Tom Lisanti is an award-winning author/film historian specializing in1960s/1970s film and television. He began writing professionally in 1998. His newest book is Ryan’s Hope: An Oral History of Daytime’s Groundbreaking Soap from Citadel Press/Kensington Books released in October 2023. Look for his next book, Dueling Harlows: The Race to Bring the Actress’ Life to the Silver Screen from McFarland & Company in late spring 2024.
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.
“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
Remembering the late Mary Hughes on her birthday. A sexy statuesque blonde in the tradition of Brigitte Bardot, she was the perpetual Sixties beach bunny and stood out from all the other girls on the beach due to her eye-popping proportions—standing 5-foot-9 and measuring 36-22-36. Most of the other gals on the sand could turn as many heads, as she.
Mary Hughes was raised in Southern California and attended University High School. A true California beach girl, the tanned beauty with the long white-blonde hair would drive the surfers of Malibu crazy every time she laid foot on the sand. It was there where she was discovered by director William Asher. Needing more beach girls to populate the background of Muscle Beach Party (1964), the sequel to the previous year’s Beach Party, Mary Hughes was literally whisked off the sands of Malibu by Asher and brought to the attention of AIP. Though she had nothing more to do in the movie than to look good in a bikini, nobody did it as sexily as Mary.
She quickly followed this with appearances in Bikini Beach (1964) and Pajama Party (1964). The latter featured a beach volleyball game and though one of the players was the sexy Susan Hart male viewers couldn’t take their eyes off of the stunning Hughes just standing on the right watching the antics. AIP signed the lissome sexpot to a contract sending her on public relation tours around the country to promote the beach films. Despite the fact that she rarely uttered a line of dialog, she became one of AIP’s most popular starlets.
In Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) she has an amusing bit during the film’s opening song as she smashes an ice cream cone into the face of surfer boy Mike Nader (“Right blanket, wrong miss,” sing Frankie and Annette) before she fades into the background. Ski Party (1965) gave Hughes billing on its poster ads but she does not appear in any of the ski scenes filmed in Sun Valley.
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) features an entertaining segment with Hughes (actually speaking a line), Patti Chandler, Marianne Gaba, and the other beach girls who through song try to persuade adman Mickey Rooney that they had what it takes to be “the girl next door” in his motorcycle ad campaign. When they cavort and sing, “We’re the chicks who know all the tricks—hey, what about us?” you could not help but agree.
In Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), Hughes played Robot No. 6 programmed by Vincent Price as the evil Dr. Goldfoot to marry then kill a wealthy surgeon in Denmark. The last of the AIP beach movies, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), features Hughes wearing an unflattering thick red headband throughout the movie but her hot body is prominently on display as she dances and shakes poolside.
Hughes next put on some clothes for her final two movies at AIP. In Fireball 500 (1966), she was one of the many fawning fans of racecar driver Fabian. The gals trail him wherever he goes and where his name on the butt of their shorts. In another AIP racecar movie, Thunder Alley (1967) starring Fabian and Annette Funicello, Hughes pops up dancing at the local club where the drivers hang out and unwind. In between, she was cast as one of the Slaymates in the Matt Helm spy spoof, Murderers’ Row (1966). Though draped in widow’s weeds, Hughes is easily recognizable from the other girls due to her golden flaxen-hair. Later she is seen scantily clad as Miss September as she and the other Slaymates surround Martin’s enormous bath tub.
Hughes final film was the swinging London-set musical Double Trouble (1967) starring Elvis Presley where she was hired as a Watusi dancer. Hughes then became part of that hip late sixties music scene and had romances with Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Roger Daltrey. While a member of The Yardbirds, Beck composed the song “Psycho Daisies” to prove his devotion to Hughes.
Hughes last professional show business gig was as one of the four “Operation Entertainment Girls” along with Sivi Aberg, Thordis Brandt, and Eileen O’Neill on the 1968 TV variety series Operation: Entertainment who performed each week with guest stars entertaining the troops around the U.S. and the world.
She sadly passed away from Cancer in 2007, shortly after reuniting with beach girls Salli Sachse, Patti Chandler, and Linda Opie for a special Vanity Fair photo tribute to the beach party movies.
