More April Showers

I don't know what the rest of the world has been like, but we've had most unusual weather here in southern Ohio these past few months. No snow to speak of, no hard freeze, unseasonable warmth... It felt like we barely had winter at all. Now that spring is here, we still have had scarcely any rain! April is halfway through and there has barely been a shower. Naturally, in The Underworld, we care far less about the rain than we do about another type of shower. Thus, we present another round of actors dipping underneath a head, a shower head! (See Mr. Guy Madison at left getting us off to a nice start.) This is sure to be scattershot despite my attempts at some sort of order. If you have an aversion to the undressed male physique, a) you may not want to read this one and b) why are you here?!

Shower scenes in the movies are by no means a new thing. The earliest I am depicting today is from 1925, though I'm sure there were some before this one. The silent movie The Plastic Age was a college-set comedy starring Donald Keith, Clara Bow and Gilbert Roland, though it also contained three fledgling performers at the dawn of their respective careers (two of whom would one day be married to each other!) Janet Gaynor and future spouses Carole Lombard and Clark Gable all played students. The very young Gable appears in the scene shown here in a locker room shower (though I can't be certain which man he is in this still at the top) and is seen on the left in the bottom picture with Gilbert Roland.

An early, major color film was 1937's A Star is Born, starring Fredric March and Janet Gaynor. In the course of the story, March, a major movie star in the story (and in real life) is beginning to experience career trauma. He meets and marries Gaynor who is on the cusp of stardom herself and seems only able to go up in importance. On their honeymoon, they rent a camper and March goes to take a shower in the vehicle's impossibly compact stall.

He struggles to shimmy into the booth, but is unable to raise his arms in order to reach the water release. After struggling back out long enough to ask Gaynor for advice, he goes back in with one arm extended above his head. Trouble is, when he tugs on the chain, the entire shower plaque falls off and all of the water comes pouring forth in a deluge, nearly drowning him! He manages to get out again and throws on a robe in order to ask a passerby for help (to no avail.)

School movies, sports movies and prison movies all have a tendency to show their characters in the shower. Here we have two cinema greats rinsing off side-by-side in the 1939 film Invisible Stripes. George Raft and Humphrey Bogart play convicts who've had many months to become friendly in Sing Sing before being set free, with Raft wanting to go straight once he's on the outside and Bogart eager to return to his previous life of crime. The invisible stripes of the title refer to the mark left upon a man who's been paroled from prison.

Raft is top-billed here, but Bogart had yet to become the big, iconic star he would ultimately become. He is billed fourth, behind the young co-leads Jane Bryan and William Holden (this movie came out the same year as his breakthrough Golden Boy.) He and Raft would work together again in 1940's They Drive by Night (where he again only merited fourth billing!) Then he won second-billing after Ida Lupino in High Sierra. That was 1941, the year of The Maltese Falcon, when he finally became a top-level star, where he stayed until his death from cancer in 1957 at the age of fifty-seven. Raft, who had declined to appear in these and other famous pictures, eventually slid into a serious career decline. Raft, two years Bogart's junior, lived until 1980 when he died of leukemia at age seventy-nine. Ironically enough, his final movie was in that same year called The Man with Bogart's Face.

I can never get enough of the beautiful (at least in his prime) and mischievous 1930s and '40s star Errol Flynn, so here he is again, poking out from his shower curtain with a grin. If you ever get the chance to see the 2005 documentary The Adventures of Errol Flynn, I cannot recommend it enough. His infectious, rakish charm was mixed with an extravagant, daring lifestyle that had no choice but to burn out swiftly, but thankfully his early movies remain to show off that gorgeous face. The doc contains priceless on-camera commentary from his frequent costar, Miss Olivia de Havilland.

In 1954, Calder Willinghams' novel End as a Man was turned into a Broadway play by the same name, exploring the goings-on at a military school where one cadet exacts considerable control over his classmates. Bearing a strong homoerotic feel and with content that was decidedly not permitted for the cinematic adaptation, the movie The Strange One was bled of much of that. They even added a female character who was not part of the original cast. Still, most of the actors strove to subtly (or sometimes not so subtly!) indicate what their inner feelings were outside any dialogue and there was phallic symbolism galore in the finished product.

One scene that could hardly escape its homoerotic flavor was the shower sequence shown above involving Ben Gazzara, the title character, treating a cadet to some hazing. I loved the color lobby card of this moment, but some ninny put the title and credits logo on top of the chest of one of the showering cadets, so I also include this “clean” black and white shot of the same moment. The uncovered photo depicts a young man with quite a hairy chest. We do prefer our shower pictures unfettered by debris-like artwork and typing!

