunch of checks written by his wife and addressed to a "Mr. Floyd B. Bariscale," and now he's convinced that Pickles Read More

Irma La Douce

Actors: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell, Herschel Bernardi, Sheryl Deauville

Synopsis: This romantic comedy opens with a resounding warning: its chief concerns are passion, bloodshed, desire, and death. "Everything," exclaims the narrator, "that makes life worth living." Irma La Douce (Shirley MacClaine) is Paris' most prosperous prostitute. Wise, endearing, and compulsively clad in Read More

Critic's Choice

Actors: Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Marilyn Maxwell, Rip Torn, Jesse Royce Landis

Synopsis: Ira Levin wrote the stage comedy Critic's Choice as a good-natured retort to a comment made by critic Walter Kerr. In his essay How Not to Write a Play, Kerr noted that the worst possible scenario would involve a drama critic forced to review a play written by his wife (we should mention that Read More

The Apartment

Actors: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Edie Adams, David Lewis

Synopsis: Widely regarded as a comedy in 1960, The Apartment seems more melancholy with each passing year. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a go-getting office worker who loans his tiny apartment to his philandering superiors for their romantic trysts. He runs into trouble when he finds himself sharing a Read More

Some Like It Hot

Actors: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, Pat O'Brien

Synopsis: The launching pad for Billy Wilder's comedy classic was a rusty old German farce, Fanfares of Love, whose two main characters were male musicians so desperate to get a job that they disguise themselves as women and play with an all-girl band in gangster-dominated 1929 Chicago. In this Read More

Betty Hutton Show

Maverick: Stampede

Synopsis: Efrem Zimbalist Jr. makes the first of several guest appearances as Dandy Jim Buckley, a gentleman gambler best described as "Bret Maverick without scruples." After they're both tossed off a riverboat, Jim and Bret (James Garner) head to Deadwood in hopes of getting even with bare-knuckle boxer Read More

A Farewell to Arms

Actors: Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Sordi, Kurt Kasznar, Mercedes McCambridge

Synopsis: Farewell to Arms is the second film version of Ernest Hemingway's World War One novel--and also the last film produced by David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind). Rock Hudson plays an American serving in the Italian Army during the "War to End All Wars". Jennifer Jones is his lover, a Red cross Read More

Conquest of Space

Actors: Walter Brooke, Eric Fleming, Mickey Shaughnessy, Phil Foster, William Redfield

Synopsis: George Pal's now-quaint science fiction odyssey concerns a multi-national group on the first space flight to Mars. Pal pulls out all stops in the special effects department, creating "The Wheel" (a earth-orbiting circular space station), rocket launches into space, and a breathtaking Read More

Bowery to Bagdad

Synopsis: It's the Bowery Boys again, in their 35th feature film. Sach (Huntz Hall) buys a battered oil lamp, which turns out to have belonged to Aladdin some 2000 years earlier. Out pops a genial genie (Eric Blore), who grants every wish of Sach and his pal Slip (Leo Gorcey). Gangsters steal the lamp, but Read More

Born for Trouble

About Mrs. Leslie

Actors: Shirley Booth, Robert Ryan, Marjie Millar, Alex Nicol, Sammy White

Synopsis: Shirley Booth followed up her Oscar-winning performance in Come Back Little Sheba with the high-gloss soap opera About Mrs. Leslie. Based on a novel by Vina Delmar, the film casts Booth as a philosophical boarding house keeper who recalls her life and loves in a long, long flashback. Born on the Read More

Casanova's Big Night

Actors: Bob Hope, Joan Fontaine, Basil Rathbone, Audrey Dalton, Hugh Marlowe

Synopsis: Bob Hope tries to capture the comic magic of his 1946 costume farce Monsieur Beaucaire with the splashy Technicolor romp Casanova's Big Night (filmed in 1952, released in 1954). Set in 18th century Venice, the film casts Hope as Pippo, the humble tailor of notorious ladies' man Casanova (an Read More

A Star is Born

Actors: Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, Charles Bickford, Tommy Noonan

Synopsis: The 1954 musical remake of A Star is Born could have been titled A Star is Reborn, in that it represented the triumphal return to the screen of Judy Garland after a four-year absence. The remake adheres closely to the plotline of the 1937 original: An alcoholic film star, on his last Read More

Francis Joins the Wacs

Actors: Donald O'Connor, Julie Adams, Chill Wills, Mamie van Doren, Lynn Bari

Synopsis: Francis Joins the WACS was the fifth in Universal's comedy series about a talking Army mule and his hapless human companion. Thanks to a bureaucratic snafu, ex-GI Peter Sterling (Donald O'Connor) is called into acitive duty and assigned to a WAC unit, headed by Major Simpson (Lynn Bari). It is Read More

Pride of the Blue Grass

Actors: Lloyd Bridges, Vera Miles, Margaret Sheridan, Arthur Shields, Michael Chapin

