Christa Helm Update

Still searching for more info on LET'S GO FOR BROKE, I ran across a brief Net note from ten years back where a gentleman was asking if anyone had ever heard of the film. He goes on to say that it premiered in Cincinnati and may not have been released anywhere else. This tells me that someone involved in the making of the picture was probably from Cincinnati. That would explain my memory of a big ad campaign for a film no one's ever seen. He goes on to add that the biggest name in the cast was Eddie Egan, the former cop, on whose life THE FRENCH CONNECTION was based. Egan appeared in a small role in THAT film and went on to an acceptable career as a character actor. This film would have been one of his earliest and is, as expected, NOT listed in his IMDB entry. Egan died a decade ago so we can't ask him about it either. Sigh. More to come I hope!

Elvis Records in the Seventies

The sixties didn’t really exist for Elvis Presley. Between movie producer Hal Wallis and the ever-present evil of Colonel Parker, Elvis was kept in a drugged stupor through most of the decade…in a manner of speaking. They had latched onto a huge cash cow in Elvis’ movies so the canny pair just kept churning out variations on the theme. Some were more entertaining than others but in all of them, Elvis gave his one note impression of the tough but sensitive singing hero who always got the girl. In between films, he was not allowed to grow up. He was given huge amounts of money and kept pacified with expensive toys, guns, sex partners and peanut butter and banana sandwiches. One telling moment captured in a posthumous documentary shows Elvis thanking one of his notorious "Memphis Mafia" for getting him a girl the night before. "That girl last night? She give great head, man!" When informed they were being filmed, he and others around them break into the hymn "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."
A partial clipping from an unknown early seventies magazine that I have in my archives talks about his female entourage. "The membership of this select group may change, but their purpose is to pamper Elvis, to soothe him when he’s tired or tense, to encourage a smile when he’s feeling blue, to give him massages, and generally cater to his needs. In return for their loving attentions to him, Elvis’ girls get the special, sweet, Southern-style treatment he always accords to members of the fair sex, as well as all the pretty clothes, expensive gifts, new hairdos and other nice things in life they could wish. He’s even been known to personally see to the outfitting and coiffuring of a particular favorite, much as if she were a life-size Barbie doll to dress up in beautiful clothes. These girls’ only fear is that—and usually sooner than later— Elvis will tire of them and have a fresh…" That’s where my partial clipping ends but….brrr! Doesn’t that sound as though El had a harem of personal concubines to you?
Anyway, Elvis didn’t have any real chart action during the mid-sixties at all, his pioneering music and style taking a backseat to his movie bankability. Then, after his legendary 1968 comeback special, "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto" were released to great acclaim. There followed a brief return to the top forty with a series of enjoyable, mostly non-movie related singles sung in a variety of (overproduced) styles. "Rubberneckin’" was a fair rocker and one of the few songs in Presley’s legendarily bad last acting film, CHANGE OF HABIT (with Mary Tyler Moore as our hero’s love interest…and a nun!) The flip side was a tearjerker story song, "Don’t Cry Daddy" which ultimately got more airplay. "Kentucky Rain" was a catchy song co-written by future country/pop hitmaker Eddie Rabbit. "I’ve Lost You" wasn’t particularly memorable but "The Next Step Is Love" became a favorite with me and features a great lead vocal (and waaaay too much backing vocals!). "Mama Liked the Roses" and "The Wonder of You" were another double A-side with both getting lots of play at first. The building, pompous show stopping splendour of the latter eventually won out. "Patch It Up" and "You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me" were probably past the end of this brief run as neither actually appeared on radio much. Presley continued to turn out singles from this point to ever-diminishing returns until his untimely death in 1977, after which his final release, the less than stellar "Moody Blue" topped the charts for obvious reasons.
What would things have been like if Elvis had been allowed to grow up and live something close to a "real" life? We’ll never know. The boy who changed music forever was himself held back from evolving by being given anything he ever wanted. Eventually everything he ever wanted , along with no one willing to say the word "no" to him, killed him at an age younger than I am now! I think there’s a lesson there somewhere.

