A Little Camping Trip

Want to get away from it all for a few minutes? Then let's go camping! No... not with tents and Coleman lanterns. We're gonna camp it up a little bit with some pictures that were mostly intended to be very arresting, but instead are found guilty of sending us into fits of chuckling. We've been down this road before here, here and here, if you find that this is your thing and you want more of the same! Our unusually-styled cover girl today is Marguerite Chapman, one of the performers who provided an anecdote in our recent post about movie turkeys.

Speaking of unusual styling, Miss Anne Francis has really gone to the birds in this promotional photo for the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet.

A fun photo-op of two '60s teen stars who didn't ever really work together, Troy Donahue and Deborah Walley.

Ladies and gentlemen, Barbra Streisand in A Star is Born... er, I mean, Raquel Welch.

Here Ms. Welch is all washed up during a shoot that was presumably intended to be more serene than this!

Oh, me... speaking of washing up... This presumably real portrait of none other than our beloved Miss Olivia de Havilland enjoying a dip in the spa is quite an eye-opener. Sorry I neglected to warn you ahead of time.

Speaking of warnings, someone ought to have let this poor dear know that deranged Roddy McDowall was about to do some serious pruning in Shock Treatment!

During my recent post on suggestive pairs, there were a couple of pics that could have been added to the mix, but I had them filed away under camp and didn't catch them. No, this was not a 1930s version of the Will Ferrell comedy Blades of Glory. It's a shot of Jimmy Stewart and Lew Ayres (two legendary figure skaters - not!) in their costumes for Ice Follies of 1939!

There seems to be a fine line between love and hate in this shot of Tom Keene and Buster Crabbe in the 1936 western Drift Fence. (Keene later ended his movie career with a role in the infamously heinous Plan 9 From Outer Space.)

No butts about it in this promo photo for Crossfire. The hook here is that all three of the leading men were named Robert. Young, Mitchum and Ryan. Note the ass-ending ascending order of amusement at the pose from left to right!

One rarely hears of Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston having loads of fun with one another on the set of the much-heralded epic Ben-Hur. Boyd and director William Wyler had a bit of a secret pact in which Boyd played his role as if he and Heston had once been lovers, but they kept this from the straight-laced Heston.

These pictures rather cloud the issue as to who was on top during the imaginary relationship, but maybe it was mutually rewarding?

It took everything I had not to caption this photo: "Humpy Lee Majors straddles a slim, hairy ass." Oops! Looks like I just did it anyway!

In another hairy situation, we have 1946's The White Gorilla, billed as "The Greatest Wild Animal Picture Ever Made" (even though you've probably never even heard of it!) Another chuckle comes with the blurb, "Ray Corrigan * Lorraine Miller and an All-Star Cast" although it's likely that you never heard of them or any of their costars either! (I will grant you that Ray Corrigan is substantially better known as "Crash" Corrigan, but really? An "All-Star Cast?") By the way, he plays the male lead AND the title character in this!

I'm sure that Gil Gerard, as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, is merely acknowledging his little robot pal Twiki, but sicker minds may feel that he is about to force the poor devil into some "surprise oral!" Perhaps with a little tinkering/reprogramming?

One full decade before his career-resuscitating role in Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges played the manager of San Francisco International Airport, a short-lived 1970 series that took its cue from the smash-hit 1970 movie Airport.

In 1983, Dallas attempted to sex itself up on the male end with Christopher Atkins (of The Blue Lagoon.) Here, the twenty-two year-old is snuggled up with Linda Gray and Victoria Principal (with whom he had virtually no contact in the series.)

Cast as Gray's preteen son's swimming teacher, Atkins was soon teaching Gray (twenty-one years his senior) a few strokes, too!

While the cougar-ish story line scored one for equal rights (as men had long been shown canoodling with pert young ladies), there was something icky about the pairing, perhaps because Atkin's Lagoon lustre had already worn thin after The Pirate Movie and A Night in Heaven and his baby-ish face really did make him seem like Gray's son rather than passionate lover.

