Stealing a Few Laughs

Ahhh, the 80s. Fans of this era owe it to themselves to check out today’s featured movie Thief of Hearts. A feast for the senses, the inherent tackiness of the venture goes down like drawn butter while the ears are stimulated by the heavily synthesized score, the eyes are pelted with lots of big, permed hair along with the era’s fashion and the tongue hangs in the breeze at the sight of Cuban sensation Steven Bauer using his chest (and other things) to fertilize a potential film career.

Bauer plays an ex-con who is currently operating a burglary ring with his slimy cohort David Caruso. Caruso is a valet parking attendant who alerts Bauer when wealthy patrons are at his restaurant and, thus, not home. Bauer then descends on the unoccupied houses, making off with artwork, jewelry and other treasures, usually in the $100K range per pop, which was a fair amount of dough in 1984, the year of the film’s release.

John Getz and Barbara Williams play a married couple whose spark has left their relationship. He’s a children’s book author/illustrator and she’s a burgeoning interior designer who has yet to make much of a splash. While he’s busy typing away, she tends to take long baths and write elaborate fantasies in her journals. The journals are so private that she keeps them under lock and key in a small trunk.

When Bauer comes to their home to pilfer everything of value, naturally he takes the case, too, and, as any sensitive, sentimental robber would do, he proceeds to read all of her mushy meanderings. Not content to just read them, he begins to fall for their author and starts making himself over into the type of man she has fantasized about! When she says she hates a man who smokes, he stubs out his ciggie in an ashtray. Later, hilariously, he throws his smokes to the ground whenever he’s about to see her as if she couldn’t still smell it on him!

One day, they meet “accidentally” at a small grocery store where he knocks all of her products (including the obligatory loaf of French bread sticking out of the top of one bag) onto the ground and then is there to help her pick them all up. She’s vulnerable enough from the recent burglary and from the neglectfulness of her dweeby husband, to find herself enthralled by the younger and sexier guy and, before long, she’s in the store desperately hoping that they will bump carts in the night!

Caruso is only interested in robbing more houses (the money from said enterprise mostly going up his nose in cocaine or to pay for prostitutes!) while Bauer is clearly beginning to develop a conscience. This is demonstrated in a scene that has Bauer, besotted with Williams, unable to make it with a hooker he’s been paired with. Wishing for her the same bliss he’s stumbled into, he throws her several hundred-dollar bills, telling her to buy herself an expensive dress. (Oh, and Bauer’s own personal Cuban cigar makes a brief appearance here as he’s slipping on his boxer shorts!)

Eventually, Bauer hires Williams to redecorate his mammoth loft, thus affording her the ability to come and go as she pleases and him the chance to woo her even further. He takes her out on his boat where he rubs suntan lotion on his hairy pecs, treats her to meals at outdoor establishments and shares sunny rides with her in his snappy, red Mercedes convertible.

However, what eventually turns her on and persuades her to throw caution to the wind is a trip to the gun range (!) where she tries out the weapon she found in his desk during a brainstorming session over décor. As she fires away at the target, he begins steadying her hands and before long is undoing her top and her bra! The whirlwind secret courtship now consummated, Little Steven makes another quick appearance as the couple makes love back in his loft.

It goes without saying that their sexcapades are everything they have ever dreamed of and the pair ecstatically writhes in passion unheard of. (The home video VHS version of this movie included an extra minute of "European Release" love scenes that had been deemed to sultry for US audiences.) Publicity photos for the film strive for an artistry that yearns to smooth over the potentially tawdry subject matter.

Her husband Getz begins to suspect that something isn’t right. First, his wife shows up after a business meeting with sunburn in the shape of bra-straps. (Even the viewer should be puzzled by this as she was wearing a heavy sport coat and a flouncy silk blouse on the boat!) Then she won’t let him see the things she’s writing in her diaries. He confides his suspicions to his obese beer & tennis pal George Wendt and they decide to check out Bauer’s background. Wendt (on Cheers at the time) was big even then, struggling to walk up a hillside without passing out, but I can’t pick on the man too much. He told my best friend (female) and me last year that he had never witnessed two people have more fun on a dance floor than we were having that night and I imagine he’s seen a lot of people dance at one bar or another!

Things start to come to an ugly end when Getz figures out who Bauer is while, at the same time, Caruso is angry at Bauer for ceasing the periodic night raids. Williams is distraught at the fact that her dream lover is not what he appears to be. (In yet another insanely hilarious script detail, Bauer had claimed to be heir to a school supply company!)

