"Sylvia" Star-Lit!

The first time I ever knew there was such a film as today's featured subject, Sylvia (1965), I was on a plane to Florida reading a new book I'd bought called "Bad Movies We Love" by Edward Margulies and Stephen Rubello. They were two hysterically observant and snarky reviewers for the now-gone Movieline magazine, a publication I adored. This was 1993 and it has taken me a quarter of a century to actually finally get to see this film. (I turned the book, almost a personal Bible for me, into a checklist of movies I felt I had to see before I croak.)

Based on a rather edgy mystery novel by Howard Fast (forced by the lingering effects of the McCarthy-era blacklist to use pseudonym E.V. Cunningham), Sylvia concerns a private investigator's descent into the world of a woman he knows almost nothing about, emerging on the other side perhaps knowing far too much.

The title subject of the 1960 book had raven-dark hair, but that would never do for Joseph E. Levine at Paramount. He turned her platinum white, as essayed by his personal pet actress (though not his lover), Carroll Baker, who was in the midst of a big, brassy, blonde build-up in the wake of Marilyn Monroe's demise in 1962. She was surrounded by a collection of other well-known stars in this film, hence the title of this post.

The movie begins with a puzzle being put together, just as the investigator will have to do over the course of the movie. In short time we see that is the blonde Miss Baker, though no sooner are the pieces assembled then they are popped right back out again...

The title song is sung in a croony, romantic way in the style of popular vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones or Vic Damone and before it's over we find that it is being performed by pouty, pretty boy Paul Anka, and rather well, too. Canadian-born Anka is seventy-seven these days and still performing. It might have drawn more attention were ninety-two year-old Tony Bennett not still out there doing his thing as well!

We open on a chauffeur-driven limo collecting a man and bringing him to a luxurious mansion in the Beverly Hills area. Once inside, after a crisp greeting by the butler, the man is shown in to meet the person who has requested his presence.

The visitor is one George Maharis, a skillful enough, but not exactly top-flight private investigator. He needs money just badly enough to take whatever decent paying job is put before him.

The customer is millionaire Peter Lawford. Was there ever a (former) leading man with as bad posture as Lawford? He always seems as if it's a struggle to stand upright. Then again, based upon reports of some of his livelier activities and vices, maybe it was indeed asking a lot!

Lawford does some finagling with various fixtures and controls in the room in order to reveal a movie projector and a screen, previously hidden behind works of art. On it, he shows home movies of a young lady in a series of activities from swimming to watering her rose garden. She's Lawford's fiancee and before he takes her to wife, he wants to know exactly who she is; more importantly, who she's been...

Every home oughtta have one!

As she is a published poet by the name of Sylvia West, Maharis is able to use her book of published works along with some handwriting samples to begin his quest for who this girl is and where she sprang from. (Lawford forbids Maharis to inquire among any of her known friends, lest she get wise to the investigation.)

After some handwriting analysis, Maharis calls upon a friend of his (Gene Lyons) to help determine where Baker was raised. He a father of at least four, perched precariously on the edge of a playpen!) carefully studies her poetry and discovers that she has used a word that can only mean she was reared in or around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

So it's off to Steeltown Maharis goes. A fair amount of location work in Pittsburgh appears in the film, which will make it particularly interesting for people who live there. It must be said that, in general, the city doesn't come off a a particularly wonderful place but since I am in Cincinnati, a football rival like few others, I am not too sorry! LOL

Here we find Maharis in front of the long- standing Penn Sheraton hotel as he checks school after school to find info on Baker. This hotel was originally the William Penn Hotel and is now the Omin William Penn. It is the site where Lawrence Welk's famed bubble machine made its debut...!

Anyway, inside the school he confers with an assistant principal about how he needs to find a woman who may have attended the school with only the name Sylvia to go on. She, especially in those old filing drawer days, can only offer limited suggestions, but she does point him towards a nearby library or two.

At one library, he chats with a young boy who sports the worst accent I have probably ever heard (and which I doubt is Pittsburgh-ian!)

He begins to question the librarian (Viveca Lindfors), initially asking if an older employee works there who might know what he needs to find out, but she informs him that she has in fact been there eighteen years.

She, like practically everyone else when it happens, is facially stricken when Maharis mentions the word Sylvia. She is reluctant to help him much until he informs her that he is not with the police, but a private investigator. She cannot stay past closing time at the library, so they go for a drink and she begins to relay what she knows.

