Varietal Spice

They say variety is the spice of life? Then I have a few spice girls to show you today. This post started out as a visual tribute to the sometimes elaborate hair of female guests on 1960s variety shows, but soon evolved into a general appreciation of the whole package: the carefully coiffed 'dos, the elegant gowns, the sparse yet glamorous sets, colorful lighting, etc... For the most part, variety shows (ala The Ed Sullivan Show, Hollywood Palace, etc...) are dead now, but in their hey-day one could spot a lovely lady coming out on stage all decked out and singing a song or dancing. Like many folks, I love scampering through youtube and coming upon things like this. Bless the people who take care to upload them. Sometimes it's amazing, sometimes less so, but they nearly always LOOK interesting! Ha ha!  I've attached links so that you can witness the performances yourselves should you wish to.

Today's cover girl for this post is Miss Barbara Eden, romping around to the strains of "Spinning Wheel!"

Many a teen-aged boy dreamed of Jeannie (and a few probably dreamed of BEING Jeannie! - ha ha!)

Here she is in an earlier appearance, singing "Big Beautiful Ball" and sporting some of that piled-high hair we love so much.

This is the one that actually started the whole idea off. One look at Miss Julie London's crown of tresses and false eyelashes and I was all in! She's singing "Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast."

Miss Shirley Jones starts off this number in a sleek, but conventional '60s hairstyle and wedding dress, but soon morphs into a green gown and a higher stacked coiffure. (As an aside, I have always adored pale green and purple as a color combination.)

The song is "Love Walked In." Sadly, I was unable to get a look at this creation from the back.

Variety show staple Miss Leslie Uggams sports a fairly high hairpiece here.

She's belting out "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues." I just love the beaded detailing on her gown.

It's Christmas in July as Miss Florence Henderson (Mrs. Brady) performs a medley while bedecked in period wear and an elaborate hairdo.

Generally, I'd rather take a bullet than listen to children singing, especially in unison as happens for much of this... Thank God we can at least appreciate Flo's lengthy curls.

Miss Nancy Wilson (who sang the jaunty theme song for one of our guilt pleasures, Love Has Many Faces, 1965) is icy blue with Andy Williams here.

Here are some close-ups of her colorful eye makeup as she's performing "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" with Williams.

Miss Diana Ross (I'm bound legally to refer to her that way! LOL) along with The Supremes joined up with The Temptations for a mash-up. They took turns singing songs made popular by the other group!

Gladys Knight and the Pips perform "Baby I Need Your Lovin'" which is obscured throughout by psychedelic effects.

Miss Knight generally wore her hair long with maybe some height at the top, thus this piled-up, curly do is something of a departure for her.

Miss Ann-Margret does one of her characteristically sultry performances in a slinky pink gown with a bejeweled neckline.

She does "The Look of You" and later "Put a Little Love in Your Heart." What sends this over the top for me is her hooty bedazzled microphone!

Now entering the Miss Bobbie Gentry wing of this exhibit. She croons "Let it Be Me" with Glen Campbell.

I love her eyelashes and hair, but get a load of the shoes!

Here, she performed an entire medley with Bobby Darin in profile! The two remain nose-to-nose throughout. (For some reason he is afforded a brief close-up from another angle, but she isn't...!)

This is the way most of us recall Gentry if we do at all. Looking as if she's just auditioned for either Valley of the Dolls (1967) or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), we adore her hair, her lashes, her ensemble and, well, just all of it! She's performing a song called "Touch 'Em With Love."

Arguably, her most famous numbers, though, were "Fancy," later remade with success by Reba McIntire and, as seen here, "Ode to Billie Joe." Her makeup here does Sharon Tate proud!

The talented songwriter-producer and vocalist abruptly retired in 1978 after having come up against behind-the-scenes sexism and a spate of lackluster sales of her work and is, thus, unjustly forgotten by many.

Heading old school for a moment, we catch up with Miss Ginger Rogers, hoofing her way through "That's How Young I Feel" and "Dancing," both from Jerry Herman shows she performed on stage (Mame and Hello Dolly!) No close-ups of Ginge in this instance.

