The best Ann Blyth’s drama movies

After her unfaithful husband leaves her, Mildred Pierce proves she can become independent and successful. However winning the approval of her spoiled daughter proves a greater challenge.

Timeworn Joe Collins and his fellow inmates live under the heavy thumb of the sadistic, power-tripping guard Captain Munsey. Only Collins' dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey's chains?

A tabloid magazine threatens to ruin a television performer's career.

Atomic scientist Peter Standish travels back in time to 1784, an era he has read about in his forefather's diaries. He falls in love with his forefather's cousin Helen but his contemporaries of 1784 are perplexed by his strange talk and the odd knowledge he possess.

Tommy McCoy grew up poor and scrappy. As a young man he discovers that he can fight with his powerful right arm. He becomes successful at boxing, however he has an alcoholic father.

Torch singer Helen Morgan rises from sordid beginnings to fame and fortune only to lose it all to alcohol and poor personal choices.

Sister Mary presides over a convent where a convicted murderess, who is being escorted to Death Row, is stranded by bad weather. She is slowly becoming convinced that Valerie is innocent so Sister Mary sets about to clear the girl and bring the real killer to justice.

Loosely traces the life of tenor Enrico Caruso (1873-1921). He loves Musetta, in his home town of Naples, and then Dorothy, the daughter of one of the Metropolitan Opera's patrons. Caruso is unacceptable to both women's fathers: to one, because he sings; to Dorothy's, because he is a peasant. To New York patricians, Caruso is short, barrel chested, loud, emotional, unrefined. Their appreciation comes slowly. The film depicts Caruso's lament that "the man does not have the voice, the voice has the man": he cannot be places he wants to be, because he must be elsewhere singing, including the day his mother dies. Throughout, Mario Lanza and stars from the Met sing.

An idealistic United Nations official learns the harrowing truth about war when she falls in love with an American officer charged with the evacuation of civilians. As hostilities escalate, the officer and his small detachment are left to hold the line until allied forces can be brought into action.

A cheating husband is charged in the poisoning death of his invalid wife, in spite of other women and suicide also being suspected.

This 'prequel' to The Little Foxes tells how the ruthless members of the old-South Hubbard family got that way.

Perception vs. reality in a tale of a scoundrel and user whose jovial manner masks his true nature until a climatic redemption.

The Merry Monahans is one of the higher-budgeted Universal musicals of the 1940s, even though the storyline is strictly grade-B material. During the first two decades of the 20th century the film concerns a family vaudeville troupe headed by patriarch Pete Monahan (Jack Oakie). Because of his love affair with the bottle, Pete manages to get himself and his family blacklisted from every major vaude house in the country. Though Pete's kids Jimmy (Donald O'Connor) and Patsy (Peggy Ryan) love their dad, they're forced to break away from the act and go off on their own to survive. Eventually, the whole gang is reunited in a shamelessly lachrymose musical finale. Producer-scripters Michael Fessier and Ernest Pagano, whose other works include such offbeat comedies as San Diego I Love You, Frontier Gal and That's the Spirit, manage to keep the proceedings relatively cliché-free, though it's an uphill climb.

Gail discovers the shocking news that she is adopted during a heated argument with her sister, Joan. With the reluctant support of her adoptive parents and baby sister, Penny, Gail goes in search of her biological mother and true identity.