The Best of 1944

An insurance representative is seduced by a dissatisfied housewife into a scheme of insurance fraud and murder that arouses the suspicion of his colleague, a claims investigator.

A police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he is investigating.

After being hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.

A young priest is sent to China to establish a Catholic parish.

During World War II, an American expatriate helps transport a French Resistance leader and his wife to Martinique while romancing a lounge singer.

Mortimer Brewster, a Brooklyn writer of books on the futility of marriage, risks his reputation after he decides to tie the knot. Things grow complicated when he learns that his beloved maiden aunts Abby and Martha are serial murderers.

Ten years after her aunt was murdered in their London home, a woman returns from Italy in the 1880s to resume residence with her new husband. His obsessive interest in the house rises from a secret that may require driving his wife insane.

In 1936, seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp. The Nazis put up seven crosses for demonstrative executions. This story about one of the fugitives, who relies on own courage and compassion of people to avoid the seventh cross.

An unhappily married man begins a flirtation with a younger woman. When his wife threatens to ruin her, he decides to take action.

A reserved professor meets a model and gets mixed up in murder.

Three modern-day pilgrims investigate a bizarre crime in a small town while on their way to Canterbury.

Stephen Neale has just been released from an asylum during World War II in England when he accidentally stumbles onto a deadly Nazi spy plot and tries to stop it.

A devoted secretary risks her life to try to find the elusive woman who may prove her boss didn't murder his selfish wife.

A widowed matriarch reminisces about her family fortunes, including her romance with a financier/mine owner.

A lonely, mentally-unbalanced woman invents a fictitious daughter and has the "daughter" write to a Marine stationed in the South Pacific. When the soldier returns to the States, he goes to look up his pen pal and is told by the "mother" that the daughter has moved away. An acquaintance of the women tells the soldier the truth, and in a rage the "mother" kills her. To cover up that crime, she realizes that she must kill the soldier, too.

The story of William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, legendary westerner, from his days as an army scout to his later activities as owner of a Wild West show.

A young turn-of-the-century newspaper man finds he can get hold of the next day's paper. This brings more problems than fortune, especially as his new girlfriend is part of a phony clairvoyant act.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a young lieutenant leaves his expectant wife to volunteer for a secret bombing mission which will take the war to the Japanese homeland.

Several survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship in World War II find themselves in the same lifeboat with one of the crew members of the U-boat that sank their ship.

Bugs, the Wolf and bobby-soxer Red chase each other around while Grandma is off working at Lockheed aircraft.

A composer and his sister discover that the reason they are able to purchase a beautiful gothic seacoast mansion very cheaply is the house's unsavory past.

When young Father O'Malley arrives at St. Dominic's, old Father Fitzgibbon doesn't think much of his new assistant.

A young femme-fatale realizes that the man she married is an incorrigible wastrel.