With it's teal and kelly green colors and the gazebo, this set brings to mind the Promenade Room from my beloved The Towering Inferno (1974), but the attraction here is Miss Alice Faye singing a medley of songs.

This set is punctuated with some slick costume augmentations and a fair amount of choreography for the fifty-one year-old performer. Love the necklace!

Another frequent variety show performer was Miss Peggy Lee. Here, she is doing "Walking Happy," followed by "Little Girl Blue."

At this time, she was elegant and glitzy (and, of course, very blonde.) Lee perfected a style that was very stationary and quiet. Reportedly, she adopted this method while singing in a noisy, hectic supper club wherein she barely sang out in order to force people to silence themselves and listen in order to hear her!

If you look at later appearances, she really went off the rails with her hair, makeup and clothing, eventually appearing quite alien! But, here, she was still pretty lovely.

Here we find Miss Lee in one of those cascading Grecian hairstyles we live for! She and Dean Martin are engaged in a medley.

Rounding third and heading for home, I give you this. I nearly died when I saw it. Not only do I adore the instrumental of "Love is Blue," but I've recently become obsessed with Mitzi Gaynor in her many TV specials. How many things I'm insane about could this clip combine? The song (which she hilariously overdramatizes, but who gives a shit!?), the cool color scheme, the sheer drapes, a dazzling Bob Mackie gown with a mind-boggling neckline and the shapely, always "in it to win it" Gaynor...

Did I mention the neckline of this show-stopping dress?!

No, this is not Bride of Frankenstein (1935) as colorized by Ted Turner... It is my ALL-TIME favorite variety show appearance. I've featured it before many moons ago, but I never tire of it.

It's the jaw-dropping Miss Nancy Ames (another practically forgotten performer who was exceedingly popular in her day.) She sings a really unusual combination of "With a Little Help from My Friends" and "Games People Play." The first time I heard it was sort of shell-shocked. Soon after I began to love it and eventually to crave it! LOL

The powerful alto was charmingly introduced by Engelbert Humperdinck and they proceed to duet, making a gorgeous couple. (She even allows some room in her hairdo for him to rest his chin!) Look at her startlingly beautiful face in close-up...

Ames receded from view in the 1970s to focus on an event planning enterprise (which is still in operation) and it was the television and recording worlds' loss.

We love watching Ames on old episodes of Password (even if she could be a bit of a cheater with gestures!) and in her many variety appearances (the vast majority of which are NOT on youtube), but it is for this neck-bending confection that we place her in The Underworld's highest esteem!

Skywhacked!

The airborne drama Skyjacked came out in 1972 and, though it isn’t a disaster movie in the sense that the plane isn’t crashing, it still belongs in the same basic family due to its all-star format and in-flight setting. Starring (who else?!) Charlton Heston as the pilot, it concerns a passenger jet, which someone onboard has decided to blow up if the crew doesn’t change its course to the destination desired. (I deliberately passed this film up in the somewhat chronological order I’ve been musing about disaster movies in, lest someone might think this is strictly a Heston blog, he was in so many of these types of movies in the 1970s!)

Some posters for the film used the popular (and oft-mentioned here) scheme of boxes with faces of the stars. This one tweaked it a bit by arranging them differently rather than in a row at the bottom. It also strove to project a “whodunit” aspect to the film and, though the movie does indeed take pains to shroud the identity of the hijacker for a fairly significant amount of time, the back of the DVD case gives the mystery away completely! So take care if you wish to be surprised when watching and ignore that until later.

During the 70s, feature films and TV movies continually focused on mid-air crises of all kinds. The Airport series featured its own mad bomber along with a collision with a small private craft, a crash beneath the waters of the Bermuda Triangle and finally a skirmish with heat-seeking missiles (clearly most of the ideas had run out by that time!) Various TV-films dealt with ghosts, crashes into the Everglades, murderers and even one in which a plane flies into a skyscraper! Then there’s the loopy Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (released to video as Starflight One) about a state of the art craft that gets flung into outer space! Check out the old VHS cover here. (Click to enlarge.)

