Help! I'm Having a Dack Attack!

I profile a good many hunks at this site and if I didn’t have some sort of affection for them or attraction to them I wouldn’t bother. Today’s guy, Dack Rambo, is one whose looks and manner thoroughly blew my pre-teen and teenage mind and who remains one of the men I always love to watch in whatever project of his happens to be on or available. Though it all ended badly, in more ways than one, he was, for a time, the go-to guest star for 70s TV.

Born Norman Rambo to a California farm family in 1941, he was a twin. Brother Orman (Jesus… Orman and Norman? Really?) and he were handsome, hard-working young men of incredible closeness. Though they had certain aspirations for escaping their lives and making a success in show business, they were 21 before anything came to fruition.

Loretta Young, once a tremendously successful movie star, but by the late 50s a significant TV personality, had ended her highly popular anthology series The Loretta Young Show (the most prominent feature of which was her darting into a room at the start and swirling her latest clothing confection as she introduced that night's story) and was now preparing The New Loretta Young Show. (Where do they get these astonishingly creative titles?) She picked Orman and Norman (newly christened Dirk and Dack, and they were called that on the program as well) Rambo to play her twin sons. Their primary distinction was a prominent mole on Dack’s lower left cheek.
The twins were briefly represented by notorious agent Henry Willson who chose their new names as part of a plan to make them the next singing sensation (a la Jan and Dean), but the relationship quickly soured and they turned to acting strictly rather than singing at all. Do we think this issue of Screen Life magazine is up my alley or what?! Dack, Stella Stevens and Faye Dunaway all on the cover! I was born too late.
The New Loretta Young Show only ran one season, but it was a big step for the young men, Dirk was quoted as saying that he came off the cotton fields right into a Hollywood acting career. Following the cancellation, it took a little while longer for the guys to land more work, but eventually Dirk won parts on The Virginian and Dragnet while Dack was placed with multi-Oscar-winning actor Walter Brennan in the series The Guns of Will Sonnett.

Brennan was one of the all-time scene-stealing character actors, but rather than run roughshod over young Dirk, he taught the young actor a lot, especially regarding camera angles and the use of eyes. Rambo’s newfound success on the series was tempered by news so tragic that Dack never really got over it. His brother Dirk, his self-confessed other half, was killed by a drunk driver at the age of 25.

Rambo discussed his brother and himself as being so close that there was hardly the need to speak to each other apart from only the most superficial of topics. They were that commensurate with each other.

In the wake of Will Sonnett, Rambo was selected to work in Jerry Lewis’s latest comedic film, a goof on WWII called Which Way to the Front?, that featured Lewis as a would-be Hitler assassin. Panned by critics and mostly ignored by audiences, the movie died a quick death and marked the end of Lewis in the cinema for a time. That’s Dack in the middle with an uncharacteristically goateed Lewis on the right.

Soon after, Dack guest-starred on the highly popular western series Gunsmoke. His appearance was well thought of enough to warrant him being brought back as a different character for a two-part episode that would serve as the pilot for another series. He played a delinquent, but good-hearted, punk who is tamed by an irascible, scraggly old woman played by Jeanette Nolan (who looks in this shot as if she took her teeth out!) The very brief series that followed was named for her character Dirty Sally.
In Rambo’s career, he starred in a large number of pilots, very few of which were picked up as series. In 1971, he did River of Gold with Roger Davis which concerned treasure seeking divers. Davis, for those who don’t know, was married to Jaclyn Smith before her Charlie’s Angels days. The pilot movie also featured Suzanne Pleshette and Oscar-winner Ray Milland, though Milland thought little of the male leads and said so! To be fair, Rambo said of himself that at the start of his career he was driven and arrogant, so perhaps Milland had grounds to be disgruntled.

Other TV followed until Dack was cast in a moody revenge flick called Nightmare Honeymoon to be directed by Nicholas Roeg. This was a step up for him in terms of the caliber of people he was working for, but, sadly, Roeg departed the film after only five days of shooting. The result was therefore far less creatively satisfying than he had anticipated it would be.

