Brian Hannan

Behind the Scenes: The Box Office Bump

Ancillary – the famed “long tail” – has all but disappeared. Used to be movie studios could count on up to 90 per cent of a picture’s overall earnings coming after it had completed its initial run in the cinemas. Until streaming cut off ancillary at the pass, that long tail consisted of an extraordinary number of revenue streams. Once a film was out of the cinemas, and assuming it wasn’t going to return in a steady reissue pattern like the James Bond or Disney movies or blockbusters such as Star Wars, its ancillary journey would begin with VHS/DVD (of which there were several sub-streams), then television (again, sub-divided into network, cable, syndication, and specialist operations like Turner) and then you could still be talking remake. Plus, you could bunch up an entire library of old pictures and sell them on again. The beauty of the system was that when movies hit whatever ancillary segment, there was rarely any such thing as an outright buy. Movies were leased. That meant every three or four years they could be sold all over again.

The forerunner of ancillary was network television. Television had begun mopping up old movies by the bucketload in the 1950s, and in such quantities that the attraction of old movies on the small screen prevented audiences seeking out new movies on the big screen and in part accounted for the steady decline of the moviegoing habit. By the 1960s, networks were beginning to fork out big bucks for individual pictures – Cleopatra (1963) going for several million.

By the 1970s, the income from a television showing of a movie could exceed what it had made at the cinema. For United Artists, in the period 1970-1972 (this covers the dates films were made not when released), television sales, calculated on an overall annual basis, brought in at least an extra 24 per cent on top of revenue from cinema release. That figure came from 1970, but in 1971 that shot up to 38 per cent and the following year dipped slightly to 37 per cent. And that was just for the United States. Although other countries tended to pay a lot less for movies, they still paid something and in total might bring in half as much again.

The ancillary gold mine had started to pay off big time. In the 1960s, the amounts networks ponied up for television rights depended very much on initial box office, the assumption being there was some obvious correlation between the numbers who would go to see a particular movie at the cinema and the size of the subsequent television audience. And while it was true the biggest cinematic blockbusters tended to attract the biggest television audiences, it was soon equally clear that television audiences were as segmented as much as cinema ones and therefore the amounts paid by networks for individual movies began to show sharp divergence.

There was no doubting that James Bond ruled the television roost as far as UA was concerned in 1970-1972. Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die, regardless of U.S. box office – the former earning $20 million in rentals (the studio’s share of the box office), the latter $16.2 million – were each sold to American television for the same, princely, sum of $5.2 million, by far and away the most any movie pulled in.

Not far behind was Fiddler on the Roof which netted $5.12 million. But here’s the kicker – the musical earned more than both Bonds put together, a colossal $37 million in rentals. but in terms of attracting a television audience was considered a weaker proposition than both. But musicals were believed to be somehting of a golden goose for television, otherwise how to acocunt for Tom Sawyer which cost networks $2.76 million. Comparatively speaking, that made no logical sense because it had only taken in $5 million in rentals. But family-friendly fare was so rare it had networks duking it out for the rights. A third musical Man of La Mancha went to television for $1.7 million having racked up just$3.7 million at the cinema.

Conversely, networks weren’t remotely interested in films with a sex theme, no matter how well they had done at the box office. Last Tango in Paris had harnessed a colossal $16 million in rentals but was worth only $120,000 (yes, that’s right, $120,000) to any television station willing to show it (heavily cut of course). It didn’t even matter if you took a comedic approach to sex. Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex hauled in $8.2 million at the cinema but only $130,000 from television. But maybe Woody Allen was the problem. Bananas, with a highly-profitable $3.3 million at the box office, could only manage less than half a million from television, the comedian perhaps considered an acquired taste which not enough of the public had acquired.

But television, rather than being viewed as the perennial enemy, was often seen as salvation for under-performing movies, maybe not recouping the entire negative costs but going some way to stem the flow of red ink. And perhaps the more interesting statistics relate to those pictures which earned more from television than they did in their entire U.S. cinema run.

Michael Winner espionage thriller Scorpio headlined by Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon notched up $1.35 million at the cinema but $1.56 million from television. Similarly, Robert Altman’s critically-acclaimed The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould as the iconic private eye picked up a mere $1 million at the U.S. cinema compared to $1.51 million from a network. Another private eye caper, Hickey and Boggs, teaming Robert Culp (who also directed) and Bill Cosby from a Walter Hill script, had snapped up just $900,000 from cinemas but $1.2 million from television. Cops and Robbers hoisted $1.32 million in small screen larceny as against $1.2 million elsewhere.

Westerns The Magnificent Seven Ride, the fourth in the series, and Ted Kotcheff’s Billy Two Hats starring Gregory Peck and with a script from Scotsman Alan Sharp, both did better financially from television than cinema. The former’s small screen take was $1.16 million compared to $750,000 from the cinema, the latter $1.15 million compared to $440,000. But for The Hunting Party with a top-line cast of Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen and Oliver Reed it went the other way, the $460,000 from television going hardly any way to offset the paltry $800,000 from cinemas.

It’s possible that star power, and weighted towards veterans, counted more in television. As well as Scorpio, Lancaster westerns Valdez Is Coming and Lawman tucked away $1.47 million and $1.5 million, respectively, from their television outings.

SOURCE: “Results of Distribution of Released Pictures (by production year),” MCHC 82, Box 1, Folder 8, The United Artists Archive, University of Wisconsin.

