Former 60s starlet and Drive-in Dream GirlQuinn O’Hara has just released her first novel called Copper and the Jo Jo Mystery? co-written with Blair Whipple. It is a lighthearted look at the two authors’ pets. Click here for more information and links to purchase.
Quinn, who co-starred in A Swingin’ Summer and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, among others, is one of the sweetest people you will ever meet and here is hoping her book is a big success. Click here for her web site chock filled with photos then and now.
The latest issue of Cinema Retro has been released and once again it is jammed packed with great articles. Click here for more information. The one I am looking forward to most is on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie, The Helicopter Spies featuring Carol Lynley and as sexy Miss Zalamar, Glamour GirlThordis Brandt.
Below is an excerpt on it from my book (co-written with Louis Paul) Film Fatales and a clip from the trailer:
Carol Lynley switched sides for The Helicopter Spies (1968), which was the feature film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. two-part episode “The Prince of Darkness Affair” (10/2 &10/9/67), written by Dean Hargrove. THRUSH is after a ray generator called the Thermal Prism and Waverly recruits master criminal Luther Sebastian (Bradford Dillman) in aiding agents Solo and Illya in retrieving it. But Sebastian (the leader of a religious sect called The Third Way) plans to snatch the Prism to control the balance of power in the world. Lynley plays the episode’s innocent Annie who stumbles into the plot determined to get Napoleon to lead her to Sebastian because “my fiancé Hugh Winslow of the Bakersfield’s Winslow’s is in a Turkish prison because Sebastian framed him for a murder he committed. I’ve spent a whole year collecting evidence. I must free my poor Hugh from that awful prison.”
The episode’s running gag is that the brothers (each played by H. M. Wynant) of Hugh ‘s cellmate (also framed by Sebastian) accompany her and as one is killed off another takes his place. The U.N.C.L.E. agents are forced to bring Annie along but she becomes more of a thorn-in-the-side with her interference. Lynley looks fantastic in this role and gives a delightful performance as the misguided Annie. Her performance is truly a standout.
There is a new book out about Paul Newman proclaiming the super star was bi-sexual. Click here to read more. I always take these accusations years after a star has died with a grain of salt. But even if he did dabble with men, ho -hum, who cares.
I’ve always thought Newman was one of Hollywood’s most handsomest leading men. Of his 60s films, my favorites are Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hud, and Harper due to his pairing with sultry Pamela Tiffin. I think they played off each other very well as evidenced by the clip below.
In 1975, two of my favorite actresses, Carol Lynley and Anjanette Comer, co-starred together in an exciting TV-movie white water river rafting adventure called Death Stalk, a sort of Deliverance rip-off.
A bunch of escaped convicts led by virile Vic Morrow stumble upon vacationing rafters Vince Edwards and his wife Comer and his boozy boss Robert Webber with his much younger wife Lynley while camped. The cons steal their canoes and wives and make run for it down river. Sounds typical, and it is, but there is a twist as supposedly happily married Comer falls for Morrow while spoiled trophy wife Lynley fights off her abductors to get back to her husband.
Death Stalk was suppose to originally air around Thanksgiving 1974 but NBC pulled the plug on it because it deemed it too adult for the holiday season (there is a scene of an attempted rape of Lynley by Neville Brand) and moved it to a January 1975 broadcast.