Really, almost any frame of film from The Village People's cinematic opus Can't Stop the Music might serve as camp, this one certainly does the trick, with Construction Worker David Hodo catching a heel from a female dancer...

What on earth is tackier or more campy than this hilarious promotional shot for the 1984 TV-movie City Killer? In it, Heather Locklear is stalked by an ex-boyfriend who demands that she get back together with him or else he will destroy buildings in their city while people are still inside! Gerald McRaney was a police psychologist assigned to help her (but compelled also to bed her!) The project blended a makeshift story with real footage of imploding, deserted buildings, something that isn't usually achieved by one man setting all the charges himself while the place it still open!

And now we take a brief turn right into the Susan Anton Wing. The statuesque pageant-honed songbird and actress was all primed for big screen success in 1979's Goldengirl until the U.S. pulled out of the 1980 Olympics, leaving the already science-fictiony story in the lurch since the movie depicted American athletes performing in said games.

Here, our girls twirls and whirls in a pleated chiffon gown during promotion for her short-lived variety show Presenting Susan Anton.

Less is left to the imagination by the time of this slinky shot.

And finally a terrible fall and hip dysplasia took their toll... okay, I'm only kidding about that. We still love her, even though in some circles she was more famous for dating a married Sylvester Stallone and the 8-1/2" shorter Dudley Moore!

More lame-o variety show promotion, courtesy of Leif Garrett, as we turn left and enter his wing of the exhibit. He looks rather out of it here.

The guy was white-hot for a time for reasons I never understood. Even now, I just can't quite see what all the fuss was about!

How utterly bored and miserable (not to mention vacant) does Brooke Shields look in this snap from the 1979 special Leif?

Did you know that Garrett and later resident of Knots Landing (and also of Desperate Housewives) Nicolette Sheridan were once live-ins? FYI - Sheridan was recently announced as the new Alexis Carrington on the Dynasty redux (a show I have yet to watch so much as a frame of...)

Things were looking a little rough by the time of this shot, though it's remarkable that Garrett didn't beat out Eric Stoltz for the co-starring role in Cher's 1985 movie Mask.

We close with a detour to the final room of our exhibit belonging to this gal. Recognize her?

It's TV's legendary funny lady Miss Lucille Ball, all Mod-ed up for her 1966 TV special Lucy in London.

I've never seen this, but it might be interesting to witness what sort of hip dance moves Ms. Ball was providing eight years prior to Mame, in which we hoped aloud that her hips COULD move...!

At the very least, she supplied us for some hooty shots with which to end this camping trip.

BONUS PIC:

Have y'all ever seen these? They're behind the scenes shots of Lucille Ball in the season two opener of The Lucy Show, "Lucy Plays Cleopatra." I thought they were pretty fascinating. Incidentally, it was the season three opening in which the stars of Cleopatra appeared on The Lucy Show in the episode "Lucy Meets The Burtons." Till next time!

A Drawer of Chests

Get it? Like a chest of drawers, but only better! Ha ha! Life is still effing insane around The Underworld, preventing me from delving into a certain film or star in the in-depth way I enjoy, but in order to bridge the gap between posts, I give you a small collection of chests (in many varieties) from our reserve supplies. This is by no means meant to be all-inclusive (and we've gone down this treasure trail before here, here, here and here), but hopefully you'll enjoy the view. Thanks to today's cover boy, a young Clint Eastwood. Now to pound on the other chests...

Always one to stay in shape even later in life (his chest in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan became the source of both speculation and amazement), Ricardo Montalban helps us to set sail today.

We don't often see a ton of Richard Denning sans shirt, but here he is in the company of a doctor from The Crooked Web, a drama about undercover agents trying to solve a WWII crime involving stolen gold.

Cornel Wilde, on the other hand, was something of a physique show-off in quite a number of films. (He barely wore anything in The Naked Prey, as the title suggests.) Here in Storm Fear, he's attended to by his real-life wife and frequent costar Jean Wallace.