Things return to the beginning in a way when Getz and Williams come home from an evening out (again at Caruso’s restaurant!) and hear a prowler upstairs. This time, however, Williams has had a little bit of training with a gun (in between the fondling and fornicating that the arousing shooting lessons led to!) Not everyone in the story is going to enjoy a happy ending.

Bearing the extraordinarily surprising production credits of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (the gentlemen who brought the world Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide and The Rock), it should be noted that they first had worked together on Flashdance. Taking that into consideration, it’s less of a jolt.

Bauer had just made a splash the prior year in Scarface as Al Pacino’s right-hand man (scoring a Golden Globe nomination) and seemed poised for big things in the cinema, but it wasn’t really to be. A stormy marriage and divorce from Melanie Griffith and other issues kept him from realizing his full potential. It must be said, though, that he stayed pretty busy nonetheless and won a SAG Award as part of the ensemble of Traffic in 2000. He’s busier now than ever, with roles of one size or another in TWELVE different 2010 films! It’s a logical progression that he got naked in this film when you note that in the publicity shots for Scarface, the corona of his penis head was visible through his pants! The director of that film, Brian de Palma, used Bauer again in 1992's uneven Raising Cain and Bauer also had a teeny part in de Palma's Body Double, which starred his then-wife Griffith.

Canadian Williams hasn’t had quite as much success, but has also kept pretty busy over the years in many TV and movie projects. She married political activist Tom Hayden, who had previously been married to Jane Fonda, in 1993 and, like he did with Fonda, he and Williams adopted a child (he and Fonda also had a son together naturally, actor Troy Garity.) Some reviewers have cited a resemblance to Barbra Streisand or Jennifer Grey. For some reason, I can never quite get it through my head that I’m not watching Patti Lupone in the movie!

Getz (who had starred in The Coen Brothers' cult favorite Blood Simple this year as well) went on to roles in many TV shows and in movies such as The Fly and its sequel as well as the cinematic milestones Men at Work (with Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez) and Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. He's been a familiar face on popular shows such as Mad Men, Grey's Anatomy, Prison Break and Criminal Minds. In this flick, he has a sort of doughy John Ritter quality.

Caruso, of course, later had a massive TV hit in NYPD Blue until he famously left it in midstream to pursue a big-screen career. That avenue having gone awry rather swiftly, he was back on TV in 2002 where he has successfully remained ever since on the series CSI: Miami. Interestingly, his greatest successes on television have been as policemen of some sort while in films he's been most effective when playing slimeballs!

Appearing in a smallish supporting role is Christine Ebersole as Williams design firm partner, a sexually hungry woman who encourages the affair. In what has to be one of the all-time contrasts, she had also appeared that year in the Oscar-winner for Best Picture Amadeus! In the scene that features their amazing design work, a kitchen is shown in which it’s next to impossible to find any of the appliances!! Very innovative. You go to open the refrigerator and can’t locate it. I haven’t studied it all that heavily, but I also never saw a sink and I believe the stools look quite insecure and uncomfortable.

The music throughout is bouncy, fully-electronicized pop by Harold Faltermeyer (with songs by a few others.) He would soon become famous for his hit Beverly Hills Cop theme song “Axel F.” Regarding the title song written by him for this movie and performed by Melissa Manchester over the closing credits, if you listen to it once, you will feel an odd sensation that sort of makes you want to hear it again as well as the desire to hear more brain-slaughtering 80s synth. If you listen to it TWICE, the melody will enter your head like an earwig and for the rest of your life, whenever no other song is in residence in your mind, you will hum it ad nauseum until you die. You have been warned.

On an entirely different note, this entry marks the 100th time that I have put forth my babblings for your alleged enjoyment. It’s hard to believe that I have made that many posts, but the computer doesn’t lie! Actually, I would love to do more, but it is increasingly more difficult to steal the time to devote to this. My company is minus 30% of its staff now and I’m busier and busier with each day. Sadly, for The Underworld, I usually prefer not to work on it very much when I’m home. In any case, thanks, as always, for reading! I still, believe it or not, have plenty of topics to blather on about. It’s something of an accomplishment, I think, that, as a gay man, I made it through 100 posts without mentioning Steel Magnolias and only today mentioned Barbra fleetingly for the first time (I think!) and have only one tag for Judy Garland. Wow.

