Reflections on ... Scorchy (1976)

 

Recently watched: low-brow 1976 grindhouse crime thriller Scorchy. IMDb’s ultra-concise plot summary: “Connie Stevens is Jackie "Scorchy" Parker, the hottest undercover agent the Feds have ever known. She makes fast friends - and deadly enemies.” 

I’d always yearned to see this one, but found Scorchy somehow not quite as juicy or fun as I hoped, especially considering its outrageous tagline (“She's Killed a Man, Been Shot at And Made Love Twice Already This Evening... And The Evening Isn't Over Yet!”). The storyline sees spunky fun-loving narcotics agent Jackie (Stevens) orchestrating an elaborate undercover operation to nab heroin-smuggling drug baron Philip Bianco (Cesare Danova). There are shoot-outs and car chases - AND helicopter and speedboat chases! (Considering Scorchy’s director Howard Avedis mainly focused on sexploitation fare like The Teacher (1974) and Dr Minx (1975), he shows a real flair for action sequences). 

/ Representative glimpse of the ultra-seventies hair, clothes and decor in Scorchy /

Scorchy frequently suggests a 1970s Blaxploitation flick, but with honkies in the central roles. Like, it feels like it should be Pam Grier playing Jackie, but it’s Connie Stevens. (And Grier’s superior 1975 film Friday Foster hits some of the same trashy sweet spots as Scorchy). Anyway, the then 38-year-old Stevens seizes the opportunity to distance herself from her ingenue days as Cricket Blake in TV’s Hawaiian Eye. There are glimpses of her bare breasts, a gratuitous skinny-dipping scene and raunchy dialogue aplenty delivered in Stevens’ trademark whispery babydoll voice (in the context of Scorchy, 1970s women’s liberation equals Jackie exclaiming about getting laid. In one exchange, she teases her boss Chief Frank O’Brien (Norman Burton) with “You look tense. You need a blowjob!” Perhaps understandably, he responds, “You’re a fruitcake, you bitch!”). I know the character is based on Stevens’ sex kitten contemporary Joey Heatherton, but with her frosted pale lipstick and feathered blow-dried hair, in her close-ups Stevens frequently resembles Catherine O’Hara as Lola Heatherton in SCTV. Anyway, you also get the backdrop of Seattle in the 1970s AND hunky young male starlet Greg Evigan before B J and The Bear. Weirdly, in theory “Scorchy” is meant to be Jackie’s nickname but I don’t recall any of the characters addressing her by that in the entire film?

/ Above: Catherine O'Hara as Lola Heatherton in SCTV. Below: publicity shot of Connie Stevens for Scorchy (clearly, the movie's poster was adapted from this pic) /

Watch Scorchy on YouTube. (Because of the sex and violence on offer, you will need to log-in!).

Reflections on ... The Unholy Wife (1957)

 

/ Illustration by Olivier Coulon /

Recently watched: The Unholy Wife (1957). Tagline: “Half-angel. Half-devil. She made him half-a-man!” 

This pedestrian but enjoyably sordid film noir is unique for being made in scorching colour. Even in the faded print circulating on YouTube, British sex bomb leading lady Diana Dors’ gleaming platinum hair and skin-tight costumes in royal blue, fuchsia and ice pink are eye-popping. (Director John Farrow was no hack: he made some of Robert Mitchum’s greatest films (Where Danger Lives (1950), His Kind of Woman (1951). He clearly had an “off day” here). 

The Unholy Wife offers a portrait of a dysfunctional marriage in the verdant sun-dappled vineyards of Napa Valley. Or as the publicity blurb promises “This is the wine cellar of the most respectable house in the Valley. This is where she met them, made love to them, laughed with them at her husband … at the man who gave her a name, a home and a heritage – the man she wanted to destroy!” The action unfolds in flashback, with present-day Phyllis (whose name evokes the Barbara Stanwyck character Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944)) in jail, recounting the events that led to her imprisonment. (In these scenes, jailbird Dors is seen scrubbed of make-up and sporting brown hair, which can’t help but recall her earlier British film Yield to the Night (1956)). In a role originally intended for Shelley Winters, Dors is a seething, manipulative married woman scheming with her lantern-jawed, broad-shouldered lover San (hunky Tom Tryon) to murder her cuckolded husband, vineyard owner Paul (played by Rod Steiger – in a role originally intended for Ernest Borgnine - in the then-fashionable mumbling Actor’s Studio tradition). Wringing her hands in the background is mother-in-law Emma, played by Beulah Bondi (a part intended for Ethel Barrymore). 

/ Tom Tryon and Diana Dors in The Unholy Wife /

Watch for one truly glorious sequence of Phyllis and her pal Gwen (hard-boiled, nicotine-saturated noir icon Marie Windsor) toiling as “hostesses” at a low-down gin joint. While the blowzy resident nightclub singer (Maxine Gates) wails “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road”), Phyllis – sheathed in sensational silver lamé - kvetches, “Not much action around here tonight.” Windsor’s appearance is fleeting and makes you wish The Unholy Wife was mainly 90-minutes of just her and Dors hanging out. The commercial and critical failure of The Unholy Wife ultimately cut short Dors’ brief and unhappy sojourn in Hollywood, and she returned to the United Kingdom. (For gossip-hungry sensationalism freaks, Dors and Steiger - both married to other people - had a fling during production).

/ Frustratingly, I couldn't source a good colour image of Marie Windsor and Diana Dors online in this nightclub sequence. (Windsor's dress is bright red). /

Watch The Unholy Wife here.

Reflections on ... Death at Love House (1976)

 

Recently watched: 1976 ABC Movie of the Week Death at Love House. Joel and Donna Gregory (Robert Wagner and Kate Jackson) are a husband-and-wife writing duo collaborating on a biography of the doomed Hollywood star Lorna Love, who died tragically young in 1935. (Coincidentally, Joel’s artist father had an impassioned affair with Lorna and painted a portrait of her). And for reasons never fully explained, the couple move into Love’s totally intact Hollywood mansion to research their book (Love House was shot on location at the former estate of silent movie star Harold Lloyd). 

Creepily, Lorna’s perfectly preserved, eternally youthful corpse is on permanent display – Snow White-style - in a shrine on the premises. Strange occurrences immediately start happening. Who is the ethereal “woman-in-white” Donna glimpses in the garden? Why are there macabre occult symbols everywhere? Who was Father Eternal Fire, Lorna’s satanic looking “spiritual advisor”? And who tried to kill Donna in the locked bathroom by carbon monoxide poisoning? 

Obviously, almost anything produced by Aaron Spelling is bound to be campy fun. Raspy-voiced, gorgeous young Jackson is always an engaging screen presence. With its emphasis on occultism, golden age Hollywood and lurid showbiz tragedies (Lorna is clearly inspired by Jean Harlow), Love House suggests a page torn from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. It will also remind you of other, infinitely superior movies: Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Fedora (1978). And like 1944 film noir Laura, characters spend a lot of time staring, mesmerized, by an oil painting of a dead woman. For verisimilitude, supporting parts are played by actual classic Hollywood veterans like Sylvia Sidney, Joan Blondell, Dorothy Lamour and John Carradine. (The Gregorys’ literary agent is played by Bill Macy - Walter from Maude!). 

Less happily, zero effort is taken to make Lorna 1930s “period appropriate”. (She’s seen in flashbacks portrayed by Marianna Hill - cult movie fans will recognize her from Messiah of Evil (1973) and The Baby (1973) - with a feathered blow-dried 70s Farrah Fawcett coiffure). And the ending is worthy of an old episode of Scooby-Doo! Smudged, murky prints of Love House are easy to find on YouTube.