Deep Diving into "Tintorera"

Quite a few years back, a good friend of mine went on a binge of shark-related movies. In the wake of Jaws (1975), there were scads of them (and they saw something of a revival when the inane Sharknado,  2013, unexpectedly scored with some viewers.) He e-mailed me to say that I really needed to see one called Tintorera (1977) because it had a level of homoerotic flavor to it and featured lots of footage of men wearing skimpy Speedos. While my interest was indeed piqued over that, I never found myself in a position to see the movie... until recently. To say that it instantaneously became my very favorite shark movie is an understatement. I don't want to take anything way from the expertly crafted and highly suspenseful Jaws, but I would re-watch that one a lot more often if it had the benefit of not only a tidal wave of Speedos in it but also the stunning charms of one Andres Garcia. Garcia was utterly new to me before this, but I will certainly never forget him now.

The structure of Tintorera is unusual (and the film was edited into a plethora of versions, making it hard to ever see the whole thing just the way it was intended and with all the desired moments intact.) There was a 126-minute release and an 83-minute one - and apparently the content can differ even within these renditions. Also, though the movie is principally about a vacationing man played by Hugo Stiglitz, top-billing goes to someone who only appears in part of the story. The movie, it must be said, caused a bit of a stir over the fact that any time a fish is killed in the film, it is real and not simulated. I have to say I barely allowed any of the fish (or even shark!) sequences to register as I was generally distracted by other things as I watched... Now we will embark on a photo essay. Not every picture will have (or need!) a caption as I work through the highlights of this eye-popping flick.

Stiglitz arrives on board a large luxury yacht anchored on the eastern coast of Mexico. Not the bleached houseboy in impossibly short shorts...

Things are snug in the galley, and not just the working space.

After decades of observing and documenting countless bulges of TV and the cinema, I may have found the most pronounced one ever...! I mean, his balls are one cough away from coming out the bottom of these minuscule shorts!

His houseboy, by the way, sort of resembles a less-handsome, badly-dyed Javier Bardem.

Stiglitz heads to the beach in a flimsy red Speedo and begins trying to woo Fiona Lewis, who's there vacationing and in no mood for commitment.

His offering of a huge tray of drinks does the trick!

There is gorgeous scenery highlighted throughout the movie, which helps make the most out of the limited budget. (It's also very attractively photographed.)

Despite his having made an impression on Lewis, Stiglitz soon finds himself alone.

It looks like she has moved on to what's behind Umbrella #1...

An indignant Stiglitz comes ashore to see what it is she's been doing with her free time.

He's not happy at all to seem to have been tossed aside for a Mexican beach bum.

This is when we are introduced to the glorious face of one Andres Garcia! Sadly, Stiglitz doesn't let that stop him from socking Garcia right in the kisser over his possessiveness towards Lewis!

Nevertheless, Lewis continues to see Garcia - and who can blame her?! He's sex on a stick.

For reasons known only to her, she gets out of bed the next morning, leaving Garcia this way. (You'd have to use a stick of TNT to evacuate me from there...)

He awakens to find her not only gone from their love bed, but gone from Mexico, with him getting stuck with the hotel bill!

Later, Stiglitz runs into Garcia again at an outdoor cantina and they nearly come to blows, though Garcia uses his charm to win the man over.

He also offers to share two slutty sisters he's been chatting up that afternoon. I love, love, LOVE his l'il swimsuit here.

A recurring image when it comes to Garcia is his handling of various bottles which was strategically placed.

Can you see the tip of his Corona? LOL

That evening, the foursome is strolling back to Stiglitz's yacht and - after Garcia takes a quick pee in the water - they decide to swim to the vessel rather than take a smaller craft. Naturally, this requires getting naked. An excited Garcia literally hops out of his pants.

"Hello, Allegiant? How much is one-way fare to Cancun? Yes, I'll hold..."

On board the yacht, Garcia locates some champagne. Note the positioning of the bottle. He even reaches down to adjust the tip...!

Everyone is naked and the couples take turns with one another. ("I love the seventies..!")

The gals have jumped ship and swum back to shore, but Garcia and Stiglitz indulge in some male bonding.

Again with the position of the bottle.

The newly-formed buddies decide to dive overboard and race to shore.

Stiglitz wins, prompting Garcia to refer to him as having duck feet.

Garcia is revealed to be a scuba instructor who manages to engage in some mouth-to-mouth underwater with his trainees. I loved this suit on him, too.