The Road to Salina (1970) ***

I thought I’d taken a stab at finding out what happened to Mimsy Farmer after More (1969) and by chance stumbled upon Rita Hayworth (The Happy Thieves, 1961), also persona non grata in mainstream Hollywood.

Pivots on the tricky trope of mistaken identity. Or, rather, someone who insists on believing that a stranger turning up is actually a long-lost son / lover / whatever. Jodie Foster was the too trusting wife in Sommersby (1993), for example, but it’s hard to pull this off once suspicions are aroused. Unless, of course, the potential dupe is determined to believe because it fills an emotional hole, thus providing sufficient narrative undercurrent.

That’s the case here, when drifter Jona (Robert Walker Jr) turns up at the roadside service station run by Mara (Rita Hayworth) his resemblance to her dead son Rocky (Marc Porel) is so uncanny she believes it is the child returned. Just to be clear, Rocky died in mysterious circumstances, corpse never found, so there’s some foundation to her belief beyond maternal madness. Seizing the opportunity for a warm bed and some decent grub and the chance to be spoiled, Jona plays along – especially after Rita’s neighbour Warren (Ed Begley) supports her delusion – and soon he’s invited into another bed, that of Rocky’s sister Billie (Mimsy Farmer). The savvy daughter has her own reasons for going along with it. Then we’re into flashbacks within the flashback as the mystery unfolds and we dip in and out of incidents around the gas station and the somewhat unusual relationship between brother and sister.

As with most slow-burn dramas, you wouldn’t really call it a thriller, it depends on atmosphere, but in the same way as, for example, Don’t Look Now (1973), there’s definitely something insidious here and noir-ish if you don’t mind a story played out away from that genre’s physical darkness. It digs deep into the worst emotion of all, loneliness, and how the hankering after relationship, and an inability to steer clear of the psychosexual, anything to stop you from being alone, can bring torment and tragedy. Dangling fantasy in front of a woman incapable of dealing with reality is a dangerous temptation.

While some of the elements verge on the bizarre, and the narrative threatens to tip into confusion, the viewer is nonetheless kept on pretty much an even keel by the direction, which doesn’t play hard and loose with the facts, but just takes its own slow way heading towards resolution.

The main younger characters aren’t anything we’ve not seen before and the impetuous immoral Billie could easily be a cousin to Estelle in More (1969) while Jona is just every dopehead drifter with an eye on the main chance, except he turns patsy under the femme fatale wiles of Estelle. Rita Hayworth (The Money Trap, 1965), by now a Hollywood back number, brings a healthy dose of reality, and it’s worth the admission just to watch the former sex symbol fry eggs and dance around with the equally middle-aged and frumpy Ed Begley (Hang ‘Em High, 1968) while tacitly acknowledging the bolder elements of the counter culture.

Robert Walker Jr (The Happening, 1967) doesn’t bring much to the party but Mimsy Farmer sizzles. The movie trips easily through the decades, contemporary 1970s buzz undercut by old-fashioned 1940s sensibilities.

French director George Lautner’s stylish concoction – this begins with a downpour, character trapped in torrential rain, an unusual image for the times, and unwinds in flashback – forces you to suspend disbelief long enough to guide the endeavour to a satisfactory conclusion.

Under-rated, this should appeal beyond the Farmer and Hayworth fan clubs.

Girl with a Pistol (1968) ****

Off-beat Oscar-nominated comedy-drama that is both a marvelous piece of whimsy and a slice of social realism set in the kind of Britain the tourist boards forget, all drizzle and grime. It zips from Edinburgh to Sheffield to Bath to London to Brighton to Jersey as if the characters had been dumped from an If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium sketch. If your idea of Italy was Fellini’s glorious decadence or Hollywood romance amid historic ruins and fabulous beaches, then the upbringing of Assunta (Monica Vitti) is the repressive opposite.

All women in her small town wear black. Men are not allowed to dance with women and must make do with each other. A man like Vincenzo (Carlo Giuffre) desiring sex must kidnap a woman, in this case Assunta, to which she will consent as long as he marries her. When instead he runs off to Scotland, she is dishonored and must kill him, armed with the titular pistol.

Pursuit first takes her to Edinburgh and a job as a maid, has a hilarious encounter with a Scottish drunk, and various other cross-cultural misinterpretations – in a bar she cools herself down with an ice-cube then puts it back in the bucket. Then it’s off to Sheffield where she falls in with car mechanic Anthony Booth (television’s Till Death Do Us Part) because he is wearing Italian shoes.

She can’t imagine he can watch sport for two hours. “You’re a man, I’m a woman, nobody in the house and you look at the television.” Although tormented by images of being attacked back home by a screaming mob of black-robed women, she begins to shed her inhibitions, wearing trendier clothes, although an umbrella is essential in rain-drenched Britain and given the Italian preference for shooting exteriors.

In between sightings of Vincenzo there are episodes with a suicidal gay man (Corin Redgrave) and a doctor (Stanley Baker). She becomes a nurse, then a part-time model, sings Italian songs in an Italian restaurant, drives a white mini, wears a red curly wig and more extravagant fashions. It turns out she can’t shoot straight. Gradually, the mad chorus of home gives way to feminist self-assertion as she becomes less dependent on men and a world run by chauvinists. It’s a startling mixture of laugh-out-loud humor and social observation. And while the narrative that at times verges on the bizarre, Assunta’s actions all appear logical given her frame of mind.