Years before, she found young Baker on the floor of her library, disheveled and unkempt, asking for a book to read. Lindfors chooses Pride and Prejudice for the young towhead. Baker, who plays roughly fourteen to thirty in the film gives us her little-girl look in this sequence. Note Lindfors interesting hand placement...

"Mah naim es Nell...!"

Lindfors' lesbian interest in Baker is staggeringly obvious to all but the most resistant viewer. While she is putting on her makeup in the bedroom, Baker is on the floor in the living room running her fingers along the soft inner petals of some fresh roses (!), doubtlessly pink, though this is a black & white movie.

Lindfors comes out (of the bedroom) and holds a mirror up for Baker to look in, hoping to encourage her to see another side of herself than the one she knows...!

She has a vested interest in this girl and wants to bring out her blossoming beauty. She gifts the physically and emotionally destitute girl a tube of lipstick as part of the maturation process.

Lindfors takes Maharis to the squalid site of Baker's childhood home, a rat's nest over a shabby storefront. As happens more than once in this flick, the signage offers comment on the action. Note that above Baker's door frame is the word "USED" in large letters!

Inside it's even worse. Baker sits preening on the bed with her new tube of pale lipstick while her put-upon mother is sewing. Her angry drunken stepfather (Aldo Ray) is getting more and more agitated that his "little girl" is toying around with makeup.

All of this early part of the story has Baker either sitting, kneeling or lying down in an effort to make her as diminutive as possible. Though the makers never went to those extremes, it almost reminded me of the Martin Short comedy Clifford (1994) in which he was surrounded by enlarged furniture and bigger people to make him appear ten!

Anyway, in what is truly a vividly brutal and unsettling scene, Ray somehow decides that since Baker is wearing lipstick, she must be fooling around with someone and he may as well join in! He tosses his glass against the wall and bursts into her room.

He then shoves his wife around and out the door, slamming it and locking it so that she cannot do anything to stop him from raping her daughter. Before he has his way with Baker, he roughly uses his hand to smear off the lipstick she was applying beforehand. As he begins to rape her, a long, knob-topped bed post looms overhead!

Ray was never given much do as an actor, but he is relentlessly burly and effectively threatening here. His wife is played by Shirley O'Hara who once played one of the title warriors in Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), but is quite helpless here.

Emerging from her nightmarish attack. Baker makes her way outside and down the fire escape, though it wouldn't exactly be correct to say that she makes her way to safety. A lanky (and creepy looking) preacher (named, seriously, "Peter the Healer") takes her under his wing. The signage almost reads "LET(s) PET"! And it turns out he shuttled her off to Mexico and ultimately pimped her out before he was killed in a knife fight.

Maharis heads to Mexico and is instantly accosted by a pint-sized little pipsqueak (you know the kind, a little kid who somehow knows everyone and everything about a large city.) The kid (played by Manuel Padilla Jr, who some of you may recall from Ron Ely's Tarzan) takes him to see a local priest who is known for his kindnesses to the downtrodden.

The priest (Jay Novello) relays to Maharis that Baker had come to see him in the wake of Peter the Healer's death, wanting him to offer final sacraments to the man who'd practically kidnapped her. She, in a continuing motif of the film, is seen admiring the roses on his altar.

Later, done up in a more hotsy-totsy manner, she returns to the church, spotted by Novello (well, how could you miss her in that polka-dotted get-up?), and places a donation in the offering box. Somehow he must have made some sort of positive impact on her.

 (I have to say, the tight-panted extra below had an impact on me as Baker leaves the church and I wish we could have seen more of him!)

As she heads to a waiting car, we can't help but notice that there are several versions of the exact same dress hanging on a rod in the back! She gets into the car with toad-like Edmund O'Brien and we eventually learn that he has offered to drive her back to the U.S. with him in exchange for "services rendered" in the sack! (He's later revealed to be a dress salesman, thus providing her with her latest look.)

Maharis now heads to O'Brien's beautiful (but heavily-mortgaged) home where he first runs headlong into a snot-nosed, smart-mouthed son, who is lounging in the family car with his feet up. He's got a Coca-Cola bottle placed right at Maharis' crotch as the two engage in a bit of a face-off. Maharis tops their exchange off by snatching the bottle, wiping the tip off and pressing it to his lips!

