David McLean

Gracie's Choice -- Inspired by a true story. Gracie (Kristen Bell) is a 17 year-old with four siblings from different fathers and a mother (Anne Heche) that is utterly incapable of taking care of the kids. When it looks as if the kids will be scattered to the wind, Gracie overcomes enormous obstacles to adopt her younger siblings and keep the family together.

Inspired by a true story. Gracie (Kristen Bell) is a 17 year-old with four siblings from different fathers and a mother (Anne Heche) that is utterly incapable of taking care of the kids. When it looks as if the kids will be scattered to the wind, Gracie overcomes enormous obstacles to adopt her younger siblings and keep the family together.

Nevada Smith is a rugged innocent boy born in the 1890s during California's gold rush days to a Native American mother and white father. When he finds his parents have been murdered by vicious killers, he sets out to track them down. While the film is a western, and has plenty of action, it is also a powerful and revealing study of the regeneration of a man, in this case a lone gunslinger who is so blinded by his compulsion that it obscures any other motive for living. Steve McQueen's dynamic presence as Nevada Smith is memorable.

Henry Hathaway's film is based on a character from Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers, who, in turn, based it on cowboy actor Ken Maynard. Set in the West of the 1890s, the film opens with the torture and murder of the parents of Max Sand (Steve McQueen) by a trio of gunslingers seemingly motivated by their hostility toward the mixed nature of the marriage, since the wife is a Native American. Swearing revenge, the young cowhand enlists the help of itinerant gunsmith Jonas Cord Brian Keith, who teaches him how to shoot while counseling against revenge. Nonetheless, Sand doggedly scours one town after the other before finally running up against one of the murderers, Jesse Coe (Martin Landau). He finally kills Coe in a vicious knife fight, but is severely wounded himself and has to be nursed back to health by Neesa (Janet Margolin), a young Kiowa woman. He next heads for Louisiana where another of the murderous trio, Bill Bowdre (Arthur Kennedy), is serving a prison sentence in a remote swamp. In order to get close to the man, Sand stages a robbery, and is soon among the prison inmates. This was the only film on which McQueen worked with Landau, the only other person admitted to the Actor's Studio out of thousands of applicants in 1957