Vitti was Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s muse (and companion) through L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962) to Red Desert (1964). She had a brief fling with the more commercial, though still somewhat arty, movie world in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966) and the nothing-artistic-about-it comedy On the Way to the Crusades (aka The Chastity Belt, 1968) with Tony Curtis. Director Mario Monicello had two Oscar nominations for writing but was best-known for Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and Casanova ’70 (1965). Girl with a Pistol was nominated in the Best Foreign Language film category at the Oscars.

Cold Sweat (1970) ***

One great scene doesn’t make a great movie, but I’ll tell you about it anyway and we can all wonder what went wrong with the rest of the picture. Through a swinging louvre door we catch glimpses of Joe (Charles Bronson) putting a headlock on a thug. The motion of the door slows down as the villain is slowly choked to death. As the door closes we cut to Joe’s terrified wife Fabienne (Liv Ullman) and watch her reaction as she hears the neck snap.

Pretty good, eh? If only the rest of the movie were in that class. Except for a rollicking good car chase, it’s hampered by an over-complicated plot, kidnappings in retaliation for kidnappings, a dippie hippie (Jill Ireland) and one of the worst accents you will ever hear – quite why director Terence Young (Mayerling, 1969) wasn’t able to tell James Mason that his American South impersonation didn’t cut it is anybody’s guess.

*Made before Bronson was a major global star, there’s a fair chance*
*the kung fu picture was a stronger attration.*

Joe charters out a yacht in the south of France, but prefers gambling and drinking to spending evenings with his wife. But then his past catches up with him. Cue complicated backstory – he was a soldier who got mixed up in a robbery but ran away from the theft when the going got tough and was the only one who escaped a jail term. Now his old buddies want revenge but will accept instead Joe doing another job for them.

Joe doesn’t agree so Captain Ross (James Mason) kidnaps his wife and child. So Joe kidnaps the captain’s girlfriend Moira (Jill Ireland), stashing her away in a remote cabin filled with creepy-crawlies where she has “nothing to eat but money.” So they do a trade, except Ross reneges, and then gets shot, potentially leaving wife and child at the mercy of his creepy sidekick.

There’s a fair bit of action, and when Joe is beating people up or driving like crazy over inhospitable terrain, it makes like a thriller but when he’s left to try and lift a flare gun up with his foot it’s on shakier territory. The two elements of the story split too quickly and while wife and daughter make the most of being scared out of their wits, terrified women aren’t what people come to see a Bronson picture for.

So it’s too much of a mixed bag. To compensate for the dire Mason (A Touch of Larceny, 1960), Liv Ullman offers a fresh perspective on the female lead in a Bronson picture, an actress who can actually act, her extremely expressive features meaning she doesn’t need to over-act. In her first mainstream picture, Ullman junks the Ingmar Bergman angst and comes across as a normal wife and mother thrown into a desperate situation. Her presence lightens up Bronson, though at this stage in his career, as evidenced by Someone Behind the Door (1970), Violent City / Family (1970) and Red Sun (1971), he presents quite a different screen persona to the grimacing/growling that was his post-Death Wish (1974) trademark.

Young seems caught between the action of his James Bond trilogy and the emotion-led drama of Mayerling and falls between two stools and hadn’t quite worked out how to get the best out of Bronson, a problem he rectified in Red Sun. Based, theoretically, on a novel by Richard Matheson (The Devil Rides Out, 1968), the screenplay has gone through too many hands, four at the last count, which probably accounts for the dodgy plot.

Not Bronson at his best, probably not a highlight of Ullman’s career either, and definitely a low point for Mason.

For Bronson completists only.

NOTE: There’s a vicious rumor going round, spread on Imdb, that this movie ended up on television only three days after cinematic release. Total nonsense of course. It was released in Britain in July 1973, gaining a two-week London West End run at the ABC-2 (“West End Soars, Variety, July 25, 1973, p19) and going out on a circuit release. It failed to find a U.S. distributor until 1974 in the wake of the success of Death Wish whne it was given a PG certificate by the Motion Picture Code and Rating Program and subsequently distributed by independents like Marcus Film and Emerson. It premiered in Denver – seen as a testing ground for difficult pictures, the city viewed “as a good barometer” of how movies will perform nationwide – in May 1974 (“Denver Used As Testing Ground For New Movies,” Box Office, May 20, 1974, pW4). Total rentals were estimated at around $250,000 (“Variety Chart Summary,” Variety, May 7, 1975, p134) and it placed 247^th in the chart. It made its U.S. television debut on ABC in February 1975. (“Only ABC Enters Second Season With Quantity of First-Run films,” Variety, January 29, 1975, p43) but didn’t score highly with viewers finishing in 119^th place for the year (“Theatrical Movie Rankings 1974-1975,” Variety, September 17, 1975, p40).

Machine Gun McCain (1969) ***

Armed robbers lack the finesse of a jewel thief or burglar when it comes to pulling off a major heist. Rather than resorting to the weaponry of the title, they are more inclined, as John Cassavetes does here, to plant bombs, both as a diversionary tactic and within the target building, in this case a Las Vegas casino.

Although boasting Hollywood leads in Cassavetes and Peter Falk and rising Swedish leading lady Britt Ekland (The Double Man, 1967) and wife of star Peter Sellers, this was an Italian-made gangster thriller with the usual abundance of location work. Without the romantic complications of A Fine Pair (1968) it concentrates on the machinations of the central characters.

