Disastrous Demises - 2019

Miss Carol Lynley (of The Poseidon Adventure, 1972) wasn't the only member of the Disaster Movie Club to have passed away last year. She was granted a special tribute, but I don't want to forget several others who contributed to my favorite movie genre, the '70s Disaster Flick. Anyone who had the good (or bad?) fortune to act in a disaster movie from 1970-1980 is automatically a member of the club (which exists only in my demented mind.) These days, so many past performers perish and barely make a ripple in the news even though we have multitudinous "news" channels whose purported purpose is to keep us informed... If not for the annual TCM Remembers memorial tribute, I might not have even known about a fair number of celebrities who passed away in 2019.

First up is an unexpected name. Miss Bibi Andersson. The Swedish Anderson made a mark with Ingmar Bergman in his 1966 film Persona, opposite Liv Ullmann. She also appeared in a number of American movies such as Duel at Diablo (1966) with James Garner and Sidney Poitier, Enemy of the People (1977) with Steve McQueen and Quintet (1979) with Paul Newman. There was also I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in 1977 with Kathleen Quinlan.

Her disaster movie entry is The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979.) In it, she was spared from having to board the title mode of transport and thus be hurled upside down repeatedly as a desperate, criminal businessman tries to blow the thing apart. That's not to say she got off light...!

She portrayed a prostitute hired to ease the mind (and body!) of burly George Kennedy during a Paris layover (no pun intended!) The widowed Kennedy has been "grounded" as far as sex is concerned since the death of his wife and his co-pilot Alain Delon has arranged this special treat.

The couple's fireside lovemaking was apparently deemed worthy for use in promotion of the film albeit primarily in Europe where Ms. Andersson's name and presence meant more in terms of marquee value. (And the movie was renamed with an "'80" by the time it limped into theaters there...)

Ms. Andersson died on April 14th, 2019 from the complications of a stroke at age eighty-three. She had been retired from the screen since 2010. Married three times, she was the mother of one daughter.

Next up is Mr. René Auberjonois. Despite his fanciful French name, Auberjonois was born in New York City to a Swiss father (a successful writer) and mother who was descended from Napoleon Bonaparte (and was of Russian royalty as well!) He did, as a youth, live in London and Paris, lending him a European background. After successful performances on Broadway, he segued to movies, including MASH (1970), King Kong (1976), The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) and many, many others. In more recent years, he established a cult following for his portrayal of Odo on Deep Space Nine.

Auberjonois gained entry into the Disaster Movie Club with 1975's The Hindenburg. He played a con man on board the famed airship with his partner Burgess Meredith. (Auberjoinois had earlier worked at the South Mountain Road artist's colony - later to be named Elmwood Playhouse - with Meredith as well as John Huston and Lotte Lenya.)

He is seated in the smoking lounge of the Hindenburg next to Anne Bancroft who lights up a pipe with marijuana in it, prompting a typically wide-eyed expression from the busy character actor.

During an onboard bit of entertainment, we see him (at far right) along with most of the rest of the cast, reacting to a shocking moment in the performance.

At the climax of the movie, the screen goes black & white in order for director Robert Wise to intersperse actual footage of the fiery conflagration. The deliberately grainy new footage shows Auberjonois (with Bancroft) amid the flaming girders during the crash. Mr. Auberjonois died December 8th, 2019 of lung cancer at age seventy-nine. He'd been wed since 1963 and was the father of two.

Auberjonois gets extra credit for having costarred in The Big Bus (1976), an elaborate spoof of the disaster genre. He's seen here with Ruth Gordon.

Yet another unexpected name for inclusion here is that of Miss Valentina Cortese. An Italian actress who'd begun making films in 1941, she scored a success with Les Miserables (1948), portraying both Fantine and Cosette opposite Marcello Mastroianni. Later, she made American films such as Malaya (1949) with Spencer Tracy and James Stewart, The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) with Richard Basehart, who she promptly married, The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner as well as international epics like Barabbas (1961) with Anthony Quinn.

One of her most famous roles came with 1973's Day for Night under the direction of François Truffaut, which garnered her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress. When she lost the award to Ingrid Bergman in Murder on the Orient Express, even Bergman expressed the feeling that the statuette ought to have gone to Cortese. Cortese had THE most expressive eyes and face.

She joined the disaster flick community when she took part in the excru- ciatingly bad When Time Ran Out... (1980.) She and Burgess Meredith played a devoted couple, in retirement after years of having been a successful high wire act. They are vacationing at a luxurious island resort.

When things get rough at the resort (a supposedly safe volcano starts trembling and eventually erupting, forcing the vacationers to evacuate their hotel and hot-foot it across treacherous tropical terrain), Cortese begins to lose some of her European elegance. I always wondered why she so often favored those close-fitting scarves on her head. Then I saw her hair here! At least we could be distracted by Edward Albert's chiseled buns... 