In back is O'Brien, practicing his golfing putts, and he's less than pleased to find Maharis there asking questions. He is cornered into revealing what he knows, however, and begins to expound on his arrangement with the blonde bed-mate.

Using her body as nature's credit card wasn't anything unusual for Baker, so there was no real issue there. She's even comfortable enough to lollygag around their room naked, but for a sheet, while reading poetry, though she does have one no-no. She refuses to kiss O'Brien.

Unfortunately, O'Brien had begun to develop real feeling for her and began to beg her to make their arrangement a regular thing when they got back home. While he's pleading his case, a limp, overripe banana hangs in a fruit bowl below his waistline (!), but Baker, sprawled in a chair opts to take a bite from an apple, the symbol for a fallen woman.

Still not over her, O'Brien won't leave her alone once she's situated in New York and working as a change-maker in an arcade. He pleads with her to give up that work-a-day life and be with him as his mistress, but she won't have it. (Note Ann Sothern as a fellow cashier in the background.)

I have always loved these sort of ruffled blouses on women...

O'Brien's son has overheard all this and appears before his father demanding a hike in his allowance or else he'll go to mommy and spill the beans. Maharis' sympathy is limited, but he does give the son a swift-kick farewell on his way out.

Now he's off to New York to chat up Sothern at the arcade. He pretends to be an old boyfriend of Baker's and this approach sets her off that something isn't right. She thinks he's a cop trying to look into anything that might be shady at the arcade.

"Sylvia...."

On site henchman Anthony Caruso comes over to break things up and gives Maharis a pat-down. Then he starts to punch Maharis in the face, but instead winds up on the receiving end of some blows to the head as Maharis knocks him against a post repeatedly! (Hilariously, the ding-ding-ding of a game bell goes off right at the end of the last one!)

Sothern gets a telegram from Maharis imploring her to call him to chat about Baker. She, who likes a nice meal now and again, demands that in exchange for information about the girl he treat her to dinner and drinks at an exclusive restaurant in addition to a hundred bucks.

She shows up at this high-toned restaurant with seemingly every bit of jewelry and accessories that she owns clamped onto her body. Her hair piled up and with a shawl, a fan and a purse with similar dots to the dress Baker once wore, she parades around the dining room like she was born to it all!

Shades of Sylvia...?

She wastes no time ordering a drink and caviar as she begins to spill the beans about Baker and her.

There's a lotta hair goin' on here...

Turns out that after Baker came to work at the arcade, she allowed her to move in with her. The floozie-ish Sothern is always on a hot date, but Baker is more interested in staying home and bettering herself. She listens to foreign language records so that she might speak more than one language fluently.

"I call this my 'Oscar the Grouch' look...!"

She also reads books, but keeps a dictionary open alongside them so that she can be sure what every unfamiliar word means.

Books and languages can only get you so far in life when you're tottering near the bottom, so Sothern encourages Baker to loosen up and get to know some men with wads of cash, even one of her own primo sugar daddies. But Baker has her sites set higher. She exclaims that she wants all the gold, silver and diamonds she can get her hands on.

Sothern gets more and more tipsy as she tells the tale. Her hair starts to become askew, she essays a whole range of emotions... The woman is taking this movie and neatly packing it into her back pocket! LOL At this stage of her life, Sothern was playing all sorts of "thick," slightly shady ladies, but no matter how cheap she was meant to be, I always thought her hair was fascinatingly lovely and her eye makeup, in a word, flawless!
 

It's revealed that Baker moved out and a while later was arrested by vice cops for prostitution. Maharis heads to the police station to look up the arrest records and finds that she was not alone in her shenanigans. Another gal was with her and now he needs to go find her.

This lady, statuesque Nancy Kovack, is now a stripper in a (comparatively) nice club. He's waiting for her as she comes off stage in her abbreviated costume. He wants to know about the month she spent in the clink with Baker following their arrest.

As Kovack changes behind a flimsy screen and flaunts her incredible body at him, Maharis can only stare (as do we!) at her impressive assets! Kovack relays the fact that there was a third girl arrested along with them who knew more about Baker than she did. Kovack dons a towering headpiece and starts out the door for her next number.

So now he's off again to a ritzy house where this third personage has landed in clover. The lady in question turns out to be Joanne Dru, a one-time hooker who is now the wife of a millionaire.