Synopsis: When equestrian Linda (Vera Miles) talks her trainer, Jim (Lloyd Bridges), into taking care of Gypsy Prince, her horse, Jim decides to enter the steed in an upcoming race. Tragically, the horse falls mid-race and breaks a leg. Though prospects look bleak, Linda (Miles) refuses to give up on her Read More

From Here to Eternity

Actors: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra

Synopsis: The scene is Schofield Army Barracks in Honolulu, in the languid days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, where James Jones' acclaimed war novel From Here to Eternity brought the aspirations and frustrations of several people sharply into focus. Sergeant Milt Warden (Burt Lancaster) enters into an Read More

All Ashore

Actors: Mickey Rooney, Dick Haymes, Peggy Ryan, Ray McDonald, Barbara Bates

Synopsis: Co-written by director Richard Quine and Blake Edwards, All Ashore has so many excellent individual components that one wishes the sum total was better than it is. Mickey Rooney, Dick Haymes and Ray McDonald play a trio of eternally broke sailors, on shore leave at Catalina Island. Because of his Read More

Loose in London

Actors: Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bernard Gorcey, Angela Greene, Walter Kingsford

Synopsis: Though scheduled for production as early as 1950, the Bowery Boys' Loose in London didn't go before the cameras until 1953. In this outing, Sach (Huntz Hall) is told that he's a relative of Sir Percy, the Earl of Walsingham (Walter Kingsford). In short order, Sach, his pals Slip (Leo Gorcey) Read More

The Marrying Kind

Actors: Judy Holliday, Aldo Ray, Madge Kennedy, Sheila Bond, John Alexander, Mickey Shaughnessy, Griff Barnett

Synopsis: A master blend of comedy, domestic drama and sudden tragedy, The Marrying Kind remains one of the best collaborations between star Judy Holliday, screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, and director George Cukor. The film begins at the end, with married couple Florence and Chet Keefer (Judy Holliday Read More

Because of You

Actors: Loretta Young, Jeff Chandler, Alex Nicol, Frances Dee, Alexander Scourby

Synopsis: Fans of Loretta Young were rather taken aback by the early scenes of Because of You, wherein Young is seen as brash, uninhibited bleach-blonde Christine Carroll. On the verge of marrying gangster Mike Monroe (Alex Nicol), Christine is arrested by the cops, and sent to prison on the strength of Read More

The Abbott & Costello Show [TV Series]

Actors: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello

Synopsis: The Abbott & Costello Show marked the last major commercial success for the comic team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The duo, who had started out in burlesque in the 1930's (and each had long experience in entertainment and performing before they met), had been a veritable fixure on radio since Read More

Something for the Birds

Actors: Victor Mature, Patricia Neal, Edmund Gwenn, Larry Keating, Gladys Hurlbut

Synopsis: Something for the Birds is a toothless satire of Washington, filmed during the McCarthy era. For lack of a political target that wouldn't get them labeled as Communists, the producers decided to go after lobbyists. Patricia Neal comes to Washington on behalf of the preservation of the California Read More

Two Tickets to Broadway

Actors: Tony Martin, Janet Leigh, Gloria de Haven, Eddie Bracken, Ann Miller

Synopsis: Personally supervised by Howard R. Hughes, the RKO Technicolor musical Two Tickets to Broadway stars Janet Leigh as a small-town girl who hopes to make it big in the Big Apple. Moving into a Manhattan boarding house populated by such showbiz hopefuls as Ann Miller, Tony Martin, Gloria De Haven and Barbara Lawrence Read More

Woman on the Run

Actors: Ann Sheridan, Dennis O'Keefe, Robert Keith, Ross Elliott, Frank Jenks

Synopsis: Frank Johnson (Ross Elliott), a window-dresser and struggling artist, accidentally witnesses a mob-related rub-out of a witness (Thomas P. Dillon), while out walking his dog one night -- after being shot at for his trouble, he's approached by the police, who want to put him into protective Read More

Prehistoric Women

Actors: Laurette Luez, Allan Nixon, Joan Shawlee, Judy Landon, Mara Lynn

Synopsis: Partially filmed at Whittier, CA, and at Hollywood's General Service Studio, this low-budget exploitation melodrama features Laurette Luez as Tigri, the head of a tribe of Amazonian women charged by an elder (Janette Scott) to find and capture husbands by the next full moon. Tigri finds and Read More

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman

Actors: Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Eddie Albert, Marsha Hunt, Carl Esmond

Synopsis: A woman struggles to reassemble her broken life in this drama that features Susan Hayward in her first starring role. The woman started out as a night-club singer, but abandoned her career after marrying a budding radio star. At first she does everything she can to insure his success, but when he Read More

This Love of Ours

Actors: Merle Oberon, Charles Korvin, Claude Rains, Carl Esmond, Sue England

Synopsis: Doctor Charles Korvin walks out on his musician wife Merle Oberon when he suspects her of infidelity. Twelve years later their paths cross again; Oberon is now saddled with an abusive husband. Possessed of a protective instinct that he hadn't evinced in the first part of the film, Korvin rescues Read More