Saturdays with the Stars Season 2 Finale

Two of our legendary Stars of 2020,
Sophia Loren & Jayne Mansfield

Yesterday with The Three Musketeers we hit the finale of our second season of "Saturdays with the Stars," and before we start the new year (and a new season, devoted to Hitchcock's leading ladies), I wanted to take time to celebrate another season, and one I treat as a success.  We never missed a Saturday (there was one close call, but that was really it-being stuck at home made at least this part of 2020 easier), and I saw a lot of new movies & now have a better understanding of twelve stars, some of which I knew next to nothing about before this year.  And I hope you learned something as well!

It's always fascinating to me to focus on an actor's career, rather than as we typically do in film discussions on a director's.  Watching these women, particularly under the guise of "Sex Symbols" was intriguing to me because Hollywood had different attitudes toward these beautiful women as the public began to find their sexuality passé, or eventually, absent.  It is kind of heartbreaking to watch someone like a Jayne Mansfield or Raquel Welch, who clearly chose poorly at select moments of their careers & paid the price for it, and fascinating to watch a figure like Sophia Loren or Ann-Margret who was able to rise above their studio-forced persona and eventually gain mainstream critical recognition in their lifetimes.

Every film I watched this year was a movie I was seeing for the very first time, as well, so once again I was blown away by the expanses of Classic Hollywood, rich with westerns and noir and musicals that I'd never been exposed to.  Next year we'll do our third and final tour of Classic Hollywood actresses (after that, if we continue the series, we're going to either add men or a more modern element for a fourth season), so we'll continue to mine this well, but before we do that, let's hand out some superlatives for this year's leading ladies.

Favorite Performance from Each Star

January: Jean Harlow-Red Dust

February: Betty Grable-I Wake Up Screaming

March: Lena Horne-Cabin in the Sky

April: Rita Hayworth-Separate Tables

May: Lana Turner-The Postman Always Rings Twice

June: Marilyn Monroe-The Misfits

July: Jayne Mansfield-Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

August: Sophia Loren-Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

September: Gina Lollobrigida-Come September

October: Nancy Kwan-The World of Suzie Wong

November: Ann-Margret-Carnal Knowledge

December: Raquel Welch-The Three Musketeers

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Jean Harlow

Rita Hayworth

Sophia Loren

Marilyn Monroe

Lana Turner

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Rita Hayworth, Separate Tables

Sophia Loren, Two Women

Sophia Loren, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

Lana Turner, The Postman Always Rings Twice

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Cabin in the Sky

Cover Girl

I Wake Up Screaming

Imitation of Life

Libeled Lady

The Misfits

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Red Dust

Separate Tables

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Clark Gable, The Misfits

David Niven, Separate Tables

Eli Wallach, The Misfits

Ethel Waters, Cabin in the Sky

Eve Arden, Cover Girl

Jennifer Jones, Beat the Devil

Juanita Moore, Imitation of Life

Laird Cregar, I Wake Up Screaming

Susan Kohner, Imitation of Life

Thelma Ritter, The Misfits

The Three Musketeers (1974)

Film: The Three Musketeers (1974)

Stars: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch

Director: Richard Lester

Oscar History: No nominations, though Welch won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical, so it's possible she was close?

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said last week, Raquel Welch's career after Myra Breckinridge never really recovered-she was never able to properly transition away from sex comedies, or roles that traded on her beauty (and curvy figure) in a comic or exploitive way.  That being said, Welch was a star in major studio films throughout the 1970's, and what is generally considered to be one of her best roles (and best films) of that era was The Three Musketeers, a retelling of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel, though told with more comedic elements than you'd generally expect from this story.  The film is an ensemble & star-studded, and while Welch is one of the lead characters, she's not one of the most important, a testament to Welch's inability to land solo roles in films that might have elevated her beyond her plastic screen persona.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie actually sticks pretty closely to the novel, though it only tells half of the story (the movie was followed by The Four Musketeers, and then many years later The Return of the Musketeers, a film that resulted in the tragic death of one of its stars, though that's a story for a different day).  We have young, naive d'Artagnan (York), starting from his humble beginnings in hopes of someday becoming one of the king's musketeers.  After inadvertently challenging all of the three musketeers (Reed, Finlay & Chamberlain) to duels, they start out on adventure to try to stop Cardinal Richelieu (Heston), who is undermining the Queen (Chaplin), who is having an affair with the Duke of Buckingham (Ward).  Despite the Cardinal and his accomplice Milady de Winter's (Dunaway) intentions, the Musketeers (including d'Artagnan) & the Queen's dressmaker (Welch) are able to help the Queen save face, and hide her affair from the King...though we get over the closing credits an indication that there will be more mad adventures with those involved.