Next up is comic actor Red Skelton in one of his opuses, showering in the tub with either a swimsuit or his boxer shorts on. (Little did he know what a forerunner he was! By the millennium, many young men would adopt this practice of showering at public gyms in their workout clothes or underwear rather than shuck down the way guys did for so many decades prior. The debate as to whether this is due to intensified modesty, body shame, fear of surreptitious photography, fear of leering or something else rages on...)

Here we have Robert Alda, a Vaudeville song and dance man who had a middling 1940s film career before making a splash on Broadway in Guys and Dolls in 1950. He had additional roles on The Great White Way, but also began appearing as a guest on television as well as working in the occasional movie (such as Imitation of Life in 1959.) A move to Italy for a decade and a half limited his exposure in the U.S., but in time he returned and was a busy TV actor again until his death in 1986 from a stroke at age seventy-two. And, yes, he is the father of M*A*S*H's Alan Alda.

The long-running British series of comic films, the “Carry On” movies, had a 1960 installment called Carry On Constable that had the gang of bumblers working as policemen in the wake of a severe flu epidemic. They had to be quartered in the jail cells for some reason, which means communal showers, of course. The angle of the four stars being shown showering was even incorporated into the posters and advertising for the movie (and, in fact, thanks to the flash of one man's rear end, this was the first Carry On movie to include any nudity), but notice how the poster shows a far less obstructive shower stall than the actual film contains.
I've posted before about humpy Van Williams and his screen debut in 1960's Tall Story as a basketball player emerging from the shower who is observed naked by cheerleader Jane Fonda (who has chased Anthony Perkins into the locker room without paying attention.) These are just new photos of the same brief scene. I'm sure that director Joshua Logan had fun setting up the shot in which the placement of Perkins' arm makes all the difference in how much we get to see of the ostensibly proud and unshy (note in the shot above, the towel is slung over his shoulder when he greets Fonda!) Williams.

In 1962, Cary Grant costarred with Doris Day in one of her “good girl flirts with sex” romps, That Touch of Mink. Grant was getting close to sixty by this time, but was still in immaculate shape, appearing briefly in a tiny pair of white swim trunks and taking an on-screen shower as shown here. Grant and Day got along well enough (though not even close to the extent that she and Rock Hudson did), but he was unsatisfied with the finished film. Shown from the back is costar Gig Young, who played Grant's male secretary.

One of Day's less memorable pairings was in 1967's Caprice, which placed her opposite Richard Harris. He's shown here in a “zany” shower scene. The “comedic” spy thriller was made completely against Day's better judgement (her manager husband signed her to it without her knowledge) and Harris hated everything about it so much that he allegedly never even saw the completed movie! Apparently, there is a growing number of people who are now beginning to appreciate its mod design and slapstick elements, so maybe I'll have to give it a try (if I ever see it surface on TV!)

On the subject of spies, the 1964 series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Was such a hit that early in its production history, the decision was made to duplicate its success (and revenue!) by expanding some of the episodes into feature films that would be seen a) in color versus the early episodes that were in black and white, b) include new footage in order to pad out the running time and c) contain slightly heavier amounts of violence and sex appeal. Thus, this shot from 1965's The Spy with My Face, which was the feature version of a 1964 ep of U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn is shown wearing only a gun and two swinging shower doors. (Surely this represents a rarity in that the usually suit-clad Vaughn hardly ever showed any leg.)

In 1966, Natalie Wood and Robert Redford teamed for a second time (having portrayed husband and wife in Inside Daisy Clover the year before. He played, understatedly, a homosexual in that one.) Their sophomore outing was called This Property is Condemned, all about what happens with a handsome stranger on a mission comes to a small railroad town and falls for the most attractive, eligible girl there. He stays in her mother's boarding house and it is there that he gets treated to the prank shown here (which, sadly, did not make it into the final film as I've ever seen it!) The steam, much of it likely airbrushed in for this picture, does a good job of covering up Redford's naughty bits.

Does anyone really want to see Woody Allen in the shower? I don't, but as an example of cinematic tomfoolery I give you this example. This promotional photo is from Allen's 1971 film Bananas (a comedy about a New York worm caught up with a fictional Latin American country in the throes of a revolution.) It depicts him being confronted in the shower by a man in a suit. Allen is implied to be naked (ack!) in the picture.

