The best William Duell’s movies

A midwestern teacher questions his sexuality after a former student makes a comment about him at the Academy Awards.

While serving time for insanity at a state mental hospital, implacable rabble-rouser, Randle Patrick McMurphy, inspires his fellow patients to rebel against the authoritarian rule of head nurse, Mildred Ratched.

When her great aunt dies, famed horror hostess Elvira heads for the uptight new England town of Falwell to claim her inheritance of a haunted house, a witch's cookbook and a punk rock poodle. But once the stuffy locals get an eyeful of the scream queen's ample assets, all hell busts out & breaks loose.

Albany, New York, Halloween, 1938. Francis Phelan and Helen Archer are bums, back in their birth city. She was a singer on the radio, he a major league pitcher. Death surrounds them: she's sick, a pal has cancer, he digs graves at the cemetery and visits the grave of his infant son whom he dropped; visions of his past haunt him, including ghosts of two men he killed. That night, out drinking, Helen tries to sing at a bar. Next day, Fran visits his wife and children and meets a grandson. He could stay, but decides it's not for him. Helen gets their things out of storage and finds a hotel. Amidst their mistakes and dereliction, the film explores their code of fairness and loyalty.

Sportswriter Andy Farmer moves with his schoolteacher wife Elizabeth to the country in order to write a novel in relative seclusion. Of course, seclusion is the last thing the Farmers find in the small, eccentric town, where disaster awaits them at every turn.

A true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production.

Based on the case of young New Yorker Etan Patz, who disappeared in the early 1980s, this film casts Kate Nelligan as the distraught mother who lashes out at the police (in the person of a relentless detective played by Judd Hirsch), who make her and her husband suspects, even as she hounds them to find her child and drives away her husband (David Dukes) and friends (including Stockard Channing) with her intensity and single-mindedness. Squandered on a Hollywood ending that doesn't square with the real case: Etan Patz was never found.

Grace Quigley is nearing the end of her life, living alone in her New York apartment. On the day she's being evicted, she witnesses a murder being committed by a top hit-man, Seymour Flint. She proposes to blackmail him into killing her, however, she has one or two friends she wants him to get rid of first.

On Christmas Eve, a relentlessly cheerful woman escapes from the killers hired by her husband, and embarks on a series of strange encounters.

A Manhattan priest with a penchant for solving crimes goes to the aid of a young actress. She is becoming enmeshed in a series of bizarre incidents she can't explain, and her complaints to the police have gone ignored.