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 5 (and last for now)

I adore Goldie Hawn. From BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE straight on to THE BANGER SISTERS, she has remained a favorite. I did NOT like her ditzy blonde on ROWAN AND MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN so I didn’t care for her Oscar-winning CACTUS FLOWER as it featured THAT Goldie. One of my absolute favorite films of the seventies is FOUL PLAY, Colin Higgins’ brilliant Hitchcockian comedy featuring Ms. Hawn, Dudley Moore and a great mainstream debut for Chevy Chase (that he never really has been able to live up to since). I also saw PRIVATE BENJAMIN, arguably Goldie’s best film, twice. In between these two popular hit vehicles, however, came LOVERS AND LIARS.
LOVERS AND LIARS, or more accurately VIAGGIO CON ANITA (literally Travels With Anita) is a fairly forgotten sex comedy featuring Italian hunk of the moment Giancarlo Giannini. I saw it several years later cut up on local TV. Hopefully, it made at least a bit more sense uncut. Did we even see it uncut in the US? One IMDB review mentions jarring jumpcuts during Goldie’s scenes of passion, the implication being (as I said yesterday) that R rated Italian films from the seventies are safe bets for naked breasts…except when the American censor (or the superstar actress’s agent perhaps) gets to them. I think it’s safe to presume that this was probably shot before FOUL PLAY and released afterwards as her career was in just a bit of a lull during that period. What’s it about? Who remembers? Like I said, it’s a romantic Italian sex farce. For some those are very much an acquired taste. For those that love them—or Goldie Hawn--- I understand that you can sometimes find LOVERS AND LIARS in the video bargain bins of America.

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 4

As a film buff since childhood, I long ago developed an affinity for foreign (ie: non-American) films from Eisenstein to Truffaut to Wim Wenders. In 1973, one of my favorite foreign films was LE AMAZONNI - DONNE D'AMORE DIGUERRA aka BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS. It was an R-rated picture and I had to choose what R-rated pictures I wanted to see carefully as this usually involved getting one or more of my parents to take my fourteen year old self to the "under seventeen not admitted without parent" showing. (Okay, Okay! I know there were ways around that but hey, I was an honest kid!) My criteria generally included A) the likely overall entertainment value of the movie and B) the expected amount of large naked breasts that would be on view. I found myself often surprised by the former and generally disappointed in the latter. Through trial and error, however, I quickly learned that foreign films were almost always a good bet for naked ladies!
BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS wasn’t really all that far removed from one of those Italian "Hercules" movies that saturated the market in the early sixties wake of Steve Reeves. Starring Lincoln Tate as Zeno and Lucretia Love—Look at the ads dummy, I am NOT making that up!--- it features a tribe of largely bare chested warrior women fighting men. I don’t recall anything else about the plot quite frankly. Tate’s IMDB listing says little about him but he seems to have started out on American TV so he may have followed the Eastwood route to "stardom."
To me, the ads were the most fun. Note that the girl in the ad gives a very distinct impression of being…Raquel Welch! It doesn’t exactly look like her but it also looks like no one in this movie and the pose even echoes Welch’s then-recent triumph in ONE MILLION YEARS, BC, of which the fur-wearing black and white poster was still everywhere in those pre-Farrah days. Note also that, in each case, the paste-up department at the local newspaper has worked overtime (with a black magic marker from the look of it)to roughly obscure a bit of cleavage deemed too shocking for the hometown market. In my case, that just underscored the fact that there were probably lots more of those shocking things on view in the movie! I named BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS as one of my top ten movies seen that year…and I haven’t seen it anywhere since.