All about a newly married couple who witness a mafia crime and then are subjected to violence upon themselves, he got the chance to play the lead in a feature film at least, though there would be very few of those in his future. TV would continue to be his bread and butter.
Popular shows such as Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, Marcus Welby, M.D. and The Rookies made use of his looks and talent. Also, Yvette Mimieux utilized him in a TV movie she had written for herself. Hit Lady gave her a meaty role, but put the hunky Rambo in a sort of “girlfriend’ role. At least there was a scene in which she snuggled up to him from behind and his (ungodly tight) jeans were open, showing off his cute, white underwear!

Another of his failed pilots was Good Against Evil, which would have had him and his sidekick fighting off the Devil every week. In 1977, he played the part of Andros on The New Adventures of Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter. His beauteous eyes and wavy hair made him the sort of alien that anyone would gladly be probed by, though his uniform stressed body coverage more than sexiness. Incidentally, this same character had been portrayed the season before by the far older, white-haired actor Tim O’Connor!

One of Dack’s pilots A Double Life was finally picked up as a series. The series went by the name Sword of Justice and concerned a millionaire who is wrongly convicted of extortion and imprisoned. While there, he develops all sorts of skills that help him later when he’s released and goes about righting various wrongs, always leaving a signature playing card at the scene.

While he had all the makings of an appealing series lead including looks, agility and some seriously sensual lips, the show only limped along for ten episodes before it was canned. While I am always happy to watch Dack do just about anything, it would take just about anything I ever desired to get me to tolerate the two freakish looking actors he was paired with for this unfortunate show! When just the publicity stills are annoying, you know you’re in trouble.
He continued to work on other series (notably a half dozen eps of Fantasy Island) and TV movies and pilots (with a teensy, uncredited part in George Cukor’s last feature film, Rich and Famous) until taking a role on the daytime serial All My Children. That stint came to an end when he was put to use in another TV show, the glossy nighttime soap Paper Dolls.

In 1984, I was a naïve (yes!) 17 year-old and, to me, Dack Rambo epitomized the all the seductive, carnal charms that a man could offer. I recall watching agape as Rambo would canoodle in the hot tub that was situated in the OFFICE of Morgan Fairchild’s character, a modeling agent hilariously named Racine. The pair would frequently discuss plans and machinations as they bubbled and bobbed around in there.

Rambo maintained that, as a former farm boy, he never felt comfortable in a suit, but he nonetheless wore expensive clothes beautifully and seemed to exude an inherent sense of up to the second style. Now, of course, I would likely look back at his and Morgan’s hot tub exploits and scream with laughter, but at the time, he was beyond hot.

Paper Dolls was not meant to be and folded up after thirteen episodes. Its demise happened to coincide somewhat closely with that of one of primetime soaps’ most beloved characters, Bobby Ewing of Dallas. Star Patrick Duffy decided to leave the still popular show and was killed in a bloody murder by car.

To fill the void he was leaving, the producers of Dallas brought in Dack to play long-lost cousin Jack Ewing (in an almost science-fiction level piece of casting, they also hired big-mouthed Jennilee Harrison as Rambo’s sister! Right…) Things went swimmingly at first and Rambo gave J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) some cause for concern. He also had a tendency to lounge about poolside wearing a Speedo. Dack’s tightly packed Speedos always seemed as if they had to have been made out of some special substance, lest they burst apart at the first twitch.

Unfortunately, after one season, Duffy decided he wasn’t going to get the big movie career he’d hoped for and came back, rendering the entire season Rambo was on into nothing but an extended dream!! Still under contract, Rambo’s character had to be written in AGAIN, as if he had never been there and since Duffy was back, there was precious little for him to even do. He sported blonde highlights for his second season there in order to emphasize a rebirth on the show, but instead he was underused and, according to him, discriminated against because of his sexual lifestyle. The good ol’ boys behind the scenes of the show (and some in front of the camera) allegedly made him the brunt of various derogatory remarks and actions. When they wrote him out, he was glad to go, but sad at how it had ended.