Now the dynamic duo is on the prowl again and they see something they both like...

This time it's vacationer Susan George, the top-billed star of the film. She puts up precious little resistance and, in fact, can't make up her mind who she likes more.

So why choose at all?! She ends up in the same bed with both men. A little nibble of Garcia...

...followed by a slurp of Stiglitz!

The next morning she finds a bare-assed Garcia getting the breakfast table ready. (And, yes, he does have fleeting frontal nudity here as well.)

Stiglitz isn't exactly overdressed for the occasion either, wearing only an apron as he scrambles their eggs.

After breakfast, George is about to go for a swim... whether she likes it or not! (Don't worry. She will!) Garcia has more brief frontal nudity here. Strangely, it is snipped from the "uncut" version of the movie and only appears in the shorter version...!

You know, I like the movie Summer Lovers (1982), but the MMF dynamics here are more my speed than the triangle found in that film.

George has some ground rules.

She wants there to be no love between them, but also no jealousy. And also no other women. (How convenient!)

An example of the beautiful setting for the film (if you can see past Stiglitz' wedgie...)

Just another evening of strumming his instrument...

..while Garcia prepares to pop his cork!

The four S-es of this movie: Smoking, Swilling, Swimming & Screwing!

It is now their one-month anniversary and they toast to the occasion. George has also bought them each a wedding ring to wear.

Decisions, decisions.

Smooth & light or dark & hairy. I have my own mind made up, but Susan doesn't have to pick!

It all seems like bliss. But unfortunately nothing lasts forever.

As the film wears on, Stiglitz finds himself alone again. He desolately roams the beaches looking for love while forever having a lengthy cigarette ash dangling precariously.

One of the gals who may be a potential datemate is non other than Priscilla Barnes in one of her earliest roles.

Within three years, she'd be a replacement cast member on Three's Company. She does have a flattering topless scene in Tintorera (at 23 it could hardly be anything but!) I won't go on any further with the plot (was there one??) But this post is not yet through. 

Everything you've seen above is from the 83-minute version of the film I watched. But I later got a gander at the 126-minute version. Some of the additional content is dull footage of Stiglitz being sick in a hospital bed, which is what had prompted him to take this extended vacation in the first place. And some scenes were slightly extended or in a different order.

We see a lot more of Stiglitz' green gingham suit (with coordinating sun visor!)

We also discover how the previously naked Garcia wound up with a blue swimsuit on the morning after that foursome with the sisters. He borrowed it from Stiglitz (and I dare say filled it out a heck of a lot better.)

After their little race to shore, there is an extended scene between them which is not in the shorter version.

This bulgy scene with Garcia's white pants is also absent in the abbreviated version.

The breakfast scene begins first with George seeing Stiglitz in his apron before coming upon Garcia.

There's also this moment when George expresses to the men that she wants to give birth to the first baby born born of two fathers. (I take it she didn't pay all that close attention during high school science class.)

This refers to the difference in color and framing. The shot above is from the widescreen 83-minute movie, just after Garcia notices that Lewis has disappeared on him. Note the stunning colors of the sunrise and the cropping.

This is the same moment in the cropped (VHS) version. Not as nice colors, but we get to see that Garcia was actually naked as he walked outside to look for Lewis.

But the real thrill of the longer version of the film was a lengthy prologue featuring Garcia, making his part about a big as Stiglitz'! He's shown cavorting in the resort swimming pool and staking out his prey as a gigolo.

He's in the right place at the right time to rescue a wealthy woman's hat which has blown off.

Never does he wear more than this in the opening sequence!

He uses his underwater wiles on her whenever her older husband isn't looking

At night he skulks along the fountain's edge...

...scales the hotel architecture (without benefit of a stunt double!) and gymnastically hurls himself onto her balcony.

I mean....

Once he's done his good deed, he snatches payment and proceeds to exit.

Brazenly, he slithers out past the woman's husband and out the front door!

But there, a surprise awaits him in the form of a hulking bodyguard!

He deftly weasels his way out of getting caught in the act of adultery. This whole sequence, especially as I am now such a fan of Garcia, was a delightful surprise to see. There are other subtle differences in the versions. (And some NOT so subtle. For some reason, the audio track for the uncut length one was lost. Hence the recognizable British voices of Lewis and George are replaced with flat American ones!)