Then we have this very similar shot released as a black and white publicity photo. It is cropped lower and so the fact that he is wearing some sort of black undies or trunks is visible in the shot! Try as I might (and alas I have not really tried that hard), I just have never been able to get into Woody Allen or his films. I hear all the time how amazing they are, but they are not for me. Then again, I have repeatedly confessed to you all that I have NO TASTE.

1972's The Possession of Joel Delaney cast Shirley MacLaine and Perry King as brother and sister. King was the one possessed (by the spirit of a Puerto Rican murderer) and their already rather questionable sibling relationship gets kicked up a notch when the spirit taking over King becomes more and more lascivious and deadly. Here, she goes to bring him a towel and a robe as he's showering after a stint at a mental ward and he grabs and splashes her (his junk practically visible through the mottled shower door.) Later, she towel dries his hair and the way she does it so vigorously, it's a wonder King's next role wasn't as Daddy Warbucks in Annie! King would flirt with nudity several times in his early films, finally taking it all off in 1975's Mandingo.

On the sports page again, we come to 1975's Rollerball, starring James Caan and John Beck. The movie concerns the ultra-violent, international title spectacle, which pits men on skates, armed with various spiky weapons, against each other as they try to score points for their team. (Set in the future, the teams are no longer represented by countries, but by corporations.) After a sweaty, bloody round of rollerball, it's time to hit the showers, hence these shots of Caan, Beck and friends.
It's really quite amazing the way the standard of masculine attractiveness has changed over time. Not that this movie was meant solely as a beefcake parade...it was mostly just an action film. However, in the 1970s, it was all about showing off one's hairy chest and beefy, burly physique. Now, it's far more about slick, smooth bodies that are rippled with identifiable muscle groups. I know I sound like an old fogey, but I can't help but prefer the types I grew up salivating over like these.

Though Caan and Beck don't show anything other than the tops of their chests (with Caan shot so up close, we hardly get to see his at all in this particular sequence), the extras in the shower show their rear ends and even a fleeting glimpse of penis here and there. I wonder what the pay was. I seem to recall hearing once that extras who get naked for the camera make more than the standard scale rate plus a box lunch for their trouble.

Back to prison we go again for 1977's Short Eyes, starring Bruce Davison. Child molesters are often targeted with special severity in prison by both the guards and the inmates and so it is that Davison, a newly convicted one, is subjected to extreme torment once the nature of his crime is discovered. Here, he takes it on the chin, in the showers, from an infuriated fellow inmate (who was probably incarcerated for something for honorable like murder!)

Though it is far less likely to happen now, it used to be rather common for newspapers to publish photos of victorious athletes taking a shower after the big game. Be it football, basketball, baseball or whatever else, there are many wire photos that depict an MVP washing off all the grime and sweat in the shower after winning for his team. This shot is of famed baseball player Reggie Jackson in 1978. While he was with the New York Yankees, they won back to back World Series (in the first one, he hit three back to back home runs!), but his tenure there was almost constantly marked by one controversy or another.

One memorable shower took place in the 1979 film The Legacy, a chiller about Katherine Ross being named as an heir to a vast fortune in England. Her boyfriend Sam Elliott accompanies her to a mansion where things begin to go wrong for quite a few people. For his part, the shower becomes scalding hot and he is unable to turn it off or get out of the sliding glass doors!

Of course, the walk he takes to the shower is every bit, if not more, delicious than the shower! This right here is a MAN, y'all. We can all thank our lucky stars that Mr. Elliott opted to do this bare bottomed scene while he was at the near peak of his handsomeness and physical fitness. The way this scene is edited for regular television is one reason why I never watch anything unless it is completely intact! You just can't trust those censors not to snip out one of the best sections of a movie.

Now to flip on the TV for a moment, we have the 1983 telefilm The Fighter, starring Underworld favorite Gregory Harrison. Two years prior, Harrison had enjoyed a hit TV-movie called For Ladies Only, about a guy who finds out he can make more money as a male stripper than at any menial job. For this project, he plays a married concierge who also has trouble making ends meet. So he decides to enter the ring as an amateur boxer in order to make some real money. If you have read my profile on Mr. H., then you know that I have actually seen this chest up close (I mean, like a foot away) and it did not disappoint.

Though there isn't quite the same amount of skin as there was in Ladies, he's still shirtless a lot and in silk boxing trunks for much of the time. Then there's this lovely shower scene. Supporting actor Robert Englund doesn't know it, but he was given one of the most primo gigs ever that day, being forced to do take after take of speaking to Harrison while he's “naked” under the nozzle! He doesn't appear to ever dip his eyes away from Harrison's head, which is more than I would have been able to accomplish had I been given the part.

