Bovie Movie

For her first assignment a lady journalist tracks down the head of an organisation offering to kill, for money, people deserving of such a fate. She thinks herself very clever when he agrees to take a contract with himself as the target. What she doesn’t know is that her paper’s owner is second-in-command in the Bureau and has his own reasons for supporting her challenge.

Hercule Poirot is called in to investigate a case for an insurance company regarding firstly a dead woman’s body found on a moor and then a important diamond sent to the company to be insured turns out to be a fake. Poirot discovers that the diamond was bought for Arlena Marshall by Sir Horace Platt and Arlena is on her honeymoon with her husband and step-daughter on a tropical island hotel. He joins them on the island and finds that everybody else starts to hate Arlena for different reasons - refusing to do a stage show, stopping a book, and for having an open affair with Patrick Redfern, another guest, in full view of his shy wife. So it’s only a matter of time before Arlena turns up dead, strangled and Poirot must find out who it is…

A W. Somerset Maugham novel was the source for the fair-to-middling Greta Garbo vehicle The Painted Veil. In a situation comparable to the plotlines of most of her silent films, Garbo is lovelessly married to Herbert Marshall, but carries a flaming torch for George Brent. (Also harking back to Garbo’s silent days is the fact that neither one of the men in her life is particularly interesting!) Marshall, a brilliant physician, is compelled to go into the interior regions of China to quell a cholera epidemic. He knows that Garbo has been having an affair with politician Brent, and chivalrously gives her the choice of remaining with Brent or accompanying him. Fearing a scandal, Brent bids farewell to Garbo. Once they’re in the midst of the epidemic, Garbo tirelessly works by her husband’s side; eventually she falls in love with him for the first time. Seriously injured in a peasant uprising, Marshall hovers near death. Brent reappears, offering to take Garbo back with him. She refuses, electing to stay with her husband no matter what the future brings. Among the supporting players in The Painted Veil are Warner Oland and Keye Luke, one year away from their memorable pairing in Fox’s Charlie Chan films.

Hazard of Hearts was adapted for television from a 1948 bodice-ripper by Barbara Cartland. Set (where else?) in 1810 England, the film stars Helena Bonham Carter as the obligatory innocent young lass with a dynamite figure. Falling in love with a Rochester-like Marquis (Marcus Gilbert), Helena is whisked off to the mysterious Castle Mandrake (”played” by England’s Belvoir Castle and Burghley House). Here, our heroine is menaced by Diana Rigg, the Marquis’ evil, possessive mother. First broadcast December 27, 1987, Hazard of Hearts was buried in the ratings by NBC’s repeat showing of Terms of Endearment (1983) and ABC’s telecast of Stir Crazy (1980).

It wasn’t as well received at the box office as the pictures that preceded it or followed it, but Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the finest of the James Bond movies and also arguably the last truly great movie in the series. James Bond, portrayed here by George Lazenby (in his only performance in the role) has spent nearly two years trying to track down Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE. He has been taken off the case by his chief (Bernard Lee), an action the pushes him to the point of considering resigning from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, just as he opens a possible new avenue of attack on his quarry. Whilst in the field, Bond has chanced to cross paths with the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, whom he rescues from one apparent suicide attempt and an embarrassing moment at a casino gaming table — the Contessa, who prefers to be called Tracy (”Teresa was a saint”), is the daughter of Marc Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), an industrial and construction magnate and also a crime boss, who is impressed with Bond personally as well as professionally, and would like to see him marry his daughter. Bond is, at first, unwilling to involve himself with a woman — any woman — on that level, but Draco’s underworld contacts give Bond a vital clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts that get him back on the case and hot on the man’s trail. Journeying incognito to Blofeld’s mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, Bond finds the criminal mastermind posing as a would-be nobleman and also as a philanthropist, running a clinic devoted to the treatment and eradication of allergies. It’s all a front for a surprisingly sinister (and scientifically valid) plot for international blackmail that would make any previous Bond villain quake in fear. And in the process of staying alive long enough to have a chance of stopping Blofeld, Bond discovers the Tracy is truly like no woman he’s ever known before — one special enough that he finds himself willing to give up his life as a free-living, free-loving bachelor.