 

:::::::VIEWER ALERT - Tintorera (83-min) is airing on TCM tonight/tomorrow at 3:45am EST:::::::

The name Hugo Stiglitz does not trip off the tongue of very many U.S. film fans, but the Mexican-born actor has led a busy, busy career in movies and television projects from 1969 up to the present day. Nearly 20 of his credits are for this film's director Rene Cardona Jr. Several of Cardona's movies made their way (usually dubbed) into American theaters in the 1970s including Survive! (1976), The Bermuda Triangle (1978) and Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979) - all of these featuring Stiglitz. Now 80, he continues to act in various movies in his homeland. By the way, his name was used by fan Quentin Tarantino for a character in 2009's Inglourious Basterds.

As for Garcia, I was obviously quite taken with the utter hunk. One year younger than Stiglitz, and born in The Dominican Republic to Spanish parents, he began working on screen in 1967. He eventually became a highly popular sex symbol and eventually emerged as a sought after performer on soap operas, in action movies and as a model in photo-romance novels.

Those lips, those eyes.

As you can see, he aged into a handsome silver daddy!

The End!

Poseidon Quickies: Thursday's Early Burt Special

That recent post about unexpected beefcake on The Carol Burnett Show got me thinking about the lean times (in body & wallet!) of Mr. Burt Reynolds and how he was often called upon to take off his shirt. I also happen to be reading a book on his films and realized that I hadn't seen ANY of his films prior to 100 Rifles and Sam Whiskey (both 1969.) There were four prior to those and they are, by his own admission, a pretty sorry lot, but you never know when you might discover a moment of entertainment, even accidentally. Scanning the Internet for evidence of these early epics, I happened upon Operation C.I.A. (1965), his third film - one he claims had a total budget of $70,000!

At the time Reynolds made Operation C.I.A., he was serving time, rather unhappily, on Gunsmoke. He played a half-Indian blacksmith named Quint Asper who mostly brooded about one thing or another (and who had perhaps the hairiest forearms on television apart from J. Fred Muggs!) He welcomed the trip to the Far East to make the movie, which was set in Vietnam, but ultimately filmed in Bangkok and Laos.

This rather startling lobby card is what made me dive into C.I.A. in the first place! Burt in his flimsy undies being slapped around by an Asian lady? Looked like a can't miss sequence to me.

Sure enough, at about the 17 minute mark, Reynolds heads to a massage parlor and there is the gal next to him from the photo.

He enters the room and is hurled onto the table and practically mauled by the two attendants.

He can't get a word out as they systematically pull off one thing after another.

Reynolds' familiar sense of humor was already in place as he glances heavenward in awkward discomfort as his belt is undone and fly opened (obscured by the masseuse.)

Next she's on her knees between his legs giving his trousers a good tug!

Next we see a pretty close view of his hairy legs as his pants are doffed.

But, very sadly, we soon find out that he's suddenly covered by a towel as the massage begins...! The photo was from a run-through or an alternate take. I want my money back!!! (Speaking of money, one of the gals gets into his wallet and takes all of his currency.)

He's understandably distressed over being robbed. I held out hope that perhaps there would be a struggle and the towel might be pulled away, but...

...the promised whack comes along and he's still clad in the towel. The scene is shot from a whole other angle and there are no tightie-whities to be seen.

Incidentally, in some promotional material for the movie, even the (incorrectly) promised tightie-whities must have proved too much and so someone meticulously went over them with black ink and turned them dark! Unreal.

Soon after, Reynolds confronts the shifty manager of the parlor over his missing money.

This moment was accurately captured for another of the movie's lobby photo selections. Note the indentation on Burt's torso above his waistline. That is where a near-fatal car accident (one which ended his football dreams) caused his spleen to have to be removed. This is important because of something that happened during Operation C.I.A.

In a later sequence of the movie, the skiff he's being taken around in is rammed by a speedboat.

He and costar Kieu Chinh are sent splashing into the water. (If she looks at all familiar, it may be because she worked several times on China Beach and later portrayed The Mother in 1993's The Joy Luck Club, among other things.)

Reynolds filmed a rescue scene in heavily polluted water.

Again, later on in the movie, he was once again dumped into this water and was pulled out by some locals.