We have no great love for the circus, but do tend to enjoy watching movies with high-flyers and acrobats, such as the case here with Tony Curtis in Trapeze.

Woody Strode's role in Spartacus as a towering gladiatorial opponent of Kirk Douglas no doubt inspired later casting choices (including, as a prime example, Peter Mensah in Spartacus: Blood and Sand.)

Strode, a former UCLA football star turned actor with an imposing stature, was lucky to be given a shirt in most of his films! He played in everything from Tarzan and Bomba movies to John Ford westerns.

Here we have Jeffrey Hunter in a makeup test for In Love and War, featuring some partially-healed wounds. The inset shows him in the film, wearing some pajama bottoms, on the side of his bed.

This test reveals (in more ways than one!) the design of Charlton Heston's loincloth for the galley slave scenes in Ben-Hur. Heston could often be found in abbreviated duds like this from the 1950s through the early-1970s.

Here we see the costume being utilized in the famous shipboard sequence (and in the inset, after the boat's sinking with Roman Jack Hawkins, who he saved from drowning.)

What was that? You wanted a bigger, better glimpse of the picture that was inset? Here you go.

It's tough to beat the dreamy John Gavin in color and in a towel from the aforementioned Spartacus. Had I been directing the movie, most of the action would have taken place within this Roman spa/bath!

Lee Van Cleef takes his turn at wearing almost nothing in the low-budget western Captain Apache. Quite a few actors found themselves in this state of (un)dress including Charles Bronson in Chato's Land the year after this one.

On a lighter note, I give you Edson Stroll of McHale's Navy. Click on his name to see a bit more of the well-toned Edson...

Speaking of the Navy, here is a publicity photo featuring several of the sailors - including Ken Clark at far right - from South Pacific. (They seem to have dames on their mind here.)

An alternate pose has our guys still determining that there's "nothing like a dame." Hmmm.....

Behinds the scenes of Cheyenne, burly Clint Walker breaks up his director and costar (Fay Spain?) during an otherwise serious moment.

For us, Clint baby is the ne plus ultra when it comes to handsome, brawny men with hairy chests. He's just IT as far as I'm concerned.

We all know what a superior football player Jim Brown was, but look how even he is dwarfed by Walker in this group shot from The Dirty Dozen.

Stuart Whitman wasn't in Walker's league, but he was still a pretty good looking man, especially in this film - Sands of the Kalahari - which I really love thanks to its combination of plane crash, beefcake, scenery and beautiful '60s color. Oh, and savage monkeys on the prowl, too!

Which is leaner, the surfboard or Robbie Benson? The last I heard, Benson was teaching in the theatre department of Indiana University.

Kurt Russell shows off his bare essentials from one of his movies.

It's sort of hard to move part all of Ricky Martin's hair to notice the torso, but you'll eventually see it.

I avoided Joey Lawrence like the plague when he was on Blossom, but once he cut his hair like this (for a short-lived show called Brotherly Love), I paid a bit more attention. This lean look was never my type, but I know it's someone's!

I might have seen maybe one episode, two at most, of Baywatch in my life, but from what I've ever seen from the show David Chokachi was my favorite. I really got to know of him through the tacky reality series Confessions of a Teen Idol, but also saw him on the (cheesy) retread of Battle of the Network Stars.

Who'd a thunk that pale, slim Zac Efron would eventually develop into this muscle-bound man? Again this is not my type, but at least he's got some hair on his chest and it may be of interest to some of you.

My jaw hit the floor the first time I ever actually saw Efron in anything after years of avoidance (That Awkward Moment) and actually enjoyed him! I've since seen other movies of his and been equally surprised at my lack of hatred. LOL

I leave you with this remarkable (and apparently real!) gag shot of another big favorite, Hugh O'Brian, having fun during a photo shoot for The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. Love the strategic use of his marshal's badge! Till me meet again...!