And it is a pretty lean machine. The robbery takes place against the background of warring Mafia chieftains, West coast boss Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) trying to muscle in on a Vegas casino without being aware it is controlled by the New York hierarchy. Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) does not realize the robbery has been set up by his naïve son Jack (Pierluigi Apra) on behalf of Adamo. Irene Tucker (Britt Ekland) is on board as a kind of mostly mute magician’s assistant, helping out Hank.

Little dialogue comes Cassavetes’ way, either, which plays to his strength, that glowering intense unpredictable weasel-face, whose reactions are less likely to be emotional than violent. Falk gets the dialog and little help it does him, his goose is cooked when he has the temerity to shout at the New York kingpin.

Yet this slimmed-down documentary-style hard-nosed picture in the vein of Point Blank (1967) manages several touching moments, even more effective for completely lacking sentimentality. When Hank’s son is knifed in the back, the gangster finishes him off with a burst from the titular machine gun rather than see him suffer. His old flame Rosemary (Gene Rowlands), making too brief an appearance, has a wall covered in newspaper headlines of herself with Hank celebrating her life as his moll and she accepts without enmity the new woman in his life and she proves the toughest moll of all when confronted with Mafia gunslingers..

The planning of the heist is well done, no explanatory dialog, just action on screen; there’s a car chase; and the gangster dragnet is unexpectedly powerful. Gabriele Ferzetti (the railroad baron in Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) is excellent as the calm authoritative New York boss, Falk a bit too excitable, and Florinda Balkan (The Last Valley, 1971), in her third screen role, has a small part as a traitorous moll. Ekland is surprisingly good with not much to play with, a couple of lines here and there but still emoting with her face.

Cassavetes, who always claimed he was only acting to fill in the time between directing (Faces, 1968), and as a means of financing them, was at a career peak, Oscar-nominated for The Dirty Dozen (1967) and male lead in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He had just appeared in another Italian gangster movie Bandits in Rome (1968). Cassavetes and Falk would go on to have a fruitful partnership over another five films. Falk and Ekland had played opposite each other in Too Many Thieves (1967). Falk also had an Oscar nod behind him for Murder Inc. (1961) but his career was about to go in a different direction after the TV movie Presciption: Murder (1968) that introduced Columbo.

Trivia trackers might also note a score by Ennio Morricone. Though not one of his best, a few years later he would deliver one of his most memorable themes for Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) for the same director Giuliano Montaldo.

Behind the Scenes – What Raquel Didn’t Do Next

If ever a career was dashed by public perception and screen persona. By the end of the 1960s Raquel Welch should have been coasting, western 100 Rifles (1969) a big hit, ranked in top dozen female stars by Box Office magazine[i] and named in the Top Ten Female World Film Favourites by Reuters [ii]and beginning to be taken seriously as an actress, lined up for one of the most controversial films of the next decade in Myra Breckenridge (1970).

Sure, she had passed on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) whose success might have shot her into the box office stratosphere. And she also pulled out of The Dubious Patriots / You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1970) with rising superstar Charles Bronson and Tony Curtis.[iii] Another movie produced by husband Patrick Curtis – “vicious Hollywood love story” Laurie Lee in the Movies, written and directed by Robert Culp [iv]– failed to get funding.

Her final three movies of 1969 – Flare Up, The Magic Christian and unreleased or never-made mystery that was The Boodle (nobody seems to know what happened to that) – did nothing for her career.

Already the Queen of the Western after Bandolero! (1968) and 100 Rifles, she was set to solidify that position with the $1.4 million Hannie Caulder (1971) and the $2 million Nitro[v] (not made either). Still, she moved into more serious acting with The Beloved (1971) aka Disgrace aka Tilda aka Restless aka Sin (“Let Raquel Show You The Way Of Sin”), a $650,000-budgeted romantic drama filmed in Cyprus by newcomer George Pan Cosmatos and opposite heavyweight actors like Flora Robson and Jack Hawkins, La Welch taking minimum salary in return for 32.5% of the profits.[vi]

Not only was she aiming to knock ‘em dead with Myra Breckenridge and this but she was lined up to play one of Cellini’s mistresses in the Terence Young biopic.[vii] And if she fancied playing up to her sex queen image the role of Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever was hers for the asking.[viii] When an enterprising New York cinema reprised A House Is Not a Home (1965), the posters presented her as the star even though she had only as bit part and still the crowds kept coming.[ix] And when Hammer came to cast The Creatures the World Forgot (1971) it used Welch’s fur bikini image from One Million Years B.C. to launch a talent hunt to become the “screen’s hottest sex symbol.”[x]

And she proved way ahead of her time in setting up, two years before the format would even become a reality, a video cassette business, that would establish her up as a major “influencer” long before the term was even coined by presenting a series of 20-minute programs giving tips about cosmetics and hairdressing. [xi] She had a music publishing business.[xii] And even though her one-hour television special Raquel, reputedly costing $1 million, incited Variety’s critic to complain “can’t sing, can’t dance” it was a phantasmagoria of a production aired by CBS and bought by the BBC for prime time showing.[xiii]

But a fall from grace was imminent. Warner Bros had signed her up as the star of Kansas City Bomber (1972) but when they fell out she took the project to MGM.[xiv] It was her last starring role. When Brian De Palma was in the director’s chair she was announced as top-lining Fuzz (1972)[xv] but when the cop picture appeared she was way down the credits with the derisory “and” prefix. But there should have been a comeback. George Pan Cosmatos had signed her up to star in A Pope Called Joan, “a bawdy and irreverent comedy” possibly in the vein of The Decameron (1971) written by film journalist Robin Bean and certainly not in the serious mode of rival production Pope Joan (1972) starring Liv Ullman.