Dru, like so many of Maharis' interview subjects, really doesn't want to talk about Baker, though in this instance at least, she isn't trying to hide anything from her rich husband. It turns out he knows it all. After breaking through to her a bit, he does get her to tell her tale. She remembers working with Baker at "Mother's," a brothel.

Directly following their time served at an institute for women, Dru is severely injured in an accident and requires a lengthy hospital stay. Baker begs the administrator to move her out of the general ward and into a private room. She only has $47 on her, but a $100 deposit is required. That only leaves one option...

She heads to a nightclub owned and operated by drag performer Lola Diamond (played by Paul Gilbert.) Gilbert sings "Love and Learn" to a piano accompanist and two bongo players with twin drums between their legs.

He wants to hear about her and her experience, most of which she makes up. Still, she's attractive enough to get his attention and just cultured enough to pass muster for the type of girls he wants peppering his operation.

He takes her on for $50 a night, though she's in desperate need of $60! Unmoved, he makes it clear that she'll get what she gets and will like it.

That night, tarted up and Aqua-Netted to the skies, she parades through the place attracting immediate attention. She manages to squeeze five bucks out of a patron, giving her the money to keep Dru in a private room and able to be cared for properly.

"I'm really not moved... Neither is my hair."

Once Dru was released from the hospital, Baker continued to see men in exchange for cash until she came upon Lloyd Bochner, a surly, slimy customer.

There's no way this can end well...

He goes into his bedroom and emerges with a paper-wrapped tome that he hands her to "read." She only looks briefly at one single page before disgustedly handing it back to him, saying it belongs in the trash, so it must have been bad!

He doesn't like this one single bit and proceeds to tear off her nightgown. Then he sadistically beats and rapes her mercilessly! (Thankfully, like the one with her stepfather Ray, the bulk of this happens behind a closed door.)

She emerges later bloodied, bruised and bedraggled, hardly able to move at all. She spies a phone and attempts to report what has happened to her, but Bochner rallies and prevents her. He tries to stop her from spilling the beans on his perverted ways.

She retaliates by grabbing a scorching hot pot of coffee and threatening to spill it all over his face if he doesn't make things right. In this case making things right equals $10,000 which, in 1965, was a nice hunk of change. Dru's wealthy husband is able to take Baker's new nest egg and invest it for her, which is how she finally became the independent and refined poetess who managed to snag the rich Lawford.

Maharis is preparing his report for Lawford, speaking into a Dictaphone (we ought to leave this still further form of phallic imagery alone, but you know we won't.) For reasons unknown, I became fixated on the fact that he has three lamps in his small apartment, all in close proximity to one another (by a large window, even!) There seems to be an excessive amount of attention to lamps, chandeliers and lights in this film (shedding light on the subject?)

Maharis spending quality time with his Dictaphone.

When he can't get Lawford on the phone, he decides to follow Baker personally and finds her entering a bookshop with which he's familiar. (Even though this post is already HUGE, there is still a half-hour left to the movie! But we'll wrap up in fast order.)

He approaches the proprietress of the bookshop, who he is quite familiar with from his love of history books, and eventually asks if she will introduce him to the lovely poet who is perusing the racks.

The present day Baker is cool, refined, placid and gives little to no hint of her long, sordid past. Maharis, despite her engagement to his client Lawford, coerces her into having lunch with him. They stroll to a local amusement park where he orders them two mile-long hot dogs!

In a movie that I found riddled with phallic imagery to begin with, this part sent it over the top for me. Baker parts her jaw and crams this huge, thick wiener into her throat!

Hilariously, Maharis has the damnedest method of eating a hot dog that I have ever seen. He first takes just a teensy nibble from the tip of it, eating no bun at all...

Then as they continue to walk, Maharis again chews on only the wiener, with the folds of the bun pressed up against his nose...!

Then he does it one final time, with only three small bites consumed before tossing the rest into the garbage. Then bun never eaten. WTF???




Next the two proceed to a beautiful lake where they continue to get to know one another more deeply.

They go together like salt & pepper shakers.

He knows almost everything there is to know about her, but she has no idea. And it's pretty clear that, despite her spotty and sordid history, he's falling in love with her. Later, having taken her back to her own car, we get the sole moment of male beefcake in the movie when Maharis is determining whether to give his report to Lawford or not...