Rambo later identified himself as a (tres chic?) bisexual, though he unquestionably was associating more with men than women when it came to sex and he lived a wild, indulgent life. To me (and, one assumes, to the countless viewers who watched him on TV for so many, many hours), he never came off as particularly effeminate or readily, identifiably gay, but there’s no denying that in this shot of him at an airport in the 80s, he could make JM J Bullock seem like Paul Bunyan! I include it, though, because it is one of the rare pictures that demonstrate the otherworldly bulge that he carried in his jeans. As usual, you can click on it to, er, make it bigger. Surprisingly, in the bulk of his acting projects, this was not typically exploited very much, though perhaps the on-set censors made it clear that Dack Jr. was not gonna see any airtime!
Aaron Spelling shows, such as The Love Boat (that's Barbi Benton with him above) and Hotel, along with Murder, She Wrote, gave Dack enough work to keep his face out there, but in time he was back on daytime TV, this time on Another World. And he was quite successful there, for a while. In 1991, he was diagnosed with AIDS and willingly retired from the program. By now, his wavy hair snow white, he did a complete 180 and never acted again. Instead, he spoke candidly all over the nation, trying to spread information about the disease and sharing some of his own story. Less positive, at least from my point of view, was his association with televangelists, with whom he proclaimed a love of God and a dedication to the work of TV preachers. He did not, however, apologize for the approach he had taken to life.

It was all pretty short-lived, though. Dack died from complications of the disease in March of 1994. He was 52. In those days, especially in the prior decade, AIDS was a near-certain death sentence and people fled from it in fear. He is to be admired, at least, for trying to spend his last days educating anyone he could about it.

More than one friend of his has suggested that the sudden, numbing death of his beloved twin set Dack on a course of hedonism and lack of personal accountability that was going to lead to a downfall of some sort eventually no matter what. However, there was no way that Dack could know that his sexual activity was going to lead to his death. I tend to think that while, yes, he was wounded to the core by Dirk’s passing, he was also a very desirable man who had the benefit of fame to draw practically anyone he wanted to him. God knows had he looked at me with those eyes I’d have shoved my grandmother down a San Francisco street in a wheelchair just to hold his hand!

Dack Rambo leaves behind precious little cinematic legacy, but for those who like to watch classic TV shows and TV movies, his prolific contributions there live on. As far as I’m concerned, no still photo does him justice. He has to be watched in action and listened to (his warm voice had just a hint of twang to it) in order for his charm to be fully appreciated.

White Supremacy

There’s a bit of a frenzy going on these days with our featured actress Miss Betty White. Despite the fact that she’s pushing 90, she is every bit as popular as she ever was and, as a result, the public basically cried out that she MUST be a guest host on Saturday Night Live. The producers took heed of this grassroots movement and she will do the honors on May 8th. It will be the first time I will have bothered to tune into the program in years.

Betty White was born just that, Betty Marion White, not Elizabeth, in Oak Park, Illinois in 1922 to doting parents. They didn’t have a tremendous amount of money, but they had affection, humor and always a collection of dogs in and around their home. Eventually, they moved to Los Angeles and Betty was raised in the shadow of the major Hollywood Studios. However, after briefly considering opera, she had goals of being a writer rather than an actress until she wrote a play for school, cast herself in the lead and was bit by the bug.

Shortly after high school, she took part in an early television broadcast, one that, according to her was like “science fiction” as the signal was delivered all the way from the 6th floor of a building to the ground! During WWII, Betty served in a volunteer organization, complete with uniform, displaying the type of sacrifice and dedication to home and flag that is all but extinct amongst a great many of the people who live in the US now.

Not long after the war was over, Betty was married twice briefly, both times unsuccessfully, knowing in her heart that a career was what she really craved more than housework or children. These failures, in her eyes, would put her off the notion of marriage for a long time.