Couldn't We All Use a Little Moorehead?

Apart from any mystical, witchy attributes that her successful role on Bewitched may have lent to her persona, today’s featured actress was one shrouded in mystery long before and remains that way even now to a great extent. And the interesting thing about it is that that is exactly the way Miss Agnes Moorehead wanted it to be! The actress, who seemed to be able to portray practically any type of character during her busy career, was careful to reveal only as much as she wanted to to whomever she was interacting with, and it wasn’t always the same facets of her persona that were shared.

Born in 1900 (though she later backpedaled the date to 1906), Agnes Moorehead was born just that to a Presbyterian minister in Clinton, Massachusetts. A fanciful and creative child, she would impressively imitate the members of her father’s congregation. Her father wanted her to have a reliable occupation and a strong education and so, though he didn’t discourage her love of acting, he “encouraged” her to a bachelor’s degree in biology. Agnes was a schoolteacher for several years before diving into the acting realm fulltime.

She eventually embarked on a theatre career, though one that had its share of dry spells. A spate of particularly rough times caused her to go hungry for several days and, from that, she learned the value of a dollar. In 1930, she was married for the first time (a marriage which lasted until 1952) and she found success working in radio dramas. Radio was a milieu in which Miss Moorehead thrived. Always one possessing a distinctive, yet magically varied and skillful, voice, she swiftly became a favorite with producers in the field, not to mention audiences. One of her greatest successes was Sorry, Wrong Number, which she performed many times over the years, though Barbara Stanwyck was granted the role on film (and much later, thankfully after Agnes was gone, Loni Anderson did a TV movie version!)

In 1937, she met Orson Welles and became part of his fabled Mercury Theatre Group, eventually taking part in the (in)famous War of the Worlds broadcast. The troupe relocated to California within a couple of years and Miss Moorehead was granted her first feature film role through her association with the genius Welles. She played his character’s mother in a little film called Citizen Kane! (This, in case you don’t know, is considered one of the all-time classics in the history of cinema, a very distinguished way to start in the business!)

His next film was primed to succeed even further, but instead it was tampered with extremely heavily, causing Welles no end of torment and ending forever his relationship with the film's (and Kane’s) esteemed editor Robert Wise, who was enlisted to chop 5o minutes from it and shoot some new material to help patch it back together. The film was The Magnificent Ambersons and, even in its ravaged form, there is and was an interest in it. For this, Moorehead’s second screen role ever, she was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category even though her most momentous scene was cobbled together from new footage blended with bits of the old!

After this, she proceeded to fill out the casts of many films, some now obscure, some memorable. Some of the better-known ones include Welles’ Journey Into Fear, Jane Eyre (in which Welles starred, but did not direct) and Since You Went Away. In 1944, her supporting role in Mrs. Parkington (A Greer Garson-Walter Pidgeon film) netted her a second Oscar nom. She also appeared in the hooty Tomorrow the World! about a young, blonde child who is a Nazi at heart and does any number of things to destroy the people around him, most of whom are treating him with incredible kindness.

Moorehead could play so many types. She would be a simple, plain farmwoman one time and then a snooty, sophisticated lady the next. Never a “beautiful” woman in the conventional sense (though the period photo of her at the top of this post at least reveals an attractive one), she nevertheless was able to wear ornate period clothing without ever looking swallowed up in them. A long neck and regal bearing helped to pull this off. She has a small, but key, role in The Woman in White in which she played the massive Sydney Greenstreet’s wife. That same year, she was Oscar-nominated again for her part in Johnny Belinda, a Jane Wyman movie about a deaf/mute. Wyman, herself, did take home the Oscar that year.

In The Stratton Story, she played the mother James Stewart, who enacted the role of a baseball player who loses a leg. She was only 8 years his senior, though this type of casting was not at all out of the ordinary for her. Now an important “go to” actress for deep, complex or tricky character parts, Moorehead was working with many significant stars and directors of her era.

In the late 40s, Warner Brothers had planned to use Bette Davis and Joan Crawford together in a prison movie, but that all fell apart. In 1950, the project came to light as Caged starring Eleanor Parker as a female inmate and Agnes Moorehead as a sympathetic warden. It was one of the rare times she enjoyed almost co-starring billing, though her name was smaller than Parker’s in the promotional materials.