The next day, Maharis accomp- anies Baker to a flower show where her prize roses are on display. While there, they run into some staid, skeptical friends she knows through her association with Lawford and there is a feeling that the world she has so long wanted to be a part of may not be exactly a dream come true after all.

Will the newly blossoming couple of Maharis and Baker have a happy ending? Or will Lawford, who's already engaged to Baker, spoil things for them? Or will she ruin things herself when she finds out who Maharis really is? Will her wretched past come back to haunt her one last time? I'd never tell.

Sylvia was not much of a box office hit, and is not necessarily a "good" movie, but it does move and it has a parade of familiar performers doing all they can to enliven the tale. I was captivated by the elaborate sets and the varying luxurious decor pieces throughout as well as the symbolic imagery I've pointed out along the way. Though black and white fits the often dreary subject matter, I really wish this one would have been in color. I'd love to see just which hues were chosen by Edith Head for the many pale outfits Baker wears and oh to see the set decoration in its full splendor (not to mention Miss Sothern's liquid blue eyes...) Baker's other 1965 flick Harlow was in color, but perhaps should not have been since we all really only know Jean Harlow as a black and white figure. (You'll recall that Spielberg made Schindler's List (1993) in black and white because "we remember" WWII and the Holocaust that way...)

In living lurid color?

1965 marked Baker's last year as a Hollywood film actress for some time. She'd begun about a decade prior with a big splash in Giant (1956) and Baby Doll (1956), which earned her an Oscar nomination (losing to Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia.) Then came The Big Country (1958) and How the West Was Won (1962), among others, until The Carpetbaggers (1964) - a massive hit - ushered in this blonde bombshell phase. But a contract dispute with Paramount producer Joseph E. Levine sent her packing to Rome, where she made many films.

American audiences only saw her sporadically until the early-1980s by which time she had become a skillful character actress in movies like Star 80 (1983) and Native Son (1986.) She continued in that vein with Ironweed (1987) and The Game (1997.) Now eighty-eight, she's been off-screen for about fifteen years. Her performance in Sylvia caught some heat for its underplaying, but I felt that she came off quite well in the midst of other overacting and kept the story line grounded rather than allowing it to become more hyper-squalid. She may not have been staggeringly alluring or mysterious, but she is gently attractive and generally appealing in spite of the circumstances.

Maharis is still with us today at ninety. Why in the hell didn't anyone reunite these two for a DVD commentary or at least a couple of interviews on this movie?! He'd just come off the success of Route 66 (which he left following a bout of hepatitis reputed to have come from some lake water he was in during a scene) and was enjoying a spate of leading man parts. This one had initially been earmarked for Paul Newman a couple of years prior, but that didn't happen. Maharis has been retired for more than two decades now.

Lawford was a bit down on his luck at this point having been excised from Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack after a perceived slight regarding Lawford's brother-in-law JFK. He'd played against Bette Davis in the thriller Dead Ringer and also wound up playing Baker's fiance in her 1965 film Harlow. As the years went on, he developed more and more serious drug and alcohol issues which took a tremendous toll on his looks and body. By 1984, he was dead at sixty-one of kidney and liver disease.

Swedish Lindfors was a skillful actress whose heavy accent tended to limit the parts she wound up with. Having come to Hollywood in 1948 to play with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan, she maintained a steady career up through 1995 when rheumatoid arthritis complications took her at age seventy-four. The slender, big-eyed actress occasionally gave me flashes of the gaunt Angelina Jolie during Sylvia!

For someone as raspy and rugged as Ray often played, he could also be a very tender teddy bear on screen. He was pure delight in his first starring role for George Cukor, The Marrying Kind (1952), but by the late-'60s he was appearing in fewer and fewer quality films. A heavy drinker with a weakness for the ladies, he wound up in a rough place, dying of throat cancer and pneumonia at only age sixty-four in 1991. He did work right up until his demise, though usually in cheaper, straight-to-video projects.

O'Brien (another actor with questionable posture!) won an Oscar for 1954's The Barefoot Contessa and was nominated again for 1964's Seven Days in May (that one went to Peter Ustinov in Topkapi.) Having begun all the way back in 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he eventually began to suffer from poor eyesight and in time bad memory as well. A heart attack prevented him from fulfilling the Arthur Kennedy role in Lawrence of Arabia (1962.) Ill health also forced him out of the John Saxon role in Black Christmas (1974) and he retired thereafter. It was later determined that he had Alzheimer's Disease, which claimed him in 1985 at age sixty-nine.