Now single, Miss White started working in television on a local (L.A.) level, often logging 33 hours a week as a live TV hostess! Think about that… She practically lived on TV and this doesn’t count any of the prep time beforehand or even the additional variety show that she worked on every weeknight for a time! Always a multi-tasker, she continued to do informational programming (including the production end, in which she was a female pioneer) even as she was granted her own sitcom Life With Elizabeth.

Life With Elizabeth ran from 1952 – 1955 and was eventually syndicated nationally, giving her a far broader audience than she had enjoyed while working endlessly on the Los Angeles station. It’s almost impossible to count how many hours of TV White delivered while appearing as a sitcom actress, a variety and talk show hostess, a game show panelist and even the commentator for the Tournament of Roses Parade.
Not one to pigeonhole herself, she even won a role in formidable director Otto Preminger’s 1962 film Advise and Consent, as a female senator. Still, during the bulk of the 60s, White was a game show staple, appearing on To Tell the Truth, What’s My Line? and, most importantly, Password. Betty has appeared on every incarnation of Password right up to the crappy recent one with Regis Philbin in which she helped a contestant win $100,000! Through Password, she would connect with the man who became the great partner of her life, the original host of the show Allen Ludden.

Due to her two previous divorces, it took a lot of needling to get Betty to take the plunge again, but she did and it resulted in almost 18 blissful years of marriage for her. She and Allen forged a family with his three children from a deceased wife and a home full of various dogs, which Betty has never been without. Soon, she converted Allen into an animal lover as well and they appeared together on her 1971 series The Pet Set and, later, on The Liar's Club. The couple also worked together in stage productions around the US, notably Critic’s Choice and Guys and Dolls.

Betty became a frequent guest on Match Game as well and could always be counted on for clever answers, often with a sly double meaning. She was never, ever vulgar, but very knowing, amusing, vivacious and sharp. Occasionally, her well-known adoration of animals would become the brunt of a joke and she would feign (or maybe not feign!) horror. One episode had her playfully doing the start of a striptease while bump ‘n grind music played. She traded barbs with pal Brett Somers and almost became a sort of honorary fourth regular on the six-person celebrity panel.

Ludden and White had a strong friendship with network executive Grant Tinker and his wife, TV superstar Mary Tyler Moore. They regularly dined together, played games and so on. When some of Moore’s costars from The Mary Tyler Moore Show were preparing to spin-off into their own successful series, there would a void left on the program, so they decided to integrate another character. Producers decided to go for a “Betty White type,” but one in which the effervescent, cheery outward persona actually hid a devious, egocentric and sexually voracious inner self. Finally, when casting such a role became more of a trial than the powers that be anticipated, Moore asked them why they didn’t just ask BETTY WHITE!
Betty appeared on the show, sporting hair much lighter than she’d worn it in the previous couple of decades, and was an instant smash. She played Sue Ann Nivens, a happy homemaker personality who did on air demonstrations of cooking and crafts while delighting in cheerily deriding Mary’s character, emasculating Murray (played by Gavin MacLeod) and flirting heavily with boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner.) One memorable episode had MacLeod playing dress dummy for a wedding gown, enduring everything he could until finally he plopped White ass-first into the wedding cake meant for the segment. White, as only she could, took it like a trooper, licking her finger and stating that it could have used more vanilla.

This series went out on a very high note and could have continued for years longer, but Moore wished to stop it before the success was bled dry and the creative juices had a chance to grow stagnant. The final episode involved the primary cast, including White tearfully hugging one another goodbye while shuffling across the floor en masse to the box of Kleenexes that was nearby. White was sad to see such a plum role end, but she was nominated for an Emmy three times and won twice!

Like most of the other people from that series, she was quickly given her own show with the wildly creative title The Betty White Show. She played the unlikely part of a TV actress starring on a police series called “Undercover Woman.” Her costar was John Hillerman, who would later go on to success as the employer of Magnum P.I. Her Moore costar Georgia Engel appeared in this series as well. Though Betty always gave (and gives!) 110% to any project, this cheap-looking, unfunny show died a pretty quick death.

