33 thoughts on “Ralph Bellamy Movies”

1. STEVE’s VIDEO: MY TOP 20 STILLS/LOBBY CARDS SELECTIONS

   1/Let’s Get Married
   2/Affectionately Yours
   3/Wedding Night
   4/Ghost of Frankenstein – outstandingly superb!
   5/Guest in the house
   6/Narrow Corner
   7/Dance Girl dance
   8/Let us Live
   9/Forbidden
   10/Dive Bomber – especially splendid!
   11/Lady on a Train – aka The Thin Woman with brains!
   12/Carefree
   13/Hands across the Table
   14/Trading Places – old-time Hollywood veterans Ameche and Bellamy superb together

   15/Pretty Woman-critics suggested the young Gere looked even prettier than Roberts. Steve’s photo doesn’t contradict that – but I’ll still take my Julia though!

   16/The Wolf Man

   17/The Professionals – iconic Lancaster nearing the end of his prime. Leaving aside the highly-ensemble Airport The Professionals was Burt’s last massive stand-alone box office hit that crashed the Cogerson magical $100 million barrier according to The Work Horse’s tables on Burt’s own Cogerson page.

   18/The Awful Truth and the other Archibald stuff.
   20/Sunrise at Campobello***

   ***A DAN-LIKE LINK [see paragraphs 1 and 2 of part one of this post]: In Sunrise at Campobello Ralph was of course Franklin D Roosevelt – so in the end he got to play over the course of his career the guy who didn’t “get the girl”/The Friend – AND the President of the United States!

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2. MY TOP 22 POSTER CHOICES IN STEVE’s VIDEO – I found great difficulty in paring my selections down to around 20 as the standard was consistently high throughout the video; so my comments on this video were delayed. One of these days I’ll have to make it easy on myself by simply listing EVERYTHING!!

   1/Girl in Danger

   2/two for Delightfully Dangerous [aka Cinderella Goes to War] – wow! – is that the innocent little Jane Powell of all those peaches and cream MGM musicals?

   3/Flying Devils
   4/Coast Guard
   5/Young America
   6/Spitfire – remarkable!

   7/two for Ellery Queen – HE is one of my very fave fictional detectives; I’ve read all the books.

   8/Headline Shooter
   9/Below the Sea – Fay still being pursued by monsters!
   10/first two absolute crackers for Ghost of Frankenstein
   11/The Narrow Corner
   12/Dance Girl Dance
   13/Blind Alley
   14/Oh Joel!
   15/Picture Snatcher
   16/Carefree
   17/first one for Court Martial of Billy Mitchell
   18/foreign language for The Professionals

   19/foreign language one for The [awful] Awful Truth and indeed the entire Al Leach collection in the video.

   20/Air Mail
   21/Rosemyrna’s Baby – 2nd ‘erotic’ one.

   22/three absolutely great and for me [two of them] completely original ones for Lady on a Train. Deanna turns detective and solves the mystery; SHE didn’t have to depend on the brains of a Bill Powell!***

   ***HISTORICAL NOTE: Lady on a Train was directed by Frenchman Charles David. Ultimately [after they had lived together for 8 months] he married Deanna in 1950 and she permanently moved to France with him where they had a child and remained together on his family farm until his death 50 years later. So forget about Alec Leach: it was a Frenchman who stole my Deanna away from me and turned me into a Ralph Bellamy-type loser – and the irony is that in physical appearance Charles looked more like Woody Allen than he resembled Archie Leach!

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3. I’ve mentioned before that allegedly when chairing a casting session at MGM in the early 1940s Louis B Mayer asked for suggestions as to who should play the President of the United States in a forthcoming political drama and one of his executives volunteered “Ronald Reagan” to which ironically Louis in all sincerity and innocence shouted “No! No! No! Jimmy Stewart for President: Ronnie for Friend.”

   Ralph apparently specialised in “Friend” roles where he was always the 3rd wheel losing “the girl” to the likes of Alec Leach as reflected in Steve’s cover photograph. I never watched those screwball-type comedies so I’ll have to take the word of others about Ralph’s roles; however Steve’s very funny opening quote from Ralph in the Bellamy video suggests that the observation is correct but that Ralph didn’t take it all too seriously! Unlike Old Cantankerous for example Ralph wasn’t going to sulk a make and nuisance of himself because of the higher status of others in one of his movies!

   Anyway for my money fate ultimately made it up to the older Ralph because the more-mature Bellamy turned in some wonderful character performances that I thoroughly enjoyed such as those in Rosemyrna’s Baby; Trading Places; The Professionals; Pretty Woman; and The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell [aka One Man Mutiny].

   So Steve’s video is as HE would say “Voted Up” and indeed is rated 98.5% for the personal satisfaction that it gave me: it has in it some wonderful vintage material which blends well with the more modern art work in the posters/stills for Ralph’s later movies. How DO you do it Steve?

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   1. Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info and trivia, always appreciated.

      Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.

      This was going to be a top 35 but I liked the posters for some of Ralph’s lower rated films and I hadn’t used them before, so it became a top 40.

      One thing I noticed about supporting actors like Bellamy, Mitchell and Morgan, the lesser known the movie the more likely they were the lead actors. If the movie is well known they drop down the credit list.

      At IMDB you can sort an actors filmography by several ways one way is by top rated to low rated movies. I prefer to go by number of votes by IMDB members which gives me the most popular or most well known films at the top and the least known and least voted for films at the bottom. This is how I compile the first rough list of films for an actor. The films with the least votes are generally obscure even if they have high ratings. And I usually ignore them.

      Three films scored 10 out of 10 from my sources – Rosemary’s Baby, His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth. Two films scored 9 – The Wolf Man and The Professionals.

      Rosemary’s Baby and His Girl Friday are both tied at the top at IMDB and RT.

      Bruce has The Awful Truth at no.2 and His Girl Friday lower at no.5.

      “One day in Hollywood, I read a script in which the character was described as “charming but dull — a typical Ralph Bellamy type”. I promptly headed for New York to find a part with guts.”

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      1. HI STEVE: Thanks for the thoughtful and interesting feedback. One comment of yours in particular that caught my attention is

         “One thing I noticed about supporting actors like Bellamy, Mitchell and Morgan, the lesser known the movie the more likely they were the lead actors. If the movie is well known they drop down the credit list.”

         This is a fine observation and illustrates why I have been trying for some time to convince the WH that billing is crucial in reflecting how important a particular movie is; how big any one star is; and how the movie industry rates the magnitude of the contribution that each star makes to his/her movies and to the films in which they co-star with other thespians

         Once Crawford/Davis/Durbin/Betty Grable/Liz Taylor/Julia Roberts/Dunne/Shirley Temple/Colbert etc became big stars they were top billed MOST times for as long as their heydays lasted; whereas The Thin Woman was rarely top billed. CHECK IT OUT! It is therefore in my view unwise to be dogmatic in stating that she was the greatest female star of all time: if she had been her billing would have reflected that more often.

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4. Hey Dan. Thanks for the information on Lee Phelps and Bellamy’s most frequent co-stars. I admit, I am not aware of Phelps at all. Good stuff.

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5. Lee Phelps was in 13 films with Ralph.

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