News

Carla Balenda, who starred alongside Dana Andrews and Claude Rains in the Rko Pictures thriller Sealed Cargo and portrayed Mickey Rooney’s girlfriend on the NBC sitcom Hey Mulligan, has died. She was 98.

Balenda, billed at times as Sally Bliss, her birth name, died April 9 of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, her grandson Jim Martin told The Hollywood Reporter.

She also played a nurse on the 1955-56 syndicated series The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu, starring Glen Gordon, and recurred as Miss Hazlitt, Timmy’s (Jon Provost) teacher, on CBS’ Lassie from 1958-63.

In Sealed Cargo (1951), Balenda portrayed a woman who is aboard a fishing trawler bound for Newfoundland when she and the skipper (Andrews) wind up tangling in the North Atlantic with Nazis led by Rains’ character. She often said it was her favorite role.

When Rooney took his first crack at television,...

The Fu Manchu Cycle—1965-1969

Blu ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1965 – 1969 / 96, 93, 91, 94, 92 min. / 2:33:1, 1:85, 1:66

Starring Christoper Lee, Tsai Chin

Cinematography by Ernest Steward, John Von Kotze, Manuel Merino

Directed by Don Sharp, Jeremy Summers, Jesús Franco

Arthur Henry Ward was born in Birmingham in 1883—at the age of 20 he adopted the pen name of Sax Rohmer, specializing in standard issue crime fiction and otherworldly tales of terror. In 1912 he folded both genres into one sinister figure from the East, a so-called “devil doctor” named Fu Manchu. The book covers alone were xenophobic horror shows and if there was any doubt the stories themselves were wildly racist, the author confirmed it in the description of his star villain: “the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man.”

An authority on philosophy, medicine, and idiosyncratic torture devices, Manchu made his debut in The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu which was quickly followed by The Return of Dr.

Eliza Dushku has broken her silence about her run on CBS’ Bull, a job she says featured “one of the most cruel, most aggressive humiliations I have ever experienced” and from which she was fired after speaking up about lewd comments made by her co-star, Michael Weatherly.

In an op-ed published in Wednesday’s Boston Globe, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum outlines in great detail the atmosphere on the CBS procedural that led to her lodging a formal complaint — and then being fired not long afterward. Dushku, who says she was brought onto the show to become a series regular,...