Around this same time, she embarked on a theatrical venture, one that would mean very much to her and rank among her very favorite and proudest projects. She, along with noted actors Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, were part of a concert-style reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell (itself a large segment from the playwright’s enormous work Man and Superman.) Moorehead would play in this production several times, including a recorded album of the performance. A brief second marriage to (eventual) film director Robert Gist took place in the early 50s. He was gone within a year, though the divorce took longer to occur.

Moorehead continued to accent various movies including Fourteen Hours, about a frantic man planning to jump from the window of a building, Show Boat, the colorful Broadway musical that starred Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson and Ava Gardner, and The Blue Veil, a Jane Wyman tear-jerker about a young widow who fills her days caring for young children. Wyman and Moorehead worked together in five feature films in all. Their next two would become cult classics.

1954’s Magnificent Obsession was a colorful remake of a Robert Taylor-Irene Dunne film from 1935. The weepy story of a newly widowed woman blinded by a young playboy who then strives to restore her sight made a huge star out of Taylor. This time out, Jane Wyman starred as the blinded woman and Rock Hudson appeared as the playboy. Again, the role translated to major stardom for the actor in the male role. Moorehead played a nurse who winds up caring for Wyman fulltime. Her unbridled, drop-everything devotion has led some viewers to detect a lesbian undercurrent. She did have one now-campy scene in which she threatens to take injured, uncooperative Rock’s temperature anally and, incredibly enough, he is aghast at the idea and allows her to put the thermometer in his mouth instead!

The film’s stunning success led to another teaming in All That Heaven Allows. This one had Wyman as another young widow (it just wasn’t safe to be married to her in the 1950s!) with two teenage children who suddenly falls for her hunky, somewhat younger gardener played by Hudson.

Moorehead played Wyman’s friend who can’t help but reel from the idea of her pal hooking up with someone of not only another age group but also (and perhaps more importantly) from another class. She has the memorably reactive line, “Really, Cary, your gardener?” deftly utilizing the voice that she was famous for. In short time, though, she becomes an ally to Wyman when the people of the town (as well as her selfish, insufferable children) react negatively to the match.

Both Obsession and this film were directed by the masterful Douglas Sirk, who delighted in exploring the underbelly of upper middle (and high) class, suburban American life as well as the restrictive social mores of his time. He used color, shadow, framing and symbolism to enhance his films and they are fascinating to watch (Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are two others that come to mind.) A “homage” to his films of this type, called Far From Heaven, came out in 2002 and starred Julianne Moore, though I found it to be very disappointing on several levels.

1956 was a key year in that this was when Agnes filmed The Conqueror. A ludicrous epic about Genghis Khan that had the audacity to feature John Wayne in the title role (!), it costarred Susan Hayward and an army of others. Moorehead played Wayne's sour-faced mother. What’s remarkable about it is not that it was any good or any bad (though many people have chuckled themselves silly while watching it), but that it was filmed in the desert amidst a nuclear test site and, as a result, over 90 of the cast and crew developed some sort of cancer. Sadly, Wayne, Hayward, the director Dick Powell and Miss Moorehead were among the many, many people who worked on this film who were cut down by cancer within two decades of filming it.

More regal roles (such as in The Swan) as well as amusing ones in colorful messes (such as The Opposite Sex, the musical remake of The Women with June Allyson and Joan Collins) continued, however the late 50s and early 60s brought a slowdown in her cinematic output, mostly due to the ending of the “Studio Era.” She began to work more and more on television, though the occasional film role popped up, such as in the campy horror flick The Bat with Vincent Price and the Disney family film Pollyanna (again with Jane Wyman!)

In 1961, Moorehead starred, practically alone, in one of the all-time memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone. She portrayed a farmwoman, living in a ramshackle old house, who is suddenly invaded by a small spaceship. There was no dialogue in the episode to speak of and she filled the half hour program with her customary professionalism, using every (considerable) acting tool at her disposal. She was brilliant in the episode and it has a nifty twist ending as the cherry on top.

The following year, Moorehead took a role in the sprawling, gigantic, Cinerama western How the West Was Won. She played Karl Malden’s wife and the couple, along with their children who included Debbie Reynolds among them, were making the perilous journey westward in order to settle. It wasn’t a large role, but she got to enact some (rear-projected) action scenes and be part of a very successful venture. That's her on the far right, straining to keep the raft on course. She and Debbie formed a very close friendship during this, one that would eventually prove controversial.