On the subject of death, Betty’s soul mate Allen Ludden died of cancer in 1981, robbing the couple of a lot of fun years ahead. White has scarcely had a slow moment in her career, but for a little while did limit her projects before diving back in to the work she adored, work she knew would keep her sane during this unhappy time.

In 1983, White became the first woman to win an Emmy for hosting a game show, the short-lived series Just Men! It featured two female contestants being asked to guess details about seven male celebrities who were present on the set with correct answers providing keys, one of which would open a new car!

White had been a frequent guest star on the wildly popular The Carol Burnett Show, sometimes appearing in the “Family” sketches as Eunice’s uppity sister Ellen. Later, when Vicki Lawrence began the series Mama’s Family (without the character of Eunice), White appeared quite a few times as Ellen, even working a little bit with Rue McClanahan, who played Lawrence’s sister Aunt Fran for one season. These two actresses would soon be reunited in a far greener pasture.

Susan Harris, who had written the popular series Soap and had contributed episodes to such acclaimed series as All in the Family and Maude, came up with a pilot script for an unusual series focusing on four older women, all either widowed or divorced, who cohabitate in a house in Miami, Florida. Called The Golden Girls, White was brought in to read for the sassy, sexy, southern belle Blanche, a character well within the range she had shown previously, in fact almost a combination of Sue Ann and Ellen. McClanahan, likewise, was cast in the role of Rose, a variation on the ditz Vivian she had portrayed on Maude.

She won the part, but right before the pilot was filmed, the director suggested that White and McClanahan switch roles in order to play against type and mix things up. This thrilled McClanahan who was dying to play Blanche, but confused White who felt she didn’t “get” Rose at all. Harris explained the part to her, giving her key information on how to play the role and from then on she soared. Her endearing naiveté and loony St. Olaf stories kept audiences screaming. In the attached photo, do we think Blanche could get the dang kitchen cabinets fixed a little better??

The Golden Girls ran for seven seasons and White was nominated for an Emmy every one of them. She won the first time she was nominated and though eventually all four of the stars received an Emmy apiece, the fact that she won before top-billed Bea Arthur seemed to cast a pall over things according to White’s autobiography. Rumors have persisted to this day of a feud between the two ladies with hearty evidence on both sides (that there was or wasn’t one.) Their styles of acting and interacting with the studio audience were vastly different, causing some degree of tension. As the show progressed, they had less and less interaction onscreen and, later, White and Arthur frequently declined to participate in videographies of one another or mention each other beyond a brief sentence. (Don’t let the crafty editors of Intimate Portrait fool you. Betty’s clips in Bea’s portrait were lifted from her own and have no mention of Bea at all in them.) Yet Arthur always refused to leave for lunch unless White was ready to come as well and insisted that she sit with her.

For my part, I think they were just too different to fully get along and also had incompatible feelings regarding their work. Bea always had to be lured into things, often preferring to stay home, and was quick to move on while Betty was a trooper and a workhorse, always ready to keep things going forever. They seem to have buried whatever hatchet may have been present when they, with Rue, accepted an award from TVLand in 2008, though perhaps they just grinned and bore it for the fans’ sake. It’s sad to think of these two disliking one another because I adore them both.

The show was a stunning success, spending five of its seven seasons in the top ten and gaining legions of fans, even after cancellation, due to the endless, multitudinous reruns, primarily on Lifetime TV (and later on Women’s Entertainment and Hallmark, in increasingly butchered versions.) When, like Mary Tyler Moore, Arthur decided to depart the series while it was still a reasonable success (and it, like Moore, went out with a memorable tear-filled hugfest), White, McClanahan and Estelle Getty made the unwise decision to try to continue in the utterly horrendous The Golden Palace. Not only was the dynamic destroyed by the absence of Arthur’s dry character, but also the setting was entirely new (and inane.) It was cancelled after limping along for most of a season.

