Bath Time: "Sundance" Your Pants Off!

I recently watched a rather excellent documentary on Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery. It delved into her tormented relationship with her famous father (Robert Montgomery), dove deep into Bewitched and then touched on some of her other work.  It's called Elizabeth Montgomery: A Bewitched Life (2023) and is narrated by Erin Murphy, who played Tabatha on the celebrated sitcom. As the time line reached her later career, a 1974 telefilm called Mrs. Sundance was briefly depicted because it is on that project that Montgomery met her fourth and final (and longest-lasting, relationship-wise) husband. The man was shown bathing in a creek. So naturally I had to look into that more closely and so here we are...! 

'Course you know I have to set the scene first! We meet the title character, Etta Place, who used "Mrs. Sundance" as an alias according to the story. Montgomery is first shown in sepia and with her hair obscured, perhaps to buffer the shock of her portraying a character who audiences around the world knew to look like this...

Katharine Ross played the part in the 1969 blockbuster Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 

The two actresses share precious little in common. Though it's not stated, perhaps it's conceivable that the character, who is on the run after having cavorted with the two legendary outlaws, might have gone blonde as part of a disguise.

As the movie begins, she is now working as a schoolmarm in a small town. She's doing this quite well, actually, and is asked to stay on after a three-month trial period. 

Though Montgomery is clearly more attractive, she was actually giving me Rachel Roberts in Picnic at Hanging Rock, which came out a year later!

I'm not completely insane. The ladies do indeed have some similarities! (More than Montgomery and Ross, fer sure!)

Anyway, Montgomery is horrified to see her life played out in squalid, inaccurate fashion by a tart in a traveling show and soon decides she needs to move along. 

Under heavy disguise a newsboy cap, with lipstick intact, she decides to hop a train. The train is being monitored by an imposing L.Q. Jones, who is on her tail. 

She's successfully aboard, but then another impromptu passenger makes his way into the same train car!

It's bum Robert Foxworth. 

He encourages the frightened "boy" to come forward and share his makeshift dinner. 

But as Montgomery accidentally reveals, she ain't no boy!

The two wind up traipsing the countryside together.

During a peaceful respite from trying to stay ahead of the law, they begin to connect more and open up to one another. 

She, of course, had been involved with Butch and Sundance and he confesses to her that he once rode with them.

Now I'm not presenting the whole movie here, but I didn't want to skip past this scene. Jones has Foxworth in his train car/office and there's an associate of his situated behind Foxworth. 

Throughout all of Foxworth's closeups, we are treated to a bare male torso behind him. 

He's not exactly what I'd call my own type - named Dean Smith if I'm not mistaken - (and he has a very thin-sounding voice)...

...but I liked having his torso as a backdrop over, say, oak paneling... LOL

Later in the movie, Montgomery is fixing dinner over a campfire. She informs the by now filthy Foxworth that if he wishes to eat, he needs to take a bath. Now.

He heads over to a nearby stream, bellyaching all along. 

Not only doesn't he want to take a bath, but he doesn't want to take one in this particular water, which he doesn't think looks particularly crystalline. 

I doubt that this reluctance required much acting from Foxworth because the creek is a little green and I'm sure it was quite COLD!

Off he heads into the crisp water in his dingy union suit. 

Montgomery, who by the way was on the lam with two amorous men in the parent film, isn't all that shy about the situation. She orders him to take that off, too!

And he obeys. He undoes the buttons and begins to crawl out of the cocoon-like, damp long underwear. But here's where things get interesting. I didn't know it at first, but Mrs. Sundance aired as a 90-minute TV-movie. That means it was about 70-minutes long. However, an extended version exists (released on DVD and streaming) that is almost 90-minutes long. 

And that version shows a LOT more of Mr. Foxworth than 1974 standards would have allowed. 

In this cut, we see the actor's complete backside as he struggles out of that cold, damp, clingy union suit.  

The discrete twig in-between the viewer and him ain't doin' much!

When he finally gets the damned thing off, he angrily flings it her way. (The underwear... hehehe)

We never saw this side of Mr. Foxworth during his years on Falcon Crest...!

He then proceeds to trip and fall into a deeper area of the creek! I'm not 100% sure that this was planned. 

This shot, far away and obscured, is the more common sort of creek bath that was seen on TV programs then. 

He does come closer to the water's surface for one split second. 

From there, it's off onto the next adventure. But this sequence was most unexpected when I clicked on the film. (It's on YT in some cruddy prints, but I watched it here in a pretty decent one.)

Liz must have liked what she saw okay because the two became a couple in real life. That said, she was in no hurry to be married again. 

Montogomery was first wed (b&w inset) in 1955 to a New York City socialite named Fred Cammann, but that union fell apart quickly when she realized he expected her to be nothing more than a hostess and wife. A second marriage to actor Gig Young came in 1956, but was over by 1963. Then in 1964 she wed TV producer William Asher, who became the producer of Bewitched. They had three children together. 

Foxworth and Montgomery found lasting happiness through the good, the bad and (as seen in these outfits) the ugly.

Though they each had busy careers, occasionally they were able to work together on screen again, such as in this 1992 telefilm With Murder in Mind. At last they wed in real life in 1993.

The couple had lived together happily and made countless smiling appearances as a duo for many years until 1995 when metastasized colon/liver cancer claimed her at only age 62. Foxworth remarried in 1998 and is now 84.

Oh, by the way... Not to be outdone, Katharine Ross had her own 1976 TV-movie in which she revisited the character from the original movie. 

Did the world really need two movies of this sort, two years apart?? And that, my friends, brings us to... 

The End!