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D: Victor Saville. Walter Pidgeon, Deborah Kerr, Angela Lansbury, Binnie Barnes, Janet Leigh, Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen. Good cast fails to enliven wooden drama about a crisis in the life of kindly, highly principled Pidgeon, living in a stuffy small town outside London and trapped in a marriage to coldhearted Lansbury.

D: Edward Dmytryk. John Mills, Martha Scott, Trevor Howard, Patricia Roc, Richard Carlson, Ivor Barnard. Author James Hilton narrates saga (adapted by John Paxton) of earnest newspaper editor (Mills) determined to improve living conditions in factory town, sidetracked by marriage to blindly ambitious woman (Scott). Very young Juliet Mills has bit part.

D: Mervyn LeRoy. Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Otto Kruger, Allyn Joslyn, Elisha Cook, Jr., Edward Norris. Electrifying drama begins when pretty high school student is murdered in Southern town. A man is arrested, and a big-time Northern lawyer takes the case, but everyone seems more interested in exploiting personal interests than in seeing justice triumph. No punches are pulled in this still-powerful film. Lana Turner plays the unfortunate girl, in her first important role. Script by Robert Rossen and Aben Kandel, from the book Death in the Deep South by Ward Greene; based on notorious 1913 incident later dramatized for TV as THE MURDER OF MARY PHAGAN.

D: Michael Curtiz. Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet, David Brian, Gertrude Michael, Gladys George. Crawford is excellent as tough carnival dancer ditched in small town where she soon is loving Scott and Brian and matching wits with corrupt politician Greenstreet. Remade as TVM in 1980, which later spun off a TV series.

D: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Mercedes McCambridge, Albert Dekker. Fascinating if talky (though cleaned-up) Tennessee Williams yarn about wealthy Southern matriarch (Hepburn), her supposedly mad niece (Taylor) and a neurosurgeon (Clift); grandly acted. Adaptation by Gore Vidal. Remade for TV in 1992 with Maggie Smith.