Agnes may have believed that her days of scoring Oscar noms were behind her since, after all, it had been 1948 since her last one. However, her audacious role in the black and white chiller Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte secured her a fourth and final nomination. The gothic thriller was meant to star Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but Joan took an early hike when she and Bette began to squabble. Davis had had it in for her ever since she swept in to accept Anne Bancroft’s Oscar the year Bette was up for it for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, so Olivia de Havilland was brought in instead.

Moorehead played Velma Carouthers, the slatternly, unkempt, but protective, maid of Davis, a half-mad plantation heiress who is fighting off developers who want to tear down her decaying mansion. Viewers used to seeing Agnes in stylish, well-appointed, intelligent roles must have spit out their popcorn at the sight of her in poorly fitted clothes, her grey-streaked hair askew, chopped off as with a cleaver! I mean, seriously, take a fucking look at this picture of her! Ha! There is no possible way to describe the way she talks and acts in the film. It simply has to be seen in order to be believed.

Needless to say, every single frame of her performance is golden to me because of the spectacularly trashy, grammatically incorrect way in which she delivers her lines and the slough-footed way in which she shuffles and clomps through the house. Her confrontation with Liv on the staircase is a camp scream. It’s just a shame she isn’t in the movie a little bit more. Also in the cast is her old Orson Welles cohort Joseph Cotten. These sort of cast connections have always fascinated me.

That same year, she started filming what would become her signature role. Though she wasn’t entirely satisfied with the project, she signed on to play Elizabeth Montgomery’s mother Endora on TV’s Bewitched. Montgomery’s character was a witch herself and had married a mortal (ad salesman Dick York), much to the dismay of Moorehead. A dynamic in which Endora continually complicated or otherwise made trouble for the couple was set in motion. She often referred to the husband Darrin as “Derwood.”

For the show, Moorehead adopted a wildly outré look with large, pointed collars, hair piled up in thick curls and false eyelashes that could have been cut into thirds and used on three other women! First shown in black and white, the effect was eye-catching, but not too bizarre. In color broadcasts, as the show soon turned to, she was a cornea-scorching, garish medley of green, purple, orange and most any other color!

Her decades of experience lent her the ability to utilize her arms and face and voice to their fullest extent. She would often enter with a flourish and delight in saying and doing all sorts of impish things. Moorehead never wanted to be identified with just this one characterization (and, in fact, was deliberately limited in her appearances at first so that she’d be free to pursue other things) but when a character is this arresting and lives on in rerun after rerun after rerun, there is very little choice in the matter!

While employed on Bewitched, Moorehead was nominated for SEVEN Emmys in a row, every year the program was on, but didn’t win, at least not for Bewitched. In 1967, she picked up an Emmy for her guest role on The Wild Wild West instead. When York was forced to leave the series due to recurring health issues, the replacement Dick Sergeant and Moorehead didn’t seem to hit it off as well. He described her as a “tough old bird.” In truth, Moorehead only allowed certain people to get to know her closely and he apparently wasn’t one of them.

In that time frame, she found work in a variety of other projects with roles as varied as portraying a nun in The Singing Nun with Debbie Reynolds, enacting The Red Queen in a TV version of Alice Through the Looking Glass, playing an Indian in the TV series Custer and an Aimee Semple McPherson-esque evangelist in What’s the Matter With Helen?, a hag-in-distress flick with Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds. These are only a few of the many things she worked on during this prolific time.

In 1973, she played the voice of The Goose in the animated Charlotte’s Web and even sang some in Bewitched sometimes co-star Paul Lynde’s number in which he portrayed the gluttonous rat Templeton. And who was Charlotte? Why, Debbie Reynolds again!

This deep friendship between Agnes and Debbie became the subject of speculation amongst many people. It really came to a head, and, unfortunately for Debbie, started growing even more when Debbie’s ex-husband Eddie Fisher was writing his autobiography and she found out he was going to publish the story that the two ladies were more than friends. She threatened him with legal action and the topic was excised from the book. However, then and now, people still wonder about it.

Debbie went on TCM with Robert Osborne and made a particular point of emphasizing that Agnes was a very devoted Christian and one who would be quite hurt by the gossip-mongering about her sexuality. Moorehead was indeed very religious and was spotted at times with a script in one hand and a Bible in the other. However, she was also a very savvy, wickedly wry and funny person who, while capable of being judgmental, prudish and old-fashioned, also enjoyed the company of gay men very much. She and Cesar Romero were practically a double-bill at many a Hollywood occasion before she died. The bottom line is that, whatever the truth is, Moorehead was an intensely private person with carefully selected friends who, whether straight, gay or into bestiality, would not have shared that aspect of her life with strangers.