Another TV actor who seemed to take more than his fair share of showers was Geoffrey Scott of Dynasty. Playing the hirsute, hunky tennis instructor at Fallon Colby's resort, La Mirage, he continually found himself the object of affection from one gal or another. In this scene, he's just turned off the shower and thrown a towel around himself to see who is at the door (it's Alexis, scheming to bed him down in order to prove that he isn't good enough for her daughter Fallon!) Mr. Scott is now seventy (!) and hasn't been seen on-screen since 2003's Hulk.

These two shots are from an '80s romp called Stewardess School. Released in 1986, it rips off Police Academy by focusing on a collection of kooky cadets at a, you guessed it, stewardess school. The lead, Brett Cullen, has extraordinarily bad vision. He wanted to be a pilot (!), but wasn't able to cut it thanks to his visual impairment. He either has to wear glasses almost an inch thick or intensely strong, hard contact lenses.

At the predominantly female institution, he goes to take his morning shower and, unable to see more than a few inches in front of his face, manages to stumble into the ladies bathroom and proceeds to shower with them. (They don't really care because they know he can't see them naked anyway!) His pal Donnie Most tries the same thing, but is tossed out on his keister by the towering Sandahl Bergman. Even though this scene exists solely to show off some naked ladies, it's a nice bonus that so much of Cullen was visible, too.

Here we have Mr. Rob Lowe, possibly from 1986's hockey movie Youngblood, taking a shower. Surely one of the prettiest teen actors of the '80s, he still looks quite good today as he presses towards fifty! As a member of the “Brat Pack,” Lowe appeared in many hit movies like The Outsiders (1983), St. Elmo's Fire (1985) and About Last Night (1986) until a 1988 scandal involving a videotaped sexual encounter with two girls (one of whom was underage) derailed his career. He was able to resurrect it in the early '90s, but never to the same heights that it had been previously. His strongest impact in recent years has been on television.

Another '80s star, of an entirely different type, was Tom Selleck. Selleck made a splash on TV with Magnum, P.I. and then segued into movies like 1983's High Road to China, 1984's Lassiter and Runaway and 1989's Her Alibi and An Innocent Man, with 1987's Three Men and a Baby really being the only substantial hit. I don't know which of his movies this set of shower shots is from, but it was always nice to see his hairy chest all soapy and wet! He had at least two shower scenes in An Innocent Man, but these pictures are not from that movie. Man was filmed mere blocks from where I live now, but that was in '89 and I didn't get here until '03! Always late to the party... I could have been a prison extra! LOL

On the subject of 1989 (and prison!), we next come to Tango & Cash, a buddy cop movie that brought together Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell. Though the movie took in a decent amount of dough at the box office, the star's salaries and overall high budget prevented it from being considered much of a hit (not to mention the reviews it got!) Anyway, the two play very different police detectives who are set up by their enemies and are forced to do time in jail. They believe they are headed to a minimum security facility, but instead wind up in a maximum security one, where they are tortured by the inmates, many of whom were put there by the cops themselves. Upon entering the facility, they are stripped down and sent to the showers, which is when these shots of the two heroes take place. It affords viewers a chance to do some side-by-side comparison shopping, with Russell on the left (with his broad back, but narrow hips) and Stallone on the right (showing off the more developed, body-building type of physique he perfected in order to portray Rocky and Rambo all those times.)

A Room with a View in 1985, with its extended three-man skinny-dipping scene, made a star out of lanky, blonde Julian Sands, though he didn't remain widely famous for very long. Clearly not at all shy about taking off his duds, he took a rather eye-opening shower in the 1991 Italian film La villa del venerdi (known in the U.S. as Husbands and Lovers.) Here, he plays the cuckolded husband of Joanna Pacula, who leaves him every Friday night to spend the weekend with her dangerous lover Tcheky Karyo.

1992 sprang forth a memorable trip to the showers. School Ties starred several up and coming actors including Brendan Fraser, Chris O'Donnell, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. It focused on the discrimination and alienation that Jewish Fraser experiences at a WASPy private school. All the animosity that's been brewing from Damon towards Fraser comes to a head one day in the shower room.

Here we see, in a row from left to right, Damon, Fraser and O'Donnell. The screen is steamy in more ways than one! The actors wore modesty patches over their genitals (at least O'Donnell did, for sure), but it was still fun to get a nice glimpse of these guys in their youthful prime.
Once the fight breaks out, there is plenty of close body contact amongst a few of them, notably Fraser being held back by O'Donnell from finishing Damon off. We like this movie, but we love this particular scene!

