The Wrecking Crew (1969)

Film: The Wrecking Crew (1969)
Stars: Dean Martin, Elke Sommer, Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Nigel Green, Tina Louise
Director: Phil Karlson
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the end of the 1960's, what promise had been contained for Nancy Kwan's stardom had largely gone.  We were nearly a decade away from the seismic success of The World of Suzie Wong, and Hollywood didn't have a lot of imagination with casting her, though they continued to cast her in B-grade movies with high billing for the remainder of the decade.  While we'll talk about what happened after for her below, we're going to thus end our look at Nancy Kwan with a film at the end of the decade, one that definitely has her in a prominent role (arguably more prominent than the last two films we've profiled for her), but is more famous for her costars, and how this movie was the start of one major career...and the tragic end of another.

(Spoilers Ahead) I'll be real-I've never seen any of the Matt Helm films.  During the post-Dr. No years of the 1960's, Hollywood was crawling with James Bond knockoffs in hopes of capturing some of the crazy success of that franchise.  Movies like Casino Royale and film series like the Derek Flint movies (with James Coburn) became regular fare from studios, and one of these parodies were four films starring Dean Martin as spy Matt Helm.  The movies are meant to be parodies of the Bond franchise, played for comic effect, with lots of gadgets & beautiful women.  I haven't seen the others, but it's pretty easy to see continuity isn't going to be an issue here as the plot is anecdotal to the movie. We have Matt trying to rescue $1 billion in gold from the villainous Count Contini (Green), while also avoiding his clumsy partner Freya Carlson (Tate), who continually bumbles into more problems for Matt to solve while also trying to recover the gold.  Contini has a number of beautiful women as his associates (Sommer, Kwan, Louise), all of whom alternate between being turned on by Matt & trying to kill him (all three end up dead for their troubles).  The movie ends with Matt & Friya attempting to make love, but Friya accidentally pulling the emergency brake on the train they're on, with the two of them hurtling toward the screen in a flash frame, and them advertising the next movie (which would never be made).

There was a reason that film was never made, and it had to do not with Kwan, but with one of her costars.  Based on the cast list & the year this was released, you might have put together that this was the last film Sharon Tate starred in that was released during her lifetime.  The film was released in New York in February of 1969, and she was murdered six months later in Hollywood's most notorious homicide, by the Manson Family.  Supposedly Martin was so despondent over her death that he couldn't make the fifth film, and it was scrapped by Columbia.

This is, therefore, the movie that Margot Robbie watches fifty years after it was released in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, her feet up on the seat and gleefully enjoying the actual Sharon Tate onscreen.  The movie itself isn't particularly good, but it's kind of fun.  If you get past the sexism (and oh is there sexism, even by spy film standards), it's cheesy & goofy & Tate's funny in the movie, as are Kwan and Louise playing one-note characters well (I didn't think Sommer's part was as well-drawn as the other three).  It's not a good movie, so it's getting two-stars, but it's not a bad way to kill two hours if you get into spy films.

While the film marked the end of Sharon Tate's career, it weirdly started another film icon's work in Hollywood pictures.  Bruce Lee at this point had starred in his role as Kato in The Green Hornet TV series, but had not worked on a Hollywood movie set until The Wrecking Crew where he was the action choreographer (one of the men whom he choreographed was Chuck Norris, making his screen debut in a small part).  This sparked a friendship between Lee and Kwan, one of the actors he worked with on fight scenes, that would last the remainder of Lee's life; two year's later Lee would become an international superstar with The Big Boss, and four years after The Wrecking Crew Lee would also, like Tate, die tragically young, a Hollywood death that conspiracy theorists still debate.

Nancy Kwan's film career continued sporadically, but never with as consistent of roles as she had during the 1960's.  Like many actresses of her generation, she'd spend the 1980's doing television, including spots on a nighttime soap opera (Knots Landing), and later in the 2000's would appear in a guest spot on ER.  She endured tragedy in the 1990's when her only child, Bernard, died of AIDS, and she turned down what might have been a comeback role in The Joy Luck Club due to problems with the script (namely a line in the film that disparaged The World of Suzie Wong).  Overall, Kwan achieved a success no Asian woman had ever had in Hollywood in the 1960's, and one that only now with Awkafina & Constance Wu are we seeing any Asian women attempt to hit again...but it's hard not to notice that other actresses who were breaking out in 1960 like Natalie Wood or Angie Dickinson got bigger careers than Kwan.  Next month, we're going to continue to look at an actress of the 1960's, one who made her debut near Nancy Kwan's but whose career was afforded a more traditional path to stardom in Hollywood...even though she insisted on taking a lot of detours along the way.