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 3

Gene Wilder was a major star (one of my personal favorites!) after YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN in 1974 enabling him to write and direct his own vehicles just like his mentor, Mel Brooks. If he wasn’t as talented as Mel Brooks, what did it really matter? THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES’ SMARTER BROTHER and THE WORLD’S GREATEST LOVER were still funnier than most other movies of their day. Around 1980, it looked like Gene could do no wrong. That’s where SUNDAY LOVERS comes in. Actually, I haven’t seen it so I shouldn’t talk that way. Hmmmm….according to my records I have seen it. Was it really that unmemorable? This was one of those combination features so popular in Italy in the sixties. This particular one was a French/Italian/British/US co-production. That kind of warning should NEVER be ignored! Four completely unrelated short sex comedies. Wilder starred in "Skippy," the American thirty minutes. Then-current 007 Roger Moore was in director Bryan Forbes’ UK segment with international favorites Ugo Tognazzi and Lino Ventura rounding out the other two sections. Other than the unusual fact that the Moore segment was written by Anthony Newley’s longtime lyricist Leslie Bricusse there’s not much else to say about this little seen and less remembered sex comedy anthology. Gene Wilder still had a couple of hits in him but this was the start of his career downslide. Too bad.

Movies That Fell Through The Cracks # 2

This one's not quite completely forgotten. I found several "collector's" sources for it and at least a little info on IMDB. In 1975, though, SODOM AND GOMORRAH-THE LAST SEVEN DAYS was expected to revolutionize the adult film industry before it flopped big time. At nearly a million dollar budget, it was reportedly a DeMille sized biblical epic with sex. Never having seen it, I can't say for sure but I'd bet part of the reason it flopped was that it also supposedly had comedy( including a talking chimp)...and science fiction! At age 16, never having seen an adult film, that's what appealed to me. There's a freakin' space ship in this ad! This was a period when being an adult filmmaker didn't mean just pointing the camera at couples rutting by the pool. Some of these folks actually aspired to serious low-budget, independent film-making that simply emphasized sex. Heck, the pictures were actually advertised in family newspapers (which is where I clipped this one).The ill-fated Mitchell Brothers (one would later murder the other) had earlier struck gold with BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR, a pretentious, artsy porn film starring Marilyn Chambers and this epic was to be their masterpiece. Million bucks or not, I have a sneaking suspicion that this poster was way better than the picture itself. The spaceship in biblical times was done a few years later by Monty Python in LIFE OF BRIAN. Wonder if they got the idea from this one?

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 1

To inaugurate this new occasional series, we have a movie that seems to have COMPLETELY fallen through the cracks. I have never seen this picture and I have no reason whatsoever to believe it was particularly good but nothing deserves to be completely forgotten. LET’S GO FOR BROKE was released in 1974. I swear it was. I recall saturation radio advertising! It is NOT, however, listed in IMDB nor in Michael Weldon’s two Psychotronic books which list everything else I’ve ever noted as not being in IMDB. Of the folks associated with it, star Christa Helm is listed (as "Christ" Helm) but only for a cheesy horror film (directed by DEEP THROAT’s Gerard Damiano) and a WONDER WOMAN guest appearance (some time after which, apparently, she was murdered). There are several "Chitras" listed but without this film among them. Jacqueline Mayro, an unusual name so probably the same person, appeared in numerous things including the classic Mary Martin TV PETER PAN but not this picture according to IMDB. Neither the writers nor the director show any other credits. From the ad, as well as my recollection of the radio spots, it’s a female James Bond kind of thing, undoubtedly shot on an ultra-low budget, possibly on an island somewhere. With its PG rating, there probably wasn’t much T&A but nonetheless this was probably released as drive-in fare (by whoever. There’s no studio credit on the ad either!) I was going to a lot of movies in 1974 but, at 13, I couldn’t drive so drive-in flicks often escaped me. Still, I remember the cool-sounding radio ads and I wish I had seen it. It was probably pretty bad but, at a time when IMDB regularly lists the most obscure straight-to-video releases in actors’ credits, LET’S GO FOR BROKE doesn’t deserve to be so completely and utterly ignored! If any of you saw it, feel free to tell us more about it. Thanks. UPDATE: I found a recent bit on the Web that indicates that Christa Helm's daughter was working on a book about her mother and that the TV series CELEBRITY JUSTICE was (is?) doing a piece on her tragic stabbing murder. It mentions her appearance on WONDER WOMAN, throws in a STARSKY AND HUTCH but still doesn't mention what must have been her biggest break, the starring role in LET'S GO FOR BROKE!