We adore Sothern, who'd begun acting in films back in the late-1920s! Originally a pert, pretty songbird in elaborate musicals, she segued into playing the wisecracking Maisie in a series of ten movies and on radio in the '40s. Health issues and accidents plagued her, though she continued to work through many of them (including a popular run on Private Secretary in the early-'50s.) She'd just done the hooty Lady in a Cage the year before this. In 1987, having been working only sporadically, she got an Oscar nomination for The Whales of August, but it went to Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck. In 2001, heart failure claimed her at age ninety-two.

Kovack had begun as a beauty pageant contestant and winner before modeling and then becoming an actress. Her screen career is mostly limited to the 1960s wherein she was often used as pretty decoration in things like The Wild Westerner (1962) or The Outlaws is Coming (1965) as well as appearing as a guest on TV series like Star Trek (she's one of several Trek cast members who dot this film.) In 1969, she married a successful orchestra conductor and worked only scarcely afterwards. She is now eighty-four.

In films from the mid-1940s on, Dru worked with such disparate leading men as John Wayne (in Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, both 1948) to Liberace (Sincerely Yours, 1955)! The sister of Hollywood Squares' Peter Marshall, she was also the wife of Dick Haymes and John Ireland, a costar of hers in All the Kings Men (1949.) She worked only a little more after this, with 1980's Super Fuzz (with Terence Hill) her final outing. In 1996, she passed away of respiratory ailments at seventy-four.

Gilbert was the son of vaudeville performers and worked as an aerialist until a 65-foot fall injured him seriously. He then proceeded to find work as a comic actor in many projects. It will likely come as a surprise to all that he was the adoptive father of one Melissa Gilbert (and her brother Jonathan, who played Willie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie with her!) He had recurrent pain from that fall and from injuries sustained in WWII and, according to Melissa, committed suicide in 1976 at age fifty-seven, though a stroke was also reported as cause of death.

No glossily tawdry 1960s movie would be complete without the prolific Bochner. He also appeared in Harlow (1965), Tony Rome (1967) and The Detective (1968) among others. Though he led a very busy career, it was really Dynasty in 1981 that made him a familiar name as well as a face when he enacted the role of Cecil Colby. He continued to work up until 2003, being claimed by cancer two years later at age eighty-one. He worked in many, many projects but our own favorite legacy of his was his son, dreamy Hart Bochner!

Lyons is another Star Trek alum, playing a crusty ambassador on a 1967 ep. Having worked on many TV episodes from 1950 on, he eventually landed a recurring role on Ironside in 1967, which he kept until his premature death in 1974 at age fifty-three. His problems with alcohol are believed to have contributed to his demise. Remarkably, he'd been on of Grace Kelly's paramours in the early-1950s!

The chief Trek cast member to pop up here is Barrett. Not only was she the voice of the computer on the show and the recurring part of Nurse Chapel, but she had also played Number One, second in command to Jeffrey Hunter on the show's pilot. (Outraged test viewers couldn't stand seeing a pushy woman in control this way, so Spock was elevated and Barrett returned later with a new hair color and a different role!) Barrett died in 2008 of leukemia at age seventy-six. Hilariously, her book store outfit is not dissimilar to her Number One uniform, even with a pin near the same spot as her uniform insignia!

Lastly, though she apparently filmed a more substantial part and a publicity picture was warranted, we have longtime character actress Connie Gilchrist. In the final cut, she only appears in long shot with a couple of lines as the brother owner "Mother." Film fans remember her in many movies from A Woman's Face (1941) to Auntie Mame (1958) and beyond. Having retired in 1969, she died in 1985 at age eighty-four, apparently of natural causes.

The early cut of Sylvia must have been longer and somewhat different. I mean, let's face it, there's a TON of story to tell here with many actors and locations...! This on-set still photo shows the stars in bed, something that did NOT occur in the movie. Their relationship is generally depicted as chaste, but leaning towards passion, but there must have been a sequence wherein Maharis took the ol' gal for a spin and kicked her tires to see how everything worked. Even though it would be more shirtless shots of the leading man, I'm kind of glad it was excised. Baker got around enough in this one as it was. And since it likely took place before Maharis revealed his full identity and agenda, it may have made him look like a heel.