Bus Stop / Shake Hands With the Devil

BUS STOP, 1956, 20th Century Fox, 96 min. Dir. Joshua Logan. Marilyn Monroe stunned critics and fans alike with her heartbreakingly tender performance as a truck-stop singer who falls in love with naïve young cowpoke Don Murray, in this beautiful, bittersweet drama based on the William Inge play.

SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL, 1959, MGM Repertory, 111 min. Dir. Michael Anderson. In this phenomenally hard-hitting, action-packed saga, Irish American medical student Don Murray becomes accidentally and inextricably involved with the IRA during “the Troubles” in 1921 Dublin. Professor-surgeon James Cagney is the hardboiled commandant leading a squad of insurrectionists, Glynis Johns is a feisty barmaid who refuses to kowtow to either macho British soldiers or brash Irish rebels, and Dana Wynter plays a beautiful British widow held hostage when elderly freedom fighter Lady Fitzhugh (Sybil Thorndike) is imprisoned by the Black and Tans in Dublin Castle.