The film is more fun than it should be.  The script is meandering, the characters are all two-dimensional, but Richard Lester (who made several films with the Beatles, who at one point were intended to star in this film), knows how to craft comedy, and the action sequences are played for maximum effect.  No one in the film is giving a great performance, but everyone is game.  We see several actors (Welch, Dunaway, & Heston specifically) totally trade on their real-world personas for maximum comedic effect, and the central story around the Queen trying to hide her affair works.  This was a hit for a reason-it's mindless, but pleasant fun.

The movie has a weird place in Hollywood history that I'd be remiss not to mention.  If you watch the movie in its original cut (as I did) you'll notice a preview to the sequel over the end credits.  This was something that films occasionally did at the time (we saw that during our month devoted to Nancy Kwan with The Wrecking Crew advertising a sequel that never came out).  However, this was unusual because the actors involved didn't know they'd made a sequel; the two movies were intended to be one four-hour epic, and the stars of the film only found out that they'd made two movies for Fox when they attended the premiere.  This was technically legal at the time-there were no guarantees that a studio couldn't do something like this, but the stars (who were only paid for one movie) were enraged, and eventually there was a union clause set out by SAG that actors had to be informed how many movies they were being asked to film prior to the release of a film.

Welch won a Golden Globe for this film, and is fun in it.  This is not stretching for her-we see men fall over themselves, including Michael York, trying to bed her in the movie, but at least she feels like she's in on the joke here.  The movie would not, however, win her an Oscar nomination like we saw for Ann-Margret.  The competition was fierce in 1974 (a legendarily good lineup by AMPAS), and had one of those women left, my gut says that Liv Ullmann in Abdication would've bested Welch for this slot (Ullman was deemed ineligible for her seismic performance in Scenes from a Marriage, and considering the hubbub Oscar might've wanted to go with her for literally any performance as a way to acknowledge her work).  

This was the only time in Welch's career she came close to a nomination.  She would continue making bad (but sometimes successful) sex comedies or action-adventures for the remainder of the decade, until the troubled production of Cannery Row cost her her career.  Welch was accused of diva-like behavior on the set, causing the studio to dump her as its lead, and instead cast (the younger) Debra Winger.  Welch sued, and would win over $10 million in the lawsuit for breach-of-contract, but this essentially ended her career.  No one sues the powers-that-be in Hollywood & gets away with it, and while Welch would do television & theater throughout the decade, she'd make no feature films between 1977 and 1994, and even after that her work was simply in cameo roles.  She'd make tons of money on beauty & health products (at 80-years-of-age, Welch still is fashionable & looks decades younger), but her time as a movie star was over.

And with that, the traditional film sex symbol also seemed to fade.  Welch was the last real star of that mold-the kind of buxom, sex goddess role-that had a sustainable career in film.  Some blips on the screen like Bo Derek or Megan Fox popped up, but they disappeared just as quickly.  Television became a much more lucrative spot for these types of stars (think of Farrah Fawcett or eventually the quintessential TV sex bomb, Pamela Anderson), as did modeling, pop music, & reality television.  The only star that comes close to the heyday of sex symbols in the modern era is Jennifer Lopez, who really treads the line between music & movies in a way none of her predecessors would've had to.  We will start a new theme, and a new year of Stars next Saturday, but before then we'll take a look back at what we've seen this season tomorrow as we close out our year devoted to Classic Hollywood sex symbols.

Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Film: Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Stars: Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, John Huston, Mae West, Farrah Fawcett, John Carradine

