Remembering the late lovely 60s starlet Phyllis Davis on her birthday. A striking dark-haired beauty with curves galore, Phyllis was similar in appearance to Edy Williams and was usually hired only to fill a bikini though she found deserved fame in the seventies in exploitation movies and on television as a regular on Vega$. Due to Phyllis Davis’ sultry looks and knockout body highlighted by a gleaming smile, the 5-foot-6 beauty began playing minor scantily-clad roles in such films as Lord Love a Duck (1966), The Swinger (1966), and The Last of the Secret Agents? (1966). She appeared in a number of Elvis movies including Spinout (1966) and Live a Little, Love a Little (1968), and continued popping up on television usually swimsuit clad. Despite these minor parts, Davis got noticed by studio insiders and was voted a Hollywood Deb Star in 1966.  Another bikini role came in The Big Bounce (1969) playing a bimbo with nothing more to do than splash around a pool with an older rich guy. But the brunette beauty filled a wild swimsuit so lusciously and showed comedic talent that she was hired for the blackout skits of the new series Love, American Style beginning in 1969. For the next four years Phyllis was clad either in the skimpiest of bikinis or shortest of mini-dresses for the brief sketches where she was usually the object of desire for bungling nebbish Stuart Margolin that were edited in between episodes. In 1969, she snagged the Barbara Parkins part from Valley of the Dolls in the unofficial sequel Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) directed by Russ Meyer. Davis’ character is a fashion designer and aunt to aspiring rock star Dolly Reade who comes to LA with her friends seeking fame and fortune. With her long black mane parted in the middle and hair sprayed stiff, a pale-looking Davis comes across like Vampira and performs in a bit too stiff a fashion for this loose take-off on Hollywood excess though her character is supposed to be oblivious to the weird goings on surrounding her. The film was a huge hit but Davis was unsatisfied with her part and Meyer.

While continuing on TV’s Love American Style, Phyllis lost out on being a Bond Girl to Lana Wood in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) but snagged the lead in Sweet Sugar (1972) an outrageous exploitation women-in-prison film. She convincingly played a prostitute working in Latin America set up on a bogus drug charge by a crooked politician and sent to a chain gang to work on a sugar plantation.  As with most of her contemporaries who wanted to keep working in film, Davis (looking fantastic in her mid-riffs and short shorts) got over her shyness doffing her blouse in many a scene to the delight of her male admirers and repeated going topless in Terminal Island (1973) playing another tough-talking sexpot. Exiled for life to a penal colony on an island off the coast of California for murder, Davis was cast as bimbo killer Joy who loves to sexually tease her male compatriots. The chaste bikini-clad Elvis starlet had come a long way baby.

A much smaller role came next for Phyllis in Mike Nichols’ disappointing The Day of the Dolphin (1973) as a bubble headed blonde receptionist more interested in her personal phone call than helping George C. Scott who is waiting to see her boss.  She then channeled Scarlett O’Hara in the extended dream sequence in Train Ride to Hollywood (1975) directed by Charles Rondeau who helmed many episodes of Love, American Style. Davis got noticed playing a dominatrix in the otherwise disappointing  The Choirboys (1977) and then was cast as private investigator Robert Urich’s brainy assistant in the popular lighthearted series, Vega$ a part she played from 1978 to 1981. During the course of the series Davis drastically changed her appearance by cutting her hair short and going blonde. The show brought Phyllis back into the mainstream limelight and helped buoy her career into the nineties. She retired and never looked back. Sadly, she passed away from Cancer in 2013.

You can read more about Phyllis Davis in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.

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 book Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema to 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.

You can read more about Dolores Faith in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.

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 Beach Ball.  Patton also began working steadily as an assistant director on a number of projects.

You can read anecdotes from Bart Patton about his beach movies and career in my book Hollywood Surf & Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959-1969.