“As far as I know,” averred producer Patrick Curtis, “these are two different pictures. The other is in a serious vein, ours is a satire with contemporary parallels.”[xvi] But it never appeared. The attachment of Raquel Welch to a project did not guarantee it would get made.

Although there were later flourishes in supporting roles – The Three Musketeers (1974) for example – and the legal minefield of Cannery Row (1982) she became better known as the epitome of how fleeting true movie stardom can be, though few would forget her in a handful of roles such as One Million Years B.C. (1966), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Fathom (1967) and her first two westerns. At least she ended up in the Texas Wax Museum alongside Hollywood stars like Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford.[xvii]

[i] “All-American Favorites of 1968,” Box Office, April 7, 1969, p19.

[ii] “Reuters Poll,” Variety, February 12, 1969, p2.

[iii] “Columbia Set in Turkey,” Variety, June 4, 1969, p34.

[iv] “Curtwel’s Laurie Lee with Raquel Welch Set,” Variety, June 4, 1969, p4; “Hollywood Report,” Box Office, June 16, 1969, p14.

[v] “Curtwel And Tigon Films Join Oater Trend,” Variety, November 18, 1970, p36; “Hollywood Report,” Box Office, February 15, 1971, p10

[vi] “Raquel in Tilda,” Variety, April 23, 1969, p19. “Hollywood Report,” Box Office, June 16, 1969, p14; “Raquel Welch, Johnson To Co-Star in Disgrace,” Variety, August 5, 1970, p24; “Cosmatos, Aide on Exodus, Gets His Own 650G Beloved Finished,” Variety, December 16, 1970, p18. It was based on the novel by Elizabeth Kata who had written A Patch of Blue.

[vii] “Young To Rein Sun Next April and Preps Cellini Biopic,” Variety, November 19, 1969, p5.

[viii] “Raquel Welch Pends,” Variety, February 10, 1971, p6; “Jill and Jo Ann Top Femmes In Connery’s Next Bond,” Variety, March 17, 1971, p34.

[ix] “Carnal on 80-Site Showcase,” Variety, December 22, 1971, p5.

[x] “Columbia and Carreras in Global Talent Search,” Box Office, Nay 11, 1970, p9.

[xi] “Curtwel and Tigon,” Variety.

[xii] “Raquel Welch Is Also A Music Publisher,” Variety, July 8, 1970, p51.

[xiii] “Betting $1-Mil on Raquel Mex Spec,” Variety, February 11, 1970, p31; Review, Raquel, Variety, April 26, 1970; “BBC TV Buys Raquel,” Variety, June 3, 1970, p39.

[xiv] “Corporate Minds,” Variety, May 26, 1971, p6; “Hollywood Report,” Box Office, June 14, 1971, p10; “Raquel Off WB Derby; May Skate for MGM,” Variety, December 22, 1971, p3;

[xv] “Team Raquel, Brynner for Farren-UA’s Fuzz,” Variety, August 11, 1971, p5.

[xvi]“Pact Raquel for Pope Called Joan,” Variety, March 31, 1971, p28.

[xvii] “Likeness of Raquel Welch Now in Texas Wax Museum,” Box Office, September 25, 1972, p7.

Behind the Scenes: Raquel Welch on “Myra Breckenridge” (1970)

In 2012, Raquel Welch was accorded a ten-film tribute at the prestigious Film Society of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and turned up in person to be interviewed on stage prior to various screenings. One of these was Myra Breckenridge (1970). Though interviewer Simon Doonan kicked off proceedings by mistaking her for Ann-Margret (yep). Graceful as our star was, she didn’t storm off the stage.

She admitted she wasn’t first choice for the picture. “I didn’t get a call,” she explained. “I had heard about the movie. I had read the book. The book was absolutely hysterical, so funny, and I thought it was very innovative because it was the first time I had seen somebody like Gore Vidal, who was really a genius, deal with the duality of the nature of both the male and the female. I never saw that before.

*Is that a gun or a are you just pleased to see me?*

“I was interested in how they were going to do this movie and then I heard through the trade that Anne Bancroft (after the success of The Graduate, 1969) had turned it down. So I thought, hmmm, I wonder what they’re going for. A little bird told me to call Dick Zanuck (head of 20^th Century Fox) so I called Dick, who I was in contract with, and asked what kind of actors they were looking for in this role. I was thinking if a guy was going to change his sex and wanted to be like a movie star kind of girl, don’t you think he might want to look like me? And he said, oh my god, that’s a thought, let me talk to David – that was David Brown (later, producer of Jaws, 1975) and I’m sure Helen Gurley Brown (his wife and editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan) got in on it too. And then I did get the call and they asked me to come in and talk to them and they gave me the role.

“I had not seen the script, it’s true. As much as I loved doing Myra, I was kind of disappointed in the outcome of the movie because the narrative never did really string together. It was very disjointed and it didn’t really tell the story of Myron the film critic who was enamored of all the very very strong swashbuckling women of the golden age of film from Joan Crawford to Bette Davis and Myrna Loy.