One lesser-known fact about Moorehead is that she adopted a son, Sean, in 1949. Her son ran away from home at one point and was eventually discovered living in Europe with, of all people, Paulette Goddard! In any case, he was not mentioned in her will. When she died of cancer in 1974, her estate was divided amongst various charities, schools and so on.

While, even now, most of the details of Agnes Moorehead’s private life are, just that, private, her performances remain for audiences to marvel at. She always found a way to exact as much out a part as she possibly could. A detractor of the legendary Method way of acting, I couldn’t help but be amused by her assessment of it: “The method school thinks the emotion is the art. It isn't. All emotion isn't sublime. The theater isn't reality. If you want reality, go to the morgue. The theater is human behavior that is effective and interesting.” Those are two things Agnes definitely was, effective and interesting!

Lana Has Many Costumes

Not yet available on DVD (an out of print VHS edition is often highly coveted) and only rarely shown on television these days, this glossy, hooty, sun-baked soap opera is one of my favorites. Love Has Many Faces was released in 1965, sort of on the cusp of the old-fashioned movies that implied more than they showed and the freer era that was just a few years around the corner.

Miss Lana Turner had already had a stunning success in 1959 with Imitation of Life, a film that many people felt exploited the complicated relationship she had with her teenage daughter. In the wake of that film, she embarked on several other glitzy melodramas, many of which hinted at various aspects of her real (rollercoaster) home and sex life.

Here, she plays Kit, a 40-ish, incredibly wealthy heiress who lounges away the hours in glorious Acapulco, either in her spectacular beach house or on board her sleek yacht. Always with a cig or a drink (or both!) in her hand, she bakes in the sun, wearing one of a vast array of snazzy beach ensembles. Her husband is played by Cliff Robertson, an ex-gigolo gone legit who seems devoted to Turner, but not without some concerns. In the first place, he longs for a child and she can’t seem to have one. Secondly, her despair over her inability to conceive causes her to act out with a selection of hunky playthings.

One day, her latest boy toy washes up dead and a police investigation is instigated, with a few ugly questions tossed her way. She pays for the boy’s funeral and burial but isn’t exactly overcome with remorse. When the deceased’s former girlfriend Stefanie Powers, who he left behind in the States to pine away for him, comes to look into matters, Turner’s life takes another turn.

Meanwhile, middle-aged tourists Ruth Roman and Virginia Grey have come to the beach for fun and frolic. They’ve barely pulled the first paper umbrellas out of their tropical drinks before a pair of local hustlers swoop in for the kill. (The pickup line and retort are memorably slick: “Haven’t I seen you around?” “Could be. I’ve been there.”) Hugh O’Brian portrays the elder of the two, a swarthy, slinky ferret who’s out to get all the money and other fringe benefits he can from Roman. Grey, on the other hand, is stuck with the apprentice prostie, Ron Husmann, who is still green enough to feel guilt about milking the ladies for dough and gentleman enough to actually :::gasp::: want to occasionally pick up a tab.

O’Brian is servicing Roman for money and she really doesn’t seem to mind, though he actually has his eye on a bigger prize, the sequin-encrusted Turner. Robertson, disappointed in his marriage to Turner, starts to find Powers appealing. Love has many faces and the cast has many romances and Lana has a jaw-dropping outfit for each one of them!

Somehow, the primary players wind up at a bullfighters training ground, run by Carlos Montalban (Ricardo’s brother) and if you close you’re eyes, you’ll swear it’s Ricardo talking, though Carlos looks nothing like him. On site is another man that Lana has eyes for, real-life bullfighter Jaime Bravo (what a name!), making his major motion picture debut. The ladies go off to change, giving them a chance to size one another up and the men do the same. Sadly, we don’t get to see much of the guys shoehorning themselves into their matador gear. As the emotions build to a head, the story takes a dramatic and symbolic turn, resulting in a severe injury to one of the players. Yet, the semblance of a happy ending is in store.

If it sounds really tawdry and dirty, it’s really not. Most of the “romance” is referred to rather than shown, though there is an occasional dollop of zesty dialogue. There’s even the occasional drop of mild kink, as when O’Brian takes a drink out of Lana’s glass and deliberately turns it so that his lips will touch exactly where hers had just been.

