Get a double shot of Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema gorgeous cover girl Celeste Yarnall in 2 new Blu-Ray releases. Celeste contributes a commentary track to The Velvet Vampire (1970) where she plays the title character who draws hippie couple Michael Blodgett and Sherry Miles into her desert den.
https://youtu.be/W6vKcb2eofY
The Face of Eve (1968) features Celeste as perhaps the first cinematic female Tarzan. Unlike the recent Tarzan movie filmed on a London sound stage and riddled with CGI effects, Eve was filmed on location in Spain and the jungles of Brazil. It features a first-rate class including Christopher Lee, Robert Walker, and Herbert Lom. Click here to read Cinema Retro’s review and then get a copy of my bookFantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinemato find out the reason from Celeste Yarnall herself why she was missing from a quarter of the movie.
A luminous dark-haired beauty who eerily resembled Elizabeth Taylor with the classiness of Grace Kelly, the late Dolores Faith projected a sweet persona and was usually cast as fragile ingénues or vixenish vamps but surprisingly never rose out of Grade Z movies. Dolores, a natural blonde who bucked the trend in the halcyon days of Sandra Dee and the flaxen-haired Barbie Doll by dying her hair black to match her olive skin, began the decade with bit parts as a young bride in All in a Nights Work (1961) and a pie-throwing coed in Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961). The fledgling starlet next grabbed a lead role in the low-budget exploitation movie V.D. (1961), which was also released under the title Damaged Goods. She played a dark and temperamental teenage trollop who seduces her friend’s beau and pays for it by getting the Clap. In the cult sci-fi movie The Phantom Planet (1961) she is a mute inhabitant of the planet Rehton who falls in love with stranded astronaut Dean Fredericks. At first he is treated as a hostile until he rescues the beautiful Faith from the icky creatures the Solarites. In the process, she regains her voice. Faith received a lot of press for this as she was billed as “The Girl from Outer Space” on the film’s posters and from a purported romance with dashing Sean Flynn son of Errol Flynn.
More notoriety came her way when she was selected to be a Hollywood Deb Star in 1962 however it did not lead to any significant movie roles for her and she was back in exploitation land re-teaming with Dean Fredericks in the totally obscure drama Wild Harvest (1962). On television she turned up on Ripchord and Have Gun, Will Travel in 1963. That same year Life magazine published a feature story on her but all it led to is a cameo appearance as a towel-clad American woman in Italy who gently convinces a jealous sergeant to help his rival and girlfriend escape from the Germans in the WWII adventure Shell Shock (1964). It was a respite before Dolores returned to far out roles in two Grade Z sci-fi productions from the directing/writing team of Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce. In Mutiny in Outer Space (1965) she joined Glamazons Pamela Curran and Francine York as astronauts on a space station being terrorized by a creeping alien fungus. As the crew’s bio-chemist, Faith is the one who first discovers the creature. The Human Duplicators (1965) had space visitors trying to take over the world by duplicating the Earth inhabitants as androids. Faith’s next movie was a step down from even the previous two but that is not surprising since schlock horror filmmaker Jerry Warren was brought in to try to save it. House of Black Death (1965) featured Dolores as the innocent girl caught between two battling warlocks, John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr., out to control the Desard family, which Faith is a member of. Dolores Faith married and retired from acting shortly after. She passed away in 1990.
Happy Birthday to actor-turned-producer Bart Patton. Tall and lanky, handsome Bart Patton played a surfing college boy on vacation in Waikiki in Gidget Goes Hawaiian but it is his work behind the camera that he is best remembered for. An association with Roger Corman led the actor to become a twenty-four old producer of the beach-party movies, Beach Ball (1965), Wild Wild Winter (1966), and Out of Sight (1966).