Here, Heston and Co. are on board a passenger jet for Minneapolis when suddenly there are lipstick-written messages (the first one on a mirror in the lavatory!) demanding that the flight plan be rerouted to Anchorage instead or else a bomb will be detonated. Not only does Heston have to contend with a hijacker/bomber, but also he doesn't even know who the culprit is, just that he or she is likely a member of first class. Meanwhile, the camera keeps finding ways to land on various tubes of red lipstick!

This makes the first 30 minutes of the film a bit of a mystery. It also makes for some serious tedium, as the script can't allow viewers to know much about the people on board, lest it become obvious who is or is not the passenger with a screw loose. So the various stars have to maintain a certain level of suspicion about them while also striving to deliver facets of themselves that would make the audience give a care about them. For the most part, they aren’t too successful with this, though the script is probably the main culprit.

Heston was a master at playing these types of square-jawed authority figures and he does well here, even showing some shades of vulnerability at times. Check out the mushroom cloud of smoke he has coming out of his pipe in the cockpit! Hunky former Tarzan Mike Henry plays his co-pilot and the two are in the midst of a love triangle over attractive chief stewardess Yvette Mimieux. Henry is her current lover, though she used to be with Heston. Their past love affair is displayed in some loony, “arty” flashbacks, the kind Airplane! would later make fun of.
Football star-turned-actor Rosey Grier plays a nervous musician who carries a big cello case with him. He’s seated next to clean cut soldier James Brolin, on hiatus from his regular role as Dr. Steven Kiley on Marcus Welby, M.D.”
Confrontational hippie Susan Dey (also on hiatus from her own series The Partridge Family) manages to find time to flirt with sweet Nicholas Hammond. We all remember Hammond, of course, from his appearance as Friedrich Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. He’s on board the flight with his U.S. senator father Walter Pidgeon. Pidgeon attempts in vain to inject weight into his paper-thin part.

Ross Elliott and Jeanne Crain as a married couple are so much furniture, their roles are so un-fleshed-out. (Crain, who lived for three more decades afterwards, never stepped before a movie camera again after this.) At least Mariette Hartley gets a chance to fret some in her clichéd role of the panicky pregnant woman (and orders a Bloody Mary to drink! Take that PC people.) Claude Akins appears in a role George Kennedy would likely have played if he hadn't been stretched so thin in virtually every other disaster film of the decade. Leslie Uggams, in her film debut, plays a confident stewardess whose final line is amusing if a bit unlikely.

People keep misunderstanding each other's intentions and motives in an effort to build some mystery about the bomber. Sadly, this just isn't handled well enough to work to the film's advantage. When the hijacker is revealed, things take on a more tense feeling, but there are really very few times when anyone in this movie acts like a real person. The passengers react to the news of a hijacking the way they might react to finding that the plane is out of smokehouse almonds. At least in Airport, the star-studded cast members each got a chance to shine, even if some of the stories were silly. Here, the characters are almost strictly cardboard props.

What's neat about the film are its serene production design and color scheme, its aerial photography, its unusual music score, its generally serious tone and its eclectic cast of familiar faces. I live for those cool, cadet blue stewardess uniforms that once were the norm, though movies always seemed to contain even more sharp ones than real life.

Unfortunately, the script has to count as a debit as it fails to generate any characters of particular interest or depth. The editing and continuity on the film is also poor. Chunks of activity seem to have been left out such as Henry bandaging Mimieux's cut. Also, Mimieux's hair goes from loose to pulled-back to loose within moments.

Though the film is not nearly campy enough to be funny throughout (despite being released by Warner Brothers as a "Cult Camp Classic"), there are a couple of giggles along the way such as when one passenger is nearly frozen and has a hair full of frost or when busy character actor John Fiedler has his voice hilariously and ludicrously over- dubbed. There's a lack of urgency to the movie, typified by (the still-lovely) Crain when she has a chance to get off the plane and decides to smooth out the suede in her hat instead. It's doubtful that anyone but die-hard buffs will find this anything much beyond tiresome, but at least it isn't an over-the-top mess like so many of today's movies.