Lana’s wardrobe was given its own featurette at the time. Designed by Edith Head, it was billed as a Million-Dollar Wardrobe. Most of the items are bathing ensembles, but there are occasional dresses and a few hot pant get-ups that often come with a matching wrap. Lana is very tan and very blonde and in good shape. She’s harder here than in most of her other films, but still gets to display a vulnerable side.

O’Brian, who has been profiled elsewhere on this site for his eye-blistering performance in this film, must have had his wardrobe made from just a few leftover scraps. His teeny bikinis are almost legendary in their brevity and look damn good up against his tan, hairy physique. His other clothes consist of a white towel, a sweater with no shirt under it and just the occasional shirt and jacket! Once seen, it’s difficult to shake off the sight of him waterskiing, posing and otherwise cavorting on the beaches of Mexico.

O’Brian bears no small resemblance to Lana’s ex-gigolo boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, the one who was stabbed to death in her home by her daughter during a domestic squabble. Turner and Stompanato had vacationed in Acapulco very publicly before his death. So the setting and the visuals definitely borrowed at least a little from Miss Lana’s own life.

Robertson is also an apparent casualty of Lana’s Million-Dollar Wardrobe. For an almost endless stretch of the movie, he appears in a drab, worn-out cargo jacket. Though, out of everyone in this movie, he’s the only one with an Oscar on his mantle (for Charly, three years after this), he gives the least captivating performance. Yes, his character is jaded, but he delivers a “why am I here?” sort of portrayal.

Powers seems to have been deliberately saddled with as many neutral and toned down clothes as possible, lest she pilfer even the slightest crumb of attention away from the star. I actually like Powers (and can even forgive her for that very misguided, thankfully brief, early career decision to go by the name Taffy Paul), but the idea that she could draw Robertson away from Turner is a bit of a stretch for me. However, as they say, looks aren’t everything, so maybe her more fresh-scrubbed appearance offered him a respite from the diamonds and silk.

Roman was, by now, a pretty hearty, buxom woman with a low voice that would give Bea Arthur pause. Grey, the polar opposite, being skinny and blonde, makes an amusing counterpoint. In the end, they come off as rather pathetic, which is a shame. I have seen, though, that even now there are single women who flock to expensive resorts and buy virile, sexually agile companions for use during their stay, so there’s certainly nothing unbelievable about their situation.

Husmann was a Broadway actor and singer whose appeal did not translate to film. A Tony Award nominee in 1961, he nevertheless makes next to no impression here. Though he appeared in quite a few TV guest shots and a few telefilms, this was his sole shot at the big screen in any capacity. The publicity headshot that was issued for this film does him no favors either, presenting him as a waxy, overly made up figure with a sort of garish smile. His greatest successes would continue to occur on the stage.

Though his role is small, one of the more interesting people in the film, at least off-screen, is Bravo. A legendary bullfighter for many years prior to this shot at feature filmmaking, he was renowned for his dramatic performances in the ring and notorious for his ridiculously high number of conquests outside it (including, allegedly, Ava Gardner.) He had three sons by two wives (one of whom, Ann Robinson, ironically had a small role in Imitation of Life) and was the subject of much ballyhoo and publicity. However, a 1970 car crash took him from this life prematurely.

The beach home (or I should say the set!) that Robertson and Turner inhabit is a marvel of elegance and spaciousness. It’s the perfect backdrop for the stars and gives Lana a sleek staircase from which to descend in her latest get-up. Staircases were always a key part of her films from the time she drunkenly fell down one in Ziegfeld Girl to the one she raced up in Madame X.

The title song (almost all of these types of movies have one and they are so much fun) was sung by jazz diva Nancy Wilson. More than a few folks have watched the credits just to hear this and then turned the film off. Not me, though I do like the number! Hysterically, a decision was made to put Lana on the cover of the single WITH Nancy, even though she had nothing to do with the tune. It’s a rather awkward, though friendly, shot and surely this sleeve would be considered a collector’s item to fans of either star.

It’s been said that audiences love to watch rich people suffer and there is plenty of angst stirred in with the lavish trappings here. I always had trouble wondering what there is to be so despondent about when there’s a terrific place to live, a gorgeous beach, a wealth of striking clothes, a housekeeper, apparently all the sex a body could want and plenty of booze. Half the time I want to scream at the screen “Loosen up!” which is something only Hugh-baby does to any degree.