At age ten, Bart played Scampy the Clown for four years on the ABC children’s program, Super Circus. While attending UCLA in the late fifties he met his future wife, pretty blonde actress Mary Mitchel, and became close friends with an aspiring filmmaker named Francis Coppola. Patton made his film debut playing a high school student in Because They’re Young (1960), which began his four-year relationship with Columbia Pictures though he never signed a contract. He would go on to work for the studio in Strangers When We Meet (1960) before joining Joby Baker and Don Edmonds as partying college boys in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) starring Deborah Walley in the title role. Bart also began working on TV and guest starred on such varied series as 77 Sunset Strip, Father Knows Best, Thriller and General Electric Theatre. His next film role was as an ax murderer in Dementia 13 (1963) directed by Francis Coppola. This eerie black-and-white horror movie is set in an Irish castle also starred William Campbell, Luana Anders, Mary Mitchel, and Patrick Magee. It was on Dementia 13 where Bart Patton began to get involved with the production side of making movies. Producer Roger Corman was impressed with the young man and he began working as a production manager for his company. He helped put the cult horror movie Spider Baby (1964) together before Corman offered him a chance to produce Beach Ball (1965) one of the most blatant and successful knockoffs of AIP’s Beach Party. This began his short partnership with director Lennie Weinrib. The success of Beach Ball landed the duo a seven-year contract at Universal Pictures. The studio was late into getting in on the beach movie craze and hired them. First up was Wild Wild Winter (1965), a beach party in the snow starring Gary Clarke and Chris Noel, and then the combination beach and spy spoof Out of Sight (1966) with Jonathan Daly and Karen Jensen.
In between producing assignments Patton continued accepting roles on such TV sitcoms as Petticoat Junction and Hank. At Universal, he and Weinrib had a number of projects in development but were let go before any could come to fruition. Bart Patton went on to produce the trouble-laden production The Rain People (1969) directed by his friend Francis Coppola. The movie starred Shirley Knight as a pregnant Long Island housewife who abandons her husband and hits the road and picks up hitchhiker James Caan as a mentally challenged former football star. Frustrated with film making, Patton began making commercials for John Urie & Associates. The one later film that Patton produced was The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1978) starring Robert Logan of BeachBall. Patton also began working steadily as an assistant director on a number of projects.
The late Tura Satana was one of the most exotic actresses of the sixties who always seemed to be cast as voracious man-eaters in low-budget films and fantasy television shows. Her on-screen persona was so powerful that you could not help but be transfixed by her as exemplified when cast as the vile Varla in Russ Meyer’s drive-in cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Dancer Tura Satana’s acting career began was spotted by director Billy Wilder while performing at the Pink Pussycat Club and he cast her as Suzette Wong, an Asian hooker in Irma La Douce (1963). Satana got noticed in her small role and kept busy for the next three years playing minor exotic roles on film and TV. Her dancing prowess got her cast as a stripper in Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1964) and later as a go-go girl in Our Man Flint (1966). After more TV gigs, she was cast in the role of a lifetime—the man-hating viper Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966).The movie was ahead of its time and possibly made audiences especially men squirm in their seats as buxom Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams physically and verbally abused the males in the movie. To make the gals even more Amazonian, Russ Meyer brilliantly positioned the camera close to the ground so he could film the girls from an angle looking up. Clad in a black cat suit with her cleavage prominently displayed, Satana was the trio’s depraved leader who after breaking the neck of her teenage male opponent in a car race takes his nubile prissy girlfriend hostage. The terrified teen is dragged along as the vixens plot to rip off the fortune of a crippled old man despite the presence of his two sons—one beefy and dumb and the other weak but suspicious. Satana oozes a sort of evil sexiness as the angry Varla and menaces, karate chops, and kills her way into B-movie infamy though the film was a box office disappointment when released. Shockingly, Hollywood never took advantage of Satana’s talent properly. In 1968 she turned up in director Ted V. Mikel’s grade-Z horror movie The Astro-Zombies playing a wicked Chinese dragon lady named “Satana” who works for a foreign power that covets mad doctor John Carradine’s knowledge of turning lawmen into programmable robots. Mikels then hired her for a supporting role in The Doll Squad (1973) She deserved much better. Tura then disappeared from show business only to be resurrected in the nineties due to Faster Pussycat‘s cult followers. She was a fave on the celebrity autograph convention circuit until her death in 2011. You can read more about Tura Satana in my and Louis Paul’s book Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films & Television, 1962-1973 and my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.
Also a quick happy birthday to Robert Pine star of the beach movie Out of Sight (1966) and the TV series CHiPs, but now more known as the dad of actor Chris Pine of the new Star Trek movies. And to blonde nymphet Sue Lyon of Lolita fame though I prefer her in The Night of the Iguana as the tease who turns on drunken minister Richard Burton and on-the-down-low Lesbian teacher Grayson Hall.