In the wake of this memorable role, White stayed busier than ever before. Not only did she continue volunteering at The Los Angeles Zoo, but tirelessly helped with other animal welfare organizations as well. Career-wise, she sought all sorts of roles that would help shake off the looniness and less-than-bright qualities that she displayed so well as Rose. She turned up in the Morgan Freeman-Christian Slater action flick Hard Rain. She and Red Buttons worked as a couple in the Bruce Willis-Michelle Pfeiffer film The Story of Us.

Then she blew the lid off of her image as a foul-mouthed, cranky farmwoman in the giant crocodile thriller Lake Placid. This was followed a few years later by her portrayal of a snooty, racist neighbor in the Steve Martin-Queen Latifah comedy Bringing Down the House. Along the way have been countless guest appearances on popular series, comedic dramatic, talk and even stints on daytime soap operas such as The Bold and the Beautiful, on which she played Susan Flannery’s troublesome mother. She’s been nominated for five more Emmy’s since the end of Girls, winning once more for a flamboyant role on The John Larroquette Show.

Miss White was always noted for her comic gifts and her effortlessly accessible persona. Her quick wit (aided by a lifetime of games and a mastery of words) was hard to top. Besides this, however, she possesses an unheralded gift for drama as well. During Girls, for example, she was called upon occasionally to illustrate some sensitive social situation or issue and was always top-notch, able to elicit emotion, even tears, from viewers.

Her career has been a startling, stunning success, but she is STILL on the go! She had a featured role in Sandra Bullock’s popular film The Proposal, still making audiences howl as she searched her old wedding dress, with Bullock in it, for the breasts, comparing the task to an “Easter Egg Hunt!” Bullock had the honor of presenting Miss White with a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this year and White was, again, sharp as a tack, hilarious, humble, mischievous, witty and somehow poignant.
Now comes the announcement that not only will she be hosting SNL, but she’s also about to costar in yet another sitcom! She will be playing the snappy, combative housekeeper to a threesome of L.A. transplants living in Cleveland. The TVLand series Hot in Cleveland (of which ten episodes have been ordered) stars Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick and, while it may not look entirely promising, one thing is positive. Betty White will make every moment of hers count.

Miss Betty White IS television. She’s literally been there from the start and taken part in virtually every type of production possible. What’s really amazing is that she was already 28 years old when she started to really get going. Had she not taken time off for civic duty and marriage, she could have (and surely would have) accomplished even more, though what she did do was more than any other human could dream of.

Do yourself a favor when you find you have the time and watch her Archive of American Television interview (presented in several sections on youtube.com.) Part one is linked below. This lady, my friends, is a national treasure!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QqbgF1DtEw

Back in the Swim of Things!

Okay. Let me just say that my brief time away from The Underworld, in which I tackled the theatre company newsletter, the musical play critique, my taxes and an avalanche of WORK was, in every way, far more aggravating and draining than I had ever anticipated! However, I am all done (well, not with work, but with the other extraneous “hazardous duties”) and am glad to be back doing my thing here.

New Year’s Eve, I stumbled upon an old acquaintance (one I hadn’t seen in more than a few years) at a party and, being that it was NYE, I was yammering on about The Poseidon Adventure. He absolutely floored me when he said that he’d just been reading about the movie THAT DAY and where do you think he’d been? RIGHT HERE! Since then, he’s revisited here a time or two and become interested in a few of the disaster genre films I have profiled. His favorite types of movies deal with the ocean, so, Jimbo, this oddity is for you, the title of which seems quite appropriate for this site.

The Neptune Factor, released in 1973, is a movie that I’d never even heard of until I was in my early 20s and is one that I waited many years to finally see (November of 2007, to be precise!) Produced during the early swell of the 1970s disaster movie cycle, this Canadian-made adventure film combines elements from that genre along with a little sci-fi. (Lalo Schifrin's score, notably in the opening, seems hell-bent on ripping off John Williams' one for Poseidon.)