“He wanted really to be one of those superwomen and I think that’s where the superwomen thing started because it was women then who used to go to the movies. They used to bring the guys to the movies. That was the way it went then more than it does now…The dialog was both male and female and I felt like now I’m playing the girl’s part. Rex Reed is playing Myron and there’s really hardly any relationship between the two. They’re not one person so there’s no idea of the duality and nature. One minute she likes girls and the next minute she likes studs and the older men are just to use and abuse.”

Asked about how she developed her character, Raquel replied: “The real thing – I know this is going to sound very shallow – but Theodora Van Runkle (who had swept to national fame by starting a fashion trend with her outfits for Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) did these beautiful period costumes which did emulate all of the great film stars…I felt these clothes kind of evoked this attitude.

“I did want to meet Mae (West). I did go out and research her and find out all about her and it turned out she had never made a color movie before. I asked for an audience. (In her apartment) I noticed all her furniture was white and also noticed all these 25-watt pink bulbs (to keep the room dim).”

Raquel had observed of movie stars, “There’s a screen persona and a real side. Mae didn’t have a real side. She was wearing a long peignoir and lots of eyelashes. This was noon. She didn’t bring the chimps out (she was rumored to have a menagerie of them…and young men, and neither were in evidence).”

(On set) “The other thing that got to me a little bit was that Mae never worked before 5pm. Also she never really moved by herself. (The limousine that had driven her to the studio) also brought her on to the set. I kissed her hand and one false fingernail fell to the floor and then I thought I’m getting a vibe, I think she’s a man. She refused to appear in the same frame as me. At 77 (Mae’s age) all bets are off and you’re not going to be able to doll it up that much.”

While stars being able to veto a director and perhaps refuse to work with certain other stars was still a perk for the highest-paid movie actors, Welch discovered that Mae West had a very distinctive unheard-of perk. She had costume approval. Van Runkle had designed a Garbo-esque black dress that Raquel was looking forward to wearing. But when it came time for that particular scene she discovered it had been “confiscated….nobody got to wear non-color (West was always dressed in white) except Mae.”

“Very early on (I realized) this isn’t Gore’s book. Nobody’s going to undertsand it…they hired Michael Sarne who’s only claim to fame was Joanna (1969), a visual montage kind of thing and that’s what he did to this movie. The fact that it had dialog was secondary. He used to carry round this little rectangular box and he used to say, I’ve got this little box for you, Raquel.

“It was sad fun, I didn’t want to make a movie that didn’t make any sense. I thought we were going to make something that was revolutonary. I did think it was kind of a landmark that said it’s very likely that world culture will change from this point on.”

You can catch this interview and another one discussing The Three Musketeers on Youtube.

Myra Breckenridge (1970) ***

Proof that time can be kind to even the unholiest of unholy messes. Previously only appreciated/mocked for its camp values, the thin story this has to tell suddenly carries contemporary weight. Not so much the transgender elements but now revealed as the first picture to bring the MeToo agenda to light.

While it’s still terrible, with a tendency towards the really really obvious and, when that doesn’t work, bombard the audience with a That’s Entertainment smorgasbord of sexual innuendo. In fairness, even in those more feminist-awakening times, you probably still had to batter the viewer over the head to get them to accept any of the points being made.

*Candy-striped oufit pure invention of the poster designer*.

The first, while theoretically in a theoretical twist tranposed to the female, was the sexual predator, closely followed by the notion that every woman wanted “it”, regardless of them expressing otherwise. Even the dumbest cinemagoer could not have failed to see that putting an exclusively male casting couch at the disposal of Hollywood agent Leticia (Mae West) was actually a clever way of showing just how the movie business at its worst worked, though in reverse, the females queuing up (apparently) for the kind of sexual transaction that could give them a shot at stardom.

That it’s Myra (Raquel Welch) herself who spends most of the movie degrading men (anal rape anyone?), and women indiscriminately (I’m surprised the posters didn’t scream “Raquel Goes Lesbian”), it’s again just a play on what went on in the virtually exclusive male enclave of Hollywood. Just as pointedly it points the finger at the way Hollywood has destroyed the American Dream, snaring thousands of hopefuls who spend fortunes, whittle away their lives and prostitute themselves (and still do) in the vain hope that taking acting lessons for an eternity will somehow provide them with a talent they weren’t born with.

The narrative – what narrative? – concerns Myron (Rex Reed) having a sex-change operation to become the aforesaid Myra and then claiming an inheritance, on exceptionally spurious grounds, from her kinky uncle Buck (John Huston). And trying to part hunk wannabe Rusty (Roger Herren) from his wannabe girlfriend (Farrah Fawcett, the Major came later). You might argue that the continuous loitering presence of Myron is a distraction but occasionally it’s welcome as the movie runs out of punchbags.

And in case you didn’t get the message in what passes for dialog, Myra takes to just delivering straightforward lectures on the male-dominant Hollywood that posited the notion that women were there for the taking if you were just male enough to take them and that any women who showed the slightest ounce of onscreen intelligence and the ability to swat away predatory males was just a predatory male in disguise.

Nobody comes out of this with any dignity and though it destroyed the career of director Michael Sarne (Joanna, 1969) and Roger Herren, John Huston (The Cardinal, 1963) was inclined to self-indulgence on-screen if not restrained by a strong director, while Farrah Fawcett and, in a bit part, Tom Selleck survived to become television legends. The less said about wooden Rex Reed the better.

