"Who really set the town aflame?..."

1956

1h 25m

6.9(23 votes)

Drama

Overview

Politicians go after a small-town librarian when she refuses to ban a book. She's quickly labeled a Communist.

Links & Resources

IMDbView

Social & External

IMDb

Production Companies

Cast & Crew

15 members

Acting

Bette Davis

Alicia Hull

Acting

Brian Keith

Paul Duncan

Acting

Kim Hunter

Martha Lockridge

Acting

Paul Kelly

Judge Robert Ellerbe

Acting

Joe Mantell

George Slater

Acting

Kevin Coughlin

Freddie Slater

Acting

Sally Brophy

Laura Slater

Acting

Curtis Cooksey

Stacey Martin

Acting

Kathryn Grant

Hazel Levering

Acting

Edward Platt

Rev. Wilson

Acting

Howard Wierum

Mayor Levering

No Image

Acting

Michael Raffetto

Edgar Greenbaum

No Image

Acting

Joseph Kearns

Mr. Morrisey

Acting

Howard Wendell

Sen. Bascomb

Acting

Burt Mustin

Carl (uncredited)

Similar Movies

7.1

2017

Newton

A government clerk on election duty in a conflict-ridden jungle of Central India tries his best to conduct free and fair voting despite the apathy of security forces and the looming fear of guerrilla attacks by communist rebels.

Movie

5.5

1969

The Ambush

Idealistic young man supports the party and the new Yugoslavia's communist regime, but soon gets involved in various political and criminal machinations becoming more and more confused about what's right and what's wrong.

Movie

7.3

1977

Tail Gunner Joe

Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin accuses prominent people of Communist sympathies in order to give him a national power base when he later planned to run for President.

Movie

6.3

1981

The Red Horse

A joint fight of Macedonian and Greek people against the fascist monarchical government of Greece ended with their defeat in 1949, after many years of bloodshed. Many members of the democratic party DAG, as well as the innocent inhabitants experienced the destiny of political exile.

Movie

7.0

1973

The Way We Were

Opposites attract when, during their college days, Katie Morosky, a politically active Jew, meets Hubbell Gardiner, a feckless WASP. Years later, in the wake of World War II, they meet once again and, despite their obvious differences, attempt to make their love for each other work.

Movie

6.6

1987

The Photograph

A young Greek man goes to Paris seeking help from a solitary and almost misanthropic distant relative who works as a furrier. With him, he takes nothing from his homeland but a photograph of a woman that he finds on the pavement. A misunderstanding regarding the photograph sets off a series of dramatic misunderstandings which trap him in a vicious circle of lies and fantasies.

Movie

4.8

1991

100 Days Before the Command

Hussein Erkenov's courageous and stinging indictment of communism. Five young Red Army recruits struggle for survival against the merciless violence that surrounds them on a daily basis. Their only means of saving their dignity is by preserving the humanity and compassion they share for each other.

Movie

6.8

1980

Dreams, Life, Death of Filip Filipović

The life and death of an educated communist activist who brought Bolshevik ideas to his native Serbia upon his arrival from Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

Movie

5.9

1997

Balkan Rules

Movie about secret relations between Yugoslavian, Serbian and Croatian secret police during last 50 years. Here in Balkans truth and lies are so much mixed and it lasts so long that no one knows the difference. That is why this fictitious story looks so true.

Movie

7.1

2005

Good Night, and Good Luck.

The story of journalist Edward R. Murrow's stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts in the early 1950s.

Movie

7.0

1975

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.

Movie

6.0

2007

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

The film follows Mr. Shi, a retired widower from Beijing. When his only daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington and works as a librarian, gets divorced, he decides to visit her to help her heal. However, Yilan is not interested. She tries keeping an emotional distance but when this finally fails she begins physically avoiding her father. He confronts her about an affair with a married Russian man and she, in turn, lets loose about all the gossip she'd heard as a young girl about his alleged affair with a female colleague back in China.

Movie

6.7

1996

The Funeral

After the funeral of one of their own, a criminal family decides to embark on an emotionally unnerving journey in an attempt to exact bloody revenge.

Movie

5.3

1950

The Woman on Pier 13

Communists blackmail a shipping executive into spying for them.

Movie

6.7

1957

A King in New York

A recently-deposed "Estrovian" monarch seeks shelter in New York City, where he becomes an accidental television celebrity. Later, he's wrongly accused of being a Communist and gets caught up in subsequent HUAC hearings.

Movie

7.4

2004

The Motorcycle Diaries

Based on the journals of Che Guevara, leader of the Cuban Revolution. In his memoirs, Guevara recounts adventures he and best friend Alberto Granado had while crossing South America by motorcycle in the early 1950s.

Movie

6.3

1995

Short Working Day

A dramatisation of the workers' protests in June 1976 in Radom, seen from the perspective of the local Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party.