The quite thrilling poster art for the film wrote checks that the actual movie never had a prayer of cashing! Elaborate scenes of mammoth sea life attacking divers and their underwater vessels might have put a few butts in the seats at first, but once word spread about what the reality of the movie was like, attendance trickled away.

Check out these lobby cards, cards which are generally meant to depict stolen moments from the actual movie, not just reproductions of the conceptual artwork! The distributors didn’t dare show what these scenes (some of which have no representation in the flick anyway!) looked like in the actual picture or no one would have bought a ticket! You can get the same effect of the giant fish in The Neptune Factor by going to Petland and pressing your face against the glass as close as you can get it.

To outline the basic premise, an undersea research lab charged with investigating the cause of earthquakes gets some firsthand data when a tremor rocks the ocean floor, sending the lab careening into a deep crevice. On the surface, doctors Walter Pidgeon and (the ever-busy) Yvette Mimieux, along with divers Ernest Borgnine and Donnelly Rhodes, attempt to locate the lab along with its three inhabitants, one of who is Mimieux's drippy, crooked-faced, fish-lipped boyfriend.

For a millisecond, it seems like there might be a dollop of beefcake involved in this film (and it surely couldn’t have hurt!) The divers tend to roam around inside their lab with their suits unzipped to their abdomen. However, most of them are either unattractive or otherwise hunk-resistant. The one shown here is probably the cutest, and I do like his hairy moobs, but his personality is grating, his hips are ginormous and he’s scarcely seen again after this anyway.

With time running out in the wake of the accident (the lab only has seven days worth of life support) and with no real clues to the lab's whereabouts, they call in Ben Gazzara, who operates a special deepwater sub called Neptune. With considerable difficulty and conflict, they discover that the lab has slipped far beneath the normal realm of exploration, meaning that Neptune must go to places heretofore never witnessed by man.

Once there, they find that the deepest recesses of the ocean contain massive, over-sized fish and sea life, thanks to the warmth emitted from nearby volcanic fissures, creatures that severely obstruct the crew's chances of retrieving the men they're searching for!

Pidgeon, who had just appeared previously with Mimieux in Skyjacked, is far beyond the peak of his talents here, often seeming befuddled and dispassionate, despite his inherent likeability from decades of prior screen triumphs. He kept working rather steadily about five years longer, but, sadly, would be dead in a decade due to a series of strokes.

Borgnine is markedly heavier than he was just one year earlier in The Poseidon Adventure, though, hysterically, his stunt double is notably more slender. His performance is almost reserved in contrast to some of his other, more bombastic, portrayals and he doesn't embarrass himself (even if he is not the first person who comes to mind as a deep sea diver!)

Mimieux is attractive, but hasn't got much to do besides look worried, stunned, awestruck and/or dazed most of the time. She does have a scuba scene in which the depth gets to her and she starts getting all loopy and disoriented. I can’t decide if she somehow wound up in a disproportionate number of movies that I happen to be attracted to or if she was, literally, placed in every single motion picture produced from 1960 to 1979.

New York actor Gazzara is horribly miscast and gives a stoic, wooden performance topped off with an atrocious Atlanta, GA accent. An actor who had some seriously challenging and memorable stage roles (including Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) as well as film parts (The Strange One and Anatomy of a Murder), a lot of people find him sexy. I can’t say I’m one of them, though, especially here.

Rhodes (far right in the photo below) is another one without a lot to do other than follow orders, but he retains his likable persona. He’s best remembered, in The Underworld at least, for playing one of Blanche Devereaux’s kindest and most appealing boyfriends in a single episode of The Golden Girls. (He was Jake, the caterer, who Blanche thought was beneath her until it was too late.) He’s otherwise known for a stint on Soap and that recent Battlestar Galactica redux, among many other things.