Quite where this left Raquel Welch is anyone’s guess. While she held the narrative together in convincing fashion, as an actress she wasn’t provided with enough material beyond the sensational to convince as a dramatic actress of anything more than middling caliber. Yet, it was an incredibly brave career decision. The contemporary likes of Joanne Woodward, Jane Fonda, Maggie Smith et al would have balked at the thinness of the material, and would have run a mile from expressing themselves in such sexual terms, despite probably recognizing what the movie was attempting to achieve.

It needed someone larger than life to play the part and, possibly with higher expectations than seemed plausible, the bold Raquel stepped up to plate. Perhaps the element that appeared most to her was that she took revenge on Rusty because (shock, horror) he didn’t fancy her at a time when she was presented as the most fanciable woman on the planet.

So discretion left at the door, blunderbuss in full operational mode, but even now it’s that approach that is wakening the industry up to the sexual misbehavior of many of its to male personnel. What was once top of the so-bad-it’s-good tree is now revealed as not too bad after all, if you swap the phantasmagoria for the stinking reality underneath.

Behind the Scenes: “Five Card Stud” (1968)

Every now and then in the writing of my blog an event occurs which comes as a great surprise. Last year, I was contacted from Los Angeles by Claudia Pretelin, a producer working for DVD specialist Vinegar Syndrome. They were planning a 4K restoration of Five Card Stud (1968) and, alighting on my review of the movie, Claudia asked if I would do the audio commentary, especially as I had detected the strong feminist undercurrent that runs through the western.

Five years ago, McFarland had published my book The Gunslingers of ’69: The Westerns’ Greatest Year. But if I had been writing about 1968, Five Card Stud would be one of the standouts. For whatever reason, it’s so under-rated it’s almost been completely forgotten, overshadowed by the three other westerns Henry Hathaway made either side of it, most importantly True Grit (1969) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) . Overshadowed because it wasn’t made by John Ford or Howard Hawks. Together with Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood they were the directors most admired by critics. Overshadowed because it didn’t star John Wayne or James Stewart, both considered essential elements to any great western. Overshadowed because nobody gave a damn about Dean Martin (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) as a serious actor.

But from the outset, this is distinctive with recurrent motifs and a visual symmetry – overhead camera, water, strangulation, the card table – that seems to have gone unnoticed, unlike The Searchers. Given the testosterone on display – Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) in addition to Dean Martin – this is unusually an extremely feminist western. The three female leads are far from docile and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts has changed the source book, Glory Gulch by Ray Gaulden, to exploit those elements.

Entrepreneur Lily (Inger Stevens) runs an upmarket barbershop – generally a male monopoly – with an interesting sideline, but when it comes to romance she’s in charge, choosing – and dumping – the men. Nora (Katherine Justice) is a rancher’s daughter so smart and effective that her father has already decided that he’s going to leave her a half-share in his business rather than, as would be the norm, leaving it all to his son Nick (Roddy McDowell). Mama Malone (Ruth Springford) owns the eponymous saloon and takes no sass from anybody.

Van (Dean Martin) likes to think he has the measure of women, when in fact they have the measure of him. The story avoids the obvious lure of a love triangle, of jealous women competing for Van’s affections. Both the young Nora and the more mature Lily are pretty well grounded and judge their men by the standard of their kissing – that’s equality for you.

The movie was one of the fastest ever made, just five months from the start of shooting to release – that’s efficiency for you. And for many critics that was how they regarded director Henry Hathaway. He wasn’t considered a stylist, but a studio workhorse, apt to take what was offered, work in too many genres. But this is one of his most stylish films. In some ways it harks back to film noir. The story is a mystery. And his extensive use of overhead camera would be considered innovative had it been made now.

This is in fact about a serial killer, a treatise on law and order, almost acting as a conduit between the decade’s previous westerns when the good guys and the bad guys are easily distinguished to the end of the decade when such distinctions were muddied. Here, we don’t know who the bad guy is. He’s not a hero saving a town or enforcing law and order. Not a detective either, trying to nail down a killer. He’s only trying to save his own skin. The whodunit is really a MacGuffin, an opportunity to examine the hypocrisies of the West.

The Sons of Katie Elder, Nevada Smith (1966) and Five Card Stud are all about revenge, justified in you like in the first two. Play this another way and the vengeful preacher Rudd (Robert Mitchum) would be the hero, vindicated as much as characters in Hang ‘Em High (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) or True Grit.

Producer Hal B. Wallis (True Grit) bought Ray Gaulden’s western Glory Gulch in May 1967, three months after publication by Berkeley Medallion as a paperback original. (Reprinted a year later, it was re-titled Five Card Stud). It came cheap. Nobody else was bidding. Robert Redford (Downhill Racer, 1969) turned down the role of Rudd – he thought the character too obvious and didn’t like the way the narrative developed – so Robert Mitchum was actually second choice.

Filming was due to start in October 1967 but was delayed till February 1968. It was shot in Durango – a popular locale also utilized for Guns for San Sebastian (1968), Shalako (1968) and The Scalphunters (1968) – and Churabasco Studios in Mexico City. There were 22 actors and 52 crew. The main location was 8,000ft up on the Sierra Madre mountains. The actors were billeted in a motel, but Mitchum, demanding peace and quiet, had the end room so got more of the cold and required a portable oxygen tank. Instead of privacy he was frozen. The boilers didn’t work and allocated a single blanket he ended up piling all his clothes on the bed. Roddy McDowell wasn’t hired until after shooting began and he modelled his somewhat hippie sideburns after George Harrison. Mitchum was nearly crushed to death by a falling 18^th high camera pedestal. While the two stars didn’t particularly hit it off there was no animosity either.