Michael Douglas, at the time a sex addict in real life, had a string of provocative movies from 1987 (Fatal Attraction) to 1992 (Basic Instinct) to this one, Disclosure, in 1994, in which he is shown showering. (The specter of his wife in the film, Caroline Goodall, can be seen through the steam.) He plays a business executive who is seduced by a man-eating Demi Moore who then turns around and accuses him of sexual harassment! Douglas would be divorced from ever-cheated-upon wife Diandra in 2000 and marry Catherine Zeta-Jones that same year. That same year, Moore would divorce husband Bruce Willis after more than a dozen years of marriage. Speaking of...
Welcome to the Bruce Willis Shower Hall of Fame. Ha! Willis, who after a few bit roles soared to fame on the TV series Moonlighting, proceeded to enjoy a dazzlingly successful movie career. True, there were some stops and starts and additional highs and lows along the way, as with most any career, but from Die Hard (1988) on, he enjoyed pretty steady employment. In 1994, he appeared in the hit Pulp Fiction (and took a shower on-screen in that), but he also starred in the craptastical mess Color of Night. In this glossy, sultry, silly thriller, he had love scene after love scene with costar Jane March, who barely bothered to get dressed in between such moments. He got in on the action, too, offering up fleeting glimpses of frontal nudity and cavorting and contorting through the various sex acts called for in the script.

His big shower scene is with Ms. March as they get it on for the umpteenth time, but later he pretends as if he's going to take a shower, which is what these shots are from, but doesn't actually step in. (It's all part of a plan to sneak away from her.) Apparently, the full-screen version of the film shows more of Mr. Willis than the wide-screen one, which crops out little Bruce Jr. (We do hate it when the formatting of a motion picture is such that it hits actors too high below the belt!) If you haven't seen this laugh-out-loud campfest, invite a few knowing friends over and watch it asap.

The following year (1995), Willis starred in the far more prestigious and well-received sci-fi thriller Twelve Monkeys. Directed by the highly stylized Terry Gilliam, it had Willis traveling back through time in order to obtain information about a virus that has severely threatened the world of the future. In one scene, he is taken to a facility and given a thorough (and none too gentle!) scrubbing by white-clad attendants, one of whom helps him towel off.

Pictures of stars in the shower continue to be a popular method of promotion/exploitation, even if the stars themselves have changed quite a bit since the old times I happen to call my favorite. Here is Kip Pardue, of such films as Remember the Titans (2000), The Rules of Attraction (2002), Stag Night (2008) and more recently, the lovely and soothing Hostel: Part III (2011.)

My last entry for this round of April showers is military-oriented. It's not as explicit as some that have come before it, so I apologize for that, but I think it is pretty captivating. One day not too long ago I was perusing the shelves of a bookstore (which is something you can find me doing several times a week!) and I saw this 2007 book, Men of WWII: Fighting Men at Ease. It's a collection of photographs of real World War II servicemen during their downtime and features all sorts of shots of soldiers lying around (sometimes on each other) or bathing, washing their clothes, etc... It's not the first book by the author (that one was called At Ease, printed in 2004, and focused on the navy.) The pictures are completely innocent, but provide a potent glimpse into the intimate male-bonding that can occur under such circumstances. Why I didn't buy it for $5.99 when it sells on Amazon for $23.23 I'll never know!

In any case, it reminded me of the 1945 film The Story of G.I Joe, which starred Burgess Meredith as war correspondent Ernie Pyle (who, sadly, was killed himself before the war was over) and Robert Mitchum in the early stage of his considerable career. The movie is really engrossing to start with, but it was the scene I'm about to share some shots from that really made it stick in my memory. While stationed in rural Italy, the sweaty, gritty soldiers have to get clean, so a makeshift shower is created with three stalls and three large barrels of water overhead that are refilled regularly. All of the troops are lined up naked and sent through the corp-wash (get it?) a dozen at a time (with four men to a shower head! Those are my kind of odds!)

It's intriguing enough that the guys are snugly packed in line with not a stitch on, but once they hit the showers and start, in some cases, washing each other off, it gets really arresting! One guy (for my money, the cutest one, though there is surely something for everyone in this heavily populated sequence) is so exhausted that he can't stay awake, so his cohorts start playfully slapping him around and getting him cleaned up! Afterwards, this same guy is still barely awake and so a pal helps him shave. Do take note in the pictures of the soldiers filing out, that one briefly shows most of a guy's backside. Quite a surprising sight in a 1945 Hollywood movie. I hope that you liked this sudden spurt of showers and didn't just consider the whole post a wash...