Poseidon Quickies: A Brief Shower, By George

It's all about un-challenging, non-think viewing these days as each evening brings the need for decom- pression in the wake of a day amidst manu- facturing, distribution & transportation under the current quagmire we're in. As a result, I've been catching up with some unusual, rare movies that scarcely make their way onto DVD or television. One, the aggressively awful 1970 release The Delta Factor, has little to recommend it besides a few attractive actresses (slumming in a dreary story based on a Mickey Spillane novel), but there was one moment that did cause me to sit up and take notice. 

The principal star of The Delta Factor was one Christopher George, seen here during his tenure as head of The Rat Patrol, a WWII desert-set series that ran from 1966-68. George had, in real life, been a marine as a teen and led a very colorful pre-acting existence in a wide variety of jobs. After shooting the John Wayne film Chisum (1970), he started work on the Spillane espionage flick.

Convicted thief George has been coerced into a job for the U.S. government. Early in the film, he is shown just having taken a shower in his hotel room, which gives us a quick glimpse of his hairy torso.

Exiting the tub and the bathroom, he proceeds to dry off while strolling over to his dressing table. But we soon find out that he has an audience...!

Yvette Mimieux, who's been enlisted to work with him as his wife on the mission, has been observing the situation covertly. And doesn't disapprove of what she sees.

Deducing that he's got nothing to hide at this point, he tosses the towel to the floor and continues his chat with Mimieux head on, so to speak. The rugged George had been sun-baked after those years on Rat Patrol and as a heavy smoker also sported a raspy voice to go with his crooked smile.

Touching a bit on the ladies now in order to help fill out this post. Despite her top-billing, I could only recall one sequence in which Mimieux received anything approaching a close-up! She's endlessly shown in medium and long shots and in a variety of questionable wigs (this is not her own hair either.)

Only she could tell you why there was a decision to cover up her own flattering hair (seen above-right) with some sketchy wigs that look like they might have been found in a waste can outside Jacqueline Bisset's dressing room at 20th Century Fox...!

I thought this one was especially ghastly!

Conversely, Diane McBain's hair receives the sort of brutally punishing treatment that would leave a gal scrambling for Rogaine decades after! It almost hurts to see how her locks were savagely teased, bleached and beaten into this rat's nest.

We've always liked McBain, and she tries hard to inject life into this shoddy movie (directed by Tay Garnett, close to the end of his career. Some blame the endlessly low-angle framing of the movie on his being in a wheelchair at the time!) It's all in vain, though. At one point, Mimieux tears at her dress, briefly revealing a stray boob...

Even playing a hard-nosed madam in one extended scene, Yvonne De Carlo looks better and comes off better than her younger cohorts.

Her stable of "ho"s come in all sorts, from the bizarrely overdressed to the flat out naked...!

George had known actress Lynda Day for quite a while. They'd both been models early on and were even in a bride & groom photo shoot once. But during Chisum, in which she costarred, they fell in love and she left her husband for George. In 1971, they had a daughter with the hybrid name of Krisinda (an alternatively-spelled coagulation of their first names) Casey (after Day's character on Mission: Impossible!) George. He also adopted her son Nicky from the prior marriage.

The couple was tremendously close and very happy, working together any time it was feasible. It always struck me unusual, though, that this husband and father, who rarely - if ever - appeared nude in a movie, wound up posing balls out for Playgirl in 1974!

But he did just that. The shots are readily available though a quick Google search. They feature his faithful canine, a perilous looking knife (!) and a slab of watermelon (!!) When George died suddenly of a heart attack in 1983 at only age 52, it was determined that he suffered from scar tissue in his heart stemming from an accident on the set of The Rat Patrol years earlier. His devastated wife only acted sporadically for a few years after that.