Once the movie had wrapped, Reynolds flew back to the States to attend a Selma, Alabama march with Martin Luther King Jr., but was felled in Birmingham. Waking up in a hospital with softball sized lymph glands, he was diagnosed with schistosomiasis. Snail eggs were present in his bloodstream and they were about to hatch! Had his spleen been present to clean his blood, he might have avoided the near-tragedy, but as it was he had to be given shots from a treatment that had only been discovered two years prior.

At this stage of his career, Reynolds was continually being compared to Marlon Brando, against his own desire. Brando rebuffed Reynolds when Reynolds tried to meet the established actor, who he idolized. (He later got his revenge, however, in 1980, when he played Brando in a Saturday Night Live skit with Gilda Radner's "Baba Wawa," being interviewed - grossly overweight - in bed, eating constantly and reading his answers to interview questions off of prompts under the covers!)

Surely you can guess that Operation C.I.A. is no cinema classic. And it gets extra demerit for its false advertising of Burt in his briefs! But we do get occasional glimpses of his trim bod. (He's seen here with another costar, Danielle Aubrey.)

Should you wish to, you can see the film here.

Fond Farewell: Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye...

Handsome Captain Von Trapp.

"The Captain is gone..." said a text from a friend of mine last week. While Christopher Plummer was 91, and no one would perhaps express shock when someone passes at that age, it was still a heart-tugging moment, for he was one of our lifetime favorites. We did a full-on tribute to him more than ten years ago (can it be?!) right here for those who wish to know more about him. But he proved that a lot can happen in ten years, even if you are 81 at the start of them! Considering he has that lengthy tribute here already, we will not repeat ourselves with a complete run-down of his life and career, but I do have some further pictures to share and what better time to do so than right now? 

Canadian-born Plummer was the premier Shakespearean actor of his generation, having played all the major roles of The Bard before he was 30. Seen here, he essays MacBeth, Richard III and Henry V.

Here he is in character as Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing. All these kings, princes and lords would grant him an aura of cool, regal authority which ultimately made him perfect for portraying the austere, dignified Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

Several actors were considered for the part, but, though he was in actuality a skosh too young for it, he wound up being the perfect person to inhabit the man who was scarily imperious and yet charmingly vulnerable underneath.

The movie's staggering success (and its legions of devoted fans) got under Plummer's skin for quite some time, but eventually he began to appreciate the craftsmanship and the quality of it.

He certainly cut a dashing figure in his costumes.

I love this photo of him with Eleanor Parker as Baroness Schraeder. They made on super elegant couple, even if they were not to be.

He and Julie Andrews generated incredible chemistry and really made the love story aspect of the movie come to life. One gets the feeling that, despite the on-set of war, those two had one really fine honeymoon before having to rush home to the kids!

One of my other favorite roles of his, a vastly underrated one, is as the deranged Commodus in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964.)

In projects like Oedipus the King (1968), with Lilli Palmer as his mother (and wife!), we got a glimpse of what lay underneath his buttoned-up Austrian suits.

But never more so than in 1969's The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

Despite having his singing dubbed by Bill Lee in Music, Plummer did go on to star in and win a Tony for the musical Cyrano in 1973. He copped another Tony later for his one-man show Barrymore.

Plummer was principally a motion picture and stage actor with only occasional visits to television. When he costarred in the miniseries Arthur Hailey's The Moneychangers (married to Jean Peters, but canoodling with Joan Collins, not the world's worst position to be in!), he won an Emmy. He would proceed to balance his career with further TV work including a role in The Thorn Birds.

Fans of The Sound of Music were delighted when he and Andrews reunited for live TV presentation of the play On Golden Pond in 2001. The project got mixed reviews (and many folks didn't think of these two as somewhat feeble old folks regardless of their chronological age.)

In my initial tribute to Mr. Plummer, he'd finally achieved an Oscar nomination after toiling away in the movies for half a century! Not long after that, he was nominated again and won! This time for Beginners (2010), in which he played the father of Ewan MacGregor who comes out as gay late in life. He was the oldest winner ever of a competitive Academy Award at 82. Then at age 88, he became the oldest ever nominee for acting when he was nominated for All the Money in the World (2017.) What with working on TV in 1953 and with a movie in the can for 2021 release, his career on screen nearly spanned 70 years! He died of complications from a fall on February 5th at age 91.

We enjoy watching the inventive, creative and versatile Mr. Plummer in everything, but to us he is indelibly the exquisitely debonair Captain Von Trapp. As such, we give a heartfelt, "So long, farewell..."