Tom Lisanti

…Come Fly with Me opened. Pamela, Tiffin, Dolores Hart, and Lois Nettleton portray stewardesses who fly the New York to Paris and Vienna routes. Hart is a gold digger who thinks she has landed a rich handsome baron in Karl Boehm but he is broke and using her unwittingly to smuggle diamonds. As the innocent virgin, Pamela competes for playboy co-pilot Hugh O’Brian with his married lover Dawn Addams. While the jaded though wiser Nettleton lands widowed tycoon Karl Malden without realizing he is loaded.

“I remember Hugh O’Brian was always busy being a playboy,” said Pamela Tiffin. “He played a playboy in the movie and lived it fully in real life! Dolores Hart and I had some nice conversations. She is a warm, decent, and vulnerable woman. Dolores had some unhappy experiences in love matters. And if I’m not mistaken, she was ending one up at the time. She told me the story and was still very upset about it. She said she was going to enter a convent. And at that time I couldn’t understand it. I said, ‘Oh, but you don’t want to, Dolores!’ Now I understand it.  So there she is.”

Read more behind-the-scenes stories in my book Pamela Tiffin:Hollywood to Rome, 1963-1974.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrKK5TRZ_94

The AIP racecar drama Thunder Alley opened. Fabian is a stock car racer suspended from racing after he causes the death of another driver. He goes to work for promoter Jan Murray’s “thrill circus” and falls for his daughter Annette Funicello. If you can’t get Frankie Avalon, Fabian is a nice subsitute. Diane McBain is once again the bad girl as Fabian’s thrill-seeking  former girlfriend who uses rival racecar driver Warren Berlinger to get back at her ex. Though directed by Richard Rush (The Stunt Man), Thunder Alley is a standard programmer but perfect for the sixties drive-in crowd. Choreography was actor/dancer Christopher Riordan and former beach party gals Salli Sachse, Mary Hughes, and Luree Holmes decorate the background.

Commenting in Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema, Diane McBain said with a laugh:

“I don’t remember much about this film.  Most of my off screen time was spent watching them film In the Heat of the Night with Sidney Poitier next door…But I did enjoy working with Fabian.  He’s very nice.”

The hit spy movie In Like Flint opened, the sequel to the popular Our Man Flint (1966) that introduced James Coburn as suave secret agent Derek Flint to the masses. Here he must thwart a secret society of women who are plotting to take over the world.  Led by Lisa (Jean Hale) and the three top female fashion leaders, they operate from a lavish spa in the Virgin Islands called Fabulous Faces.  Their plan is to take over a space station that controls nuclear weapons. To reach their goal, they disguise two of their women as golf caddies and kidnap the president of the U.S. and replace him with an imposter (who eventually turns on them).  To get the rest of the female population to support them, their clientele get “brain and hair washing at the same time.”  Flint’s three lovely assistants (Diane Bond, Mary Michael and Jacki Ray) however are able to resist to the chagrin of the nefarious ladies.

Jean Hale recalled working with Coburn and remarked in Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema, “James is adorable and easy, yet challenging to work with. He is a very sweet, gentle man. When I went on tour to promote the film, the big question was always, ‘What was it like to kiss James Coburn?’  I’d respond, ‘it was lovely but all in a day’s work.’”

Diane Bond  only had kind words to say about James Coburn but not so much about Jean Hale in Talking Sixties Drive-In Movies, “We passed a lot of time together and he was a splendid, jovial person, always joking. He was very down-to-Earth and you could even tell that from his body language…Jean Hale was really unsexy and I thought someone better could have been the lead.” Meow!

50 years ago today, Harry Alan Towers’ grade-B exploitation film House of 1,000 Dolls opened in the U.S. starring the slumming Vincent Price as a mad magician and Martha Hyer as his willing assistant who get sexy women audience members to volunteer for their act and then sell them into white slavery. Diane Bond played one of them and commented, “Towers was a real sleaze of a person…The whips were supposed to be fake but there were only a couple and the rest were real. That’s what the thug picked up as the film was rolling. I screamed and the director Jerry Summers must have thought what a great actress…” Read more in my book Talking Sixties Drive-in Movies from BearManor Media