Ann-Margret never actually touches a whip in this seedy jailbait drama of juvenile delinquents and square-john fall guys, but her slithery moves and schizophrenic mood swings are still enough to give anyone whiplash. The teen temptress makes her entrance skittering through an industrial park in nothing more than a baby-doll nightie as bongos pound away on the soundtrack. Taking refuge in the seemingly deserted house of political hopeful John Forsythe, she begins her torment of the man who would be her savior with her gang of beatnik buddies. "Now cool it and co-exist!" exclaims nominal leader Peter Brown. Fat chance. Ann-Margret yo-yos from little girl lost to feral femme fatale with sharp claws and a taste for blood. She becomes a hellcat who turns on everyone in her nocturnal flight to Tijuana. She even growls with glee while gunning a jeep over a running buddy tangled in barbed wire! Stiff Forsythe is uncomfortably out of place next to the slinky sex kitten, like a sitcom dad who walked onto the wrong set, and the dated portrait of nihilistic, pseudo-philosophical teens makes the film unintentionally campy. But give it credit for energy: Ann-Margret almost single-handedly powers this offbeat drama with pure sass. If the music sounds familiar in the south-of-the-border scenes, that's because it borrows liberally from Henri Mancini's Latin-flavored Touch of Evil score. [+]

Story of a light-skinned Negro doctor who, along with his family, passes for white in a New Hampshire town.

Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s-marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, "ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived. " Somehow they always end up owing rancher Jim Ed Love (Chill Wills) one more year of indentured servitude. The year we observe is dominated by a purely diabolical roan and capped by a randy brush with two showgirls (Sue Ane Langdon and Hope Holiday) who play "Dumber" to Ford and Fonda's "Dumb. " It's all very amiable and unassuming, but the toot-plunk-whistle-boom soundtrack-to signal "This is the funny part"-is sheer torture. -Richard T. Jameson.

The best-remembered film by the great silent comic Harold Lloyd is still a hair-raiser. The bespectacled Mr. Lloyd plays an earnest young chap who goes to the city to make his fortune, although $15 a week from a department store is the best he can muster. After a string of ingenious visual gags, the movie climaxes with a wild sequence in which Harold, trying to win a prize by drumming up publicity for the store, arranges for an agile friend to climb up the side of the building. Natch, the friend can't do it, so Harold ascends, inch by white-knuckle inch. The stunt is still one of the great coups in movies (this was before rear-projection or digitally erased safety ropes, remember), and Lloyd beautifully wrings every possible complication out of it. That was Lloyd's approach: a simple character, and endless complications. -Robert Horton.

When American audiences first saw Mario Bava's 1963 horror trilogy, it wasn't the same film he had made in Italy. Finding it too terrifying for kids (imagine that!), AIP pictures trimmed it of violence and intensity, rescored it, and renamed it in order to cash in on the success of Black Sunday. New tongue-in-cheek introductions with costar Boris Karloff were added, the segments were rearranged, and one segment was completely rewritten in the dubbing. It was a good film even in its butchered form, but the original Italian version is excellent. The correctly ordered stories begin with "The Telephone," a gripping, ornate thriller that anticipates Bava's later "giallo" horror classics such as Blood and Black Lace. (In the American version, lesbian overtones were removed and the escaped criminal killer was turned into a vengeful ghost. ) Karloff stars as a demonic, wild-haired patriarch in the eerie "The Wurdulak," a gorgeous vampire tale shot on misty, menacing sets. The masterpiece of the collection is "The Drop of Water," a chilling ghost story with shiver inducing imagery: the piercing dead eyes of the restless corpse will haunt you long after the film is over. Bava's original framing sequence ends with a playful tribute to the magic of moviemaking and storytelling, a sweet coda to remind us that it's only a movie. The print suffers slightly from wear and tear and water damage but the colors are sharp and vivid. [+]

Network television was already wrestling with a generation gap and the rowdy cultural upheaval posed by rock when NBC aired this 1967 special for Nancy Sinatra, with younger viewers increasingly tuning out the typical videotaped studio productions that typified TV specials. To sidestep those conventions (and, one suspects, to showcase the star's modest performing gifts to best advantage), director Jack Haley Jr. shot Movin' with Nancy on film in and around Los Angeles, yielding sequences that anticipate the visual experiments that would characterize music videos more than a decade later. The results are intriguing: for Sinatra's fans, the chance to see her in all her leggy, miniskirted glory will be irresistible, but amateur pop sociologists will be at least as fascinated by the period details and some unwittingly bizarre undercurrents. For the putative teen viewers of the day, there's the psychedelic montage of "Some Velvet Morning," one of several duets with Sinatra's frequent partner at that time, Lee Hazlewood (a country-tinged, B-team Sonny to her blonde variation on Cher), interweaving the two singers on horseback and making much out of bewildering references to Phaedra. For the grownups, there are segments teaming her with Dean Martin (awkwardly addressed as her "god-uncle") and Sammy Davis Jr. , as well as a reverential sequence in which she caresses oversized posters of her famous father (including a still from his then-current crime feature, Tony Rome, depicting him with a menacing pistol) that raises all sorts of knotty psychiatric issues. The mix of Rat Pack glitz, flower power, and mainstream pop gets an added kick with Day-Glo fashions cut to Carnaby Street lines, vintage commercials for Royal Crown Cola ("It's a mad, mad, mad, mad cola!"), and pop covers that likewise lock in a sense of temporal dislocation as Nancy gamely tackles "Up, Up and Away" (in a hot air balloon, of course) and "Who Will Buy?" from Oliver!, here goosed with go-go powered dancing. -Sam Sutherland.