Movie

4.9

1951

Dirty Hands

A young intellectual, Hugo, joins the Communist Party out of a sense of idealism, only to see his principles manipulated by party leaders. He is given the assignment of killing Professor Hoederer, a party deviationist. However, he grows to admire the man and begins to have doubts about morals and revolutionary politics. But jealousy - Hugo thinks Hoederer has made love to his wife, Jessica - takes matters out of the political realm.

Movie

7.2

1975

The Travelling Players

A traveling theatre troupe tours the Greek countryside from 1939 to the early 1950s, staging “Golfo the Shepherdess”. As the years pass, its members endure persecution, betrayal, executions, and exile. Their personal stories become entangled with the country’s major historical events, in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and loss.

Movie

7.5

1962

The Manchurian Candidate

Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco, finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and soon races to uncover a terrible plot.

Movie

Recommended Movies

6.5

1991

Guilty by Suspicion

Owing to his alleged involvement with communist parties, film director David Merrill is forbidden from working in Hollywood. He decides to fight for his rights and faces numerous challenges.

Movie

7.2

2024

Reading Lolita in Tehran

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.

Movie

5.9

1988

The House on Carroll Street

A reporter, fired after refusing to give names to a 1951 House Un-American Activities Committee, takes a part-time job as companion to an old lady. While working she overhears a noisy argument in the neighboring house, being conducted largely in German and involving her HUAC prosecutor. She begins to investigate, enlisting the help of the FBI Agent initially detailed to surveil her.

Movie

6.9

1960

The Young One

A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.

Movie

7.2

1964

The Visit

Carla Zachanassian had a child by Serge Miller as a teenager. When Serge refused to marry her, she was driven out of town. By her own wit and cunning, she has returned as a multi-millionaire for a visit. The town lays out the red carpet expecting big things from Carla, only to learn that her sole purpose is to see Serge Miller killed...

Movie

6.7

1989

A Dry White Season

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.

Movie

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

7.3

1972

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

Middle-aged widow Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters Ruth and Matilda are struggling to survive in a society they barely understand. Beatrice dreams of opening an elegant tea room but does not have the wherewithal to achieve her lofty goal. Epileptic Ruth is a rebellious adolescent, while shy but highly intelligent and idealistic Matilda seeks solace in her pets and school projects, including one designed to show how small amounts of radium affect marigolds.

Movie

7.2

1996

Bastard Out of Carolina

A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.

Movie

6.2

2008

Disgrace

Disgrace is the story of a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his cherished daughter. After having an affair with a student, he moves to the Eastern Cape, where he gets caught up in a mess of post-apartheid politics.

Movie

6.1

1997

Little Boy Blue

Living in rural Texas is a dysfunctional family: an abusive dad, a Vietnam vet with a war wound that's left him impotent; a compliant wife and a son of about 20, two small sons who look a lot like their brother. The dad harbors a secret, and he goes to murderous lengths to keep it hidden. The young man, Jimmy, who has suspicions, but little comes out until a Yankee woman comes to town.

Movie

6.4

2011

Return

Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.

Movie

5.8

2018

Come Sunday

Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.

Movie

6.4

2013

The Trials of Cate McCall

In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.

Movie

6.1

2019

Holy Lands

When lapsed Jew and former cardiologist Harry suddenly decides to spend his retirement as a pig farmer in Nazareth, Israel, the move deeply shocks his family and his new neighbours. Back in New York, Harry’s ex-wife Monica is trying to manage the lives of their adult children, Annabelle and David, as well as her own.

Movie

5.9

2014

Hellion

When motocross and heavy metal obsessed, 13-year-old Jacob's delinquent behavior forces CPS to place his little brother Wes with his aunt, Jacob and his emotionally absent father must finally take responsibility for their actions and each other in order to bring Wes home.

Movie

6.2

2007

Gracie

A teenager faces an uphill battle when she fights to give women the opportunity to play competitive soccer.

Movie

6.0

1987

The Last of England

The artist's personal commentary on the decline of his country in a language closer to poetry than prose. A dark meditation on London under Thatcher.

Movie

6.4

1994

The Browning Version

Andrew Crocker-Harris is an embittered and disliked teacher of Greek and Latin at a British prep school. After nearly 20 years of service, he is being forced to retire for 'health reasons', and perhaps may not even be given a pension. The boys regard him as a Hitler, with some justification. His unfaithful wife Laura tries to hurt him in any way she can. Andrew must come to terms with his failed life and at least regain his own self-esteem.

Movie

5.8

2015

The Girl in the Book

The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.

Movie

6.7

2009

That Evening Sun

An aging Tennessee farmer returns to his homestead and must confront a family betrayal, the reappearance of an old enemy, and the loss of his farm.

Movie