Ms. Cortese had a child with Basehart, but they divorced in 1960. She never remarried and retired from the screen in 1993. She passed away at age ninety-six on July 10th, 2019 and was considered a national treasure in her home country.

In a recent post full of leftover pictures, we bemoaned the loss of one Robert Forster, so handsome in his screen debut Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967.) After this strong debut, he won further acclaim in The Stalking Moon (1968) with Gregory Peck and Medium Cool (1969), in which he starred. After two short-lived, early-1970s TV series of his own, Banyon and Nakia, he found it difficult to reestablished a big screen career.

1973's The Don is Dead was unsuccessful in the face of The Godfather (1972.) He won the lead in the low-budget thriller Stunts (1977) only because Don Stroud was injured in a motorcycle accident just prior to shooting. Thus, he was only too happy to work in his next film, the one that placed him in the disaster genre...

Producer Roger Corman's entry into the realm was Avalanche (1978), the most expensive film to date of his New World Pictures. Starring Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow, Forster was third-billed as an environmentally conscious associate of Hudson's whose warnings of an avalanche at Hudson's expensive ski lodge go unheeded.

The fast-paced, but empty-headed, film was a flop. Part of Forster's contribution was firing shells into the side of a mountain to try to shear off some of the snow as well as taking Hudson's ex-wife Farrow to bed in order to fire off some projectiles of his own. LOL  (This happened off-screen, though Forster was never shy about showing off his body.)

He was still good-looking throughout, but any semblance of actual drama was rendered impossible by the atrocious supporting performances, the Styrofoam and shredded tissue paper snow and the often-tacky direction by former actor Corey Allen.

Forster had a late-career comeback when he appeared in Jackie Brown (1997) and collected an Oscar nomination in the process as Best Supporting Actor. The statuette went to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting, but the career momentum for Forster continued. He later was aptly cast as George Clooney's father in The Descendants (2011.) Forster was still working steadily when brain cancer claimed him on October 11th, 2019 at age seventy-eight. He will have two movies released in 2020! Married three times, he had three children with his second wife.

Our final member of the Disaster Movie Club to have been lost in 2019 was featured in our very last post on the hooty telefilm Cage Without a Key (1975.) Miss Katherine Helmond worked heavily on stage, including Broadway, before moving into films in 1971 (including The Hospital.) In 1975, she portrayed one of the endangered travelers on board The Hindenburg, sharing the screen with the aforementioned René Auberjonois.

She played the wife of Alan Oppenheimer and the mother of three children who are leaving Germany with the hope of eventually getting Oppenheimer's Jewish grandmother out as well as soon as possible.

When the calamity hits, Helmond is hysterical to the point where Oppen- heimer has to slap her across the face to snap her out of it. She is then hurled through a window in order to save her from the surrounding flames. Helmond's face is listed at the end of the movie along with many others in the cast (and at least she got a slightly better spot than the dog!)

The fates of these people are announced at the finale of The Hindenburg.

After this, she worked on Alfred Hitchcock's final movie Family Plot (1976) before zooming to fame on Soap, followed by Who's the Boss? and further appearances on Coach and Everybody Loves Raymond. Ms. Helmond died of Alzhemier's Disease on February 23rd, 2019 at age eighty-nine, having worked up to 2018. She was wed twice, the second time to a man fourteen years her junior. They were a couple for fifty-seven years, though she had no children.

The late Ms. Helmond and her husband of many years, David Christian.

We also lost a few honorary members of the DMC: Carmen Argenziano, who was a SWAT member in Two-Minute Warning (1976), Arte Johnson, who had a role in the hurricane disaster miniseries Condominium (1980) and Freddie Jones, who was the mad bomber in Juggernaut (1974.)

Only Mr. Jones at far right is shown in his disaster role.

BONUS PICS!

This French lobby card shows a laborious scene trimmed from the edited down rendition of the movie When Time Ran Out...

Cortese costarred with one-time Mr. Shelley Winters, Vittorio Gassman.

If one is going to go through something horrible (in this case escaping from a concentration camp!), it is advisable to do so with someone like Gassman, if at all possible...!

In contrast to virtually every other version of the poster for Avalanche, someone in this country felt the need to add in an extra rendition of Rock Hudson, wearing skis and falling through the air! This never occurred in the movie...

Mr. Forster was a handsome devil in his youth and in his old age.

Katherine "The Cougar" Helmond seemed to have hit the jackpot in her second go at married life!

She and David appeared to enjoy a lot of fun times together and were quite devoted.

I love that they felt free enough to pose for frolicsome photos such as these (in the wondrous 1970s!)