The film has been roundly criticized from its release right up to the present for its effects concerning the "giant" fish (actually regular old sea life and tropical fish projected UP CLOSE against the portals of the Neptune) and that aspect of the film is definitely preposterous, corny and poorly handled. However, there is still considerable tension and some otherwise fine miniature work and underwater photography. It must be said that the miniature work isn’t always flawless. Check out this horrendous publicity still in which some creatures (guppies?!) are attacking what looks to be a Neptune keychain…

Other times, the model work is more passable, as this blue-tinged snapshot demonstrates.
Another issue is the amount of light and clarity of the water at these murky depths and the premise that men can simply emerge from their vessels and scuba dive in pressures that are that intense.

One thing that robs the film of emotional impact is the fact that the audience barely gets to meet the trapped technicians before they disappear into the crevice and their plight is never shown again through the most of the duration of the film. Also, the finale is rushed, murky and very poorly handled. Much of it (notably a key attack) is done with a lot of double exposure to save on special effects money and effort.

Continuity is an issue as well. Mimieux appears in a different wash and wear outfit nearly every time she appears, even in the same day. This isn’t The Love Boat fer cryin’ out loud! It's a miracle her clothes don't change within scenes. (Note the way she and Pidgeon seem to wear the same outfits whenever they're on deck, no matter which day it is. Obviously, all of those moments were shot in one afternoon.) See if you can count how manytimes she's shown putting on or taking off a white lab coat.

More unbelievable than the giant fish is the presumption that Borgnine can shimmy in and out of his (oddly ragged considering how new everything else is!) scuba suit in the time allotted. He’s constantly making quick changes when we all know it probably took a small army to shoehorn him into the thing. Methinks the black marks on his suit are where it ruptured slightly from all the tugging and yanking on it!

Mimieux and Borgnine, would reunite a few years later in The Black Hole, another film in which they were confined to a vessel that was tossed into completely new and mysterious surroundings. A scene between the pair, which may have illuminated her relationship with the missing doctor and added a little more emotional depth to the story, was cut prior to release.

Still, there's something endearing about the clean, bright sets, the earnest performers, the mysterious and unusual aspects of the storyline and the mostly effective effects. As another online reviewer adeptly pointed out, in 1973 we had not yet been able to explore the oceans as we can now. The wreck of the Titanic had not yet been discovered. Audiences could suspend their disbelief just a tad more than they can now and they had more patience. That still doesn’t make the trick photography much more convincing, though. How scary is a giant clownfish?

Though it can be a bit tedious at times, it should be a reasonably pleasant viewing for fans of the stars or for fans of 70s disaster flicks. A superlative DVD came out in 2007, making this practically forgotten film available again to those who wish to plumb its depths.

A Missive From the Depths of The Underworld

Greetings, faithful readers. I have the unfortunate displeasure of having to tell you that Poseidon’s Underworld will be going on a (hopefully brief) hiatus. I intend to be back “in the swim of things” by Friday the 26th or Monday the 29th.

I don’t typically share a tremendous amount of my “real” life with you, preferring to keep to the subjects at hand, but the simple truth is that I am completely overwhelmed with activities and responsibilities at the moment. I started this blog last September, partly as a way to fill a ton of down time I was having at work, but in the meantime I have been given two other time-consuming job duties. (I actually have to :::gasp::: WORK at work!) In addition to working full-time, I am a part-time actor - having performed in four productions in the last 12 months, work at a local zoo for 2 months during the holidays, am an adjudicator for a theatrical organization and write the newsletter for a theatre company – five issues a year!

So, in what is the “perfect storm” of coincidences, I have to write the March/April newsletter, write an in-depth critique of a local theatrical production and complete my taxes online (and work!) ALL at the same time over this next week! So I am drowning in activity and, unfortunately, the blog has to temporarily take a backseat.

To the eleven people reading this, please don’t give up on me! I will be back shortly with many more posts on disaster movies, women’s pictures, famous actresses, hunks of yesteryear and any other bizarre spillage from my brain that seeps out. Thank you for visiting the site and I’ll do my best to get back on it ASAP!

Poseidon