Some of those involved scarcely needed to work. Dean Martin was one of the richest men in the business. At a time when the very top stars took home $750,000 a picture, say $1.5 million if they made two movies a year, Martin took home closer to $5 million a year when you totted up fees from his television show, movies, records and performing. McDowell was the co-owner of a thriving disco franchise. Hathaway had just sold his stake in an oil business for $18 million.

Marguerite Roberts had been one of the top-earning screenwriters in the Hollywood

Golden Age. Starting out in 1933, her credits included Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, The Sea of Grass (1947) starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and MGM’s big-budget blockbuster Ivanhoe (1951) teaming Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor. Around the time of Five Card Stud she had two other projects on studio slates, Hero Suit and Flight and Pursuit, though neither was made and it was perhaps ironic that her next assignment concerned a lawman who took the same no-holds-barred approach to the criminal fraternity, namely True Grit, as the killer in this picture.

Filming began on February 7 and finished on April 14. It opened on July 12. That was a phenomenal turnaround for the period. A Time for a Killing/The Long Ride Home (1967), also starring Inger Stevens, took 16 months to reach the screen. In 1967 there were 125 films in studio backlogs – movies completed but no release date set as yet as yet, studios in no hurry, and often first run cinemas in the major cities clogged up by roadshows or long-running hits.

The western from mid-1960s had become the default for many stars. Where earlier in the decade stars might mix western and war with comedy and drama now for many top names for a period of three, four or five years they appeared either exclusively or almost exclusively in westerns. From 1965 to 1968 except for Matt Helm and one comedy Dean Martin had tackled five westerns. In the same period for James Stewart four out of five were westerns. For Mitchum it was four straight westerns from 1966 to 1968. In two years starting in 1967, four out of five Inger Stevens pictures were westerns. In three years, Glenn Ford made five straight westerns and after Battle of the Bulge (1965) Henry Fonda made four straight westerns. It was the same for directors: between 1965 and 1971 Andrew V. McLaglen made nothing but, and Burt Kennedy, in one year less, seven out of eight.

DVD with 4K restoration and audio commentary by yours truly available to pre-order and comes out in a few days.

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/5-card-stud

East of Sudan (1964) ***

Remembering this picture as a summer holiday matinee of stiff-upper-lip entangled in all sorts of Khartoumery, I came at this film with low expectations. Given producer Charles H. Schneer’s (First Men in the Moon, 1964) involvement, there were no Ray Harryhausen magical special effects. I was only aware of star Anthony Quayle as a bluff supporting actor in epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and Sylvia Syms as a willowy supporting actress (The World of Suzie Wong, 1960).

So I was in for a pleasant surprise. Take away the back projection, stock footage and the unlikely zoo of wild animals and there is a fairly decent action film set in the Sudan on the fringes of the Mahdi uprising (that story filmed as Khartoum the following year).

Baker (Anthony Quayle), former army sergeant awaiting court martial, escapes from a battle near Khartoum, saving governess Miss Woodville (Sylvia Syms), her charge Asua (Jenny Agutter making her debut), officer Muchison (Basil Fowlds) and a wounded soldier. The motley crew flees down the Nile in a boat. You know you are in for something quite different when the soldier dies and Baker wants to toss him overboard. Overruled by prim Miss Woodville and by-the-book Murchison, this good deed is rewarded by losing their beached boat while burying the dead.

A picture like this only survives on twists. Burning the remainder of their boat to attract the attention of the British relief force only brings in their wake a mob of Arabs, who we are informed, in a spicy exchange, don’t know the ten commandments, especially “thou shalt not kill.”

The movie turns into a battle of the sexes, with Woodville’s innocence and good breeding quickly eroded in the face of danger, her natural antipathy towards a scallywag like Baker softening. Lacking due deference, said scallywag is given some choice lines which spark up proceedings. It being Africa, the animals have nothing better to do than torment them, so cue snakes, crocodiles, charging rhinos, hippos, elephants without even a decent monkey to lighten proceedings. Baker sets his ruthless tendences to one side to take a tender, paternal interest in young Asua. Ongoing action prevents the usual male-female meet-cute African Queen-style banter and it’s all the better for it.

Capture by African tribesman takes the story on an interesting detour. Baker, attempting to make friends, shouts out despairingly, “Don’t any of you even speak English?” only for chieftain Kimrasi (Johnny Sekka) to stride out of the bushes with the reply, “I speak, English, Arabic and Swahili.” Baker explains, “We come in peace.” The chief retorts, “With gun in hand?”

Game on! The plot goes offbeat for w while when we become involved in Kimrasi’s life. A former slave, his village presents an unusually realistic alternative world not least for Asua, ill by this time, saved by an African witch doctor. There are further surprises, clever ruses to foil the enemy, revelations about Woodville and a surprising but very British ending.

Quayle is convincing, reveling in the opportunity to create a fully-formed character rather than confined to a small chunk of a picture. Syms, too, with more on offer than normal, Agutter (Walkabout, 1971) not a precocious Disney cut-out, and Fowlds revealing what did for all those years before turning up on television as puppet Basil Brush’s sidekick. As a British B-picture making do on a small budget, it overcomes this particular deficiency with some sparkling dialog and attitudes that go against both the time in which it was set and the era in which it was made. Directed by Nathan Juran (First Men in the Moon) from a screenplay by Jud Kinberg (Siege of the Saxons, 1963).

Action the old-fashioned way.