Director: Michael Sarne

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I'm going to be honest here, it feels kind of mean to put this movie next in our month devoted to Raquel Welch.  We aren't going to be jumping super far after 100 Rifles here for Welch chronologically, and I'll be real that based on the cast list & the genre, I assumed that I'd have liked 100 Rifles more than I did, so we're going to have our third 1-star movie in a row for the actress today.  But it would be irresponsible to talk about Raquel Welch's career and not bring up the nadir of her stardom: Myra Breckinridge.  We'll get into this below, but initially one would've thought that Welch was making a good decision here.  The original novel (by Gore Vidal) on which this story is based was a big deal.  It was certainly controversial (many called it pornographic), but it was celebrated by some (Harold Bloom included the novel in The Western Canon), and for an actress like Welch, who was trying to be taken seriously by her peers, investing in a movie that might do that made sense.  Instead, it nearly wrecked her career (and in some ways caused irreparable damage), and pretty much every person involved with the movie has since opined it was an unmitigated disaster, destroying the lives of several involved & generally being considered one of the worst movies ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) All right, this is a very strange movie, and one that is not sensitive to today's views on transgender issues, so I'm going to be matter-of-fact in describing the plot as accurately as they did at the time.  We open with Myron Breckinridge (Reed), undergoing an experimental surgery at the hand of a surgeon (Carradine, in a cameo).  He is then transformed into a beautiful woman, Myra (Welch) who goes to see Myron's Uncle Buck (Huston) under the guise that Myra is Myron's widow, rather than telling the truth.  Myra is entitled to a portion of Buck's school, and when Buck refuses to give over the school, Myra insists on teaching at the school while Buck comes up with the money.  While there, she meets two "all-American specimens," masculine, handsome Rusty (Herren) and feminine, blonde Mary Ann (Fawcett).  In her quest to "destroy the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood," (that's a direct quote from the movie) Myra sets out to seduce both of them, first Rusty (which she does by raping Rusty with a strap-on dildo), and then after Rusty breaks up with Mary Ann, she starts sleeping with the blonde.  Eventually Uncle Buck concludes Myra isn't who she says she is with him trying to get her to admit she's a con artist, and then she exposes herself (and her apparently still-present testicles) to Uncle Buck, showing that she is Myron.  After this, we see that Myron has just been dreaming all of this-the people were figments of his imagination (Mary Ann was his nurse, and on a nightstand seen by the audience but not Myron as the film concludes, is a picture of a magazine featuring a headline & cover story about "Raquel Welch").

That's the plot in essence, though there are other aspects to the film worth mentioning (specifically that Reed's Myron continues to appear to Myra, frequently lusting after both Mary Ann & especially Rusty from afar, as a figment-of-her-imagination, and a strange subplot involving Mae West's Letitia van Allen as a casting couch-agent who at one point beds an extremely young, pre-mustache Tom Selleck).  But this is enough for you to understand we're in uncharted territory plot-wise, right?  A few years after the fall of the studio system, Frank Capra has officially left the building.

Myra Breckinridge could have been a cult classic.  It has those trappings, just a few years away from the quintessential (and not entirely dissimilarly-themed) Rocky Horror Picture Show.  But Myra is terrible, and not even some of its campier elements can save it.  Myra as played by Welch is a cartoon, a cruel, vicious cartoon, insensitive, degrading, & violent.  She's a weird juxtaposition of celebrating Old Hollywood (in many ways mirroring film critic Red Reed himself in that regard) and wanting to totally defy gender norms.  Her sexuality at the end feels a bit confusing (it feels like her lust after Mary Ann is more real than her lust after Rusty, even though Myron generally feels like he's a gay man in our meetings with him in apparition).  And putting Myra aside, the movie is littered with terrible performances (including from actors like Huston, who are brilliant in other movies), and a plot that vacillates between dumb comedy & abject horror.  Particularly in its strange treatment of the character of Rusty (who is literally raped for laughs at one point in the film), it's just mind-bogglingly awful.

And that was the public reaction.  Myra Breckinridge was an abject disaster for all involved.  Mae West (who came out of a 27-year film retirement to do this movie) & Raquel Welch feuded repeatedly on the set, and the whole film went over budget quickly.  As word spread of what the movie was about (and that it was going to get an X-Rating, one of only two such films to be released by Fox with such a distinction), the use of old footage of movies in the picture was removed due to lawsuits from the original stars; Loretta Young & Shirley Temple (then a UN Ambassador, so even the White House go involved on her behalf) both successfully sued to have footage of themselves removed from the film (though other footage of Temple was still used during the opening of the film).  And the end product was savaged by critics, was a flop at the box office, and since then West, Vidal, Welch, & Fawcett have all publicly disavowed the film.  Sarne never directed another major studio film again, and eventually had to find work as a waiter at a pizzeria to make ends meet.

This also caused big issues with Welch's career.  Welch thought when she was signing up for this film she was taking her career in a different direction, a more serious one like we saw with Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge last month.  Instead, she became something of a joke, and never really got to do a film that was considered "important" in the 1970's.  Next week we're going to take a look at arguably the closest that Welch ever came to actual critical credibility, but it's worth remembering that unlike several of the women we profiled this year, Welch never actually was considered a serious actress (even in hindsight), and a lot of that damage lies squarely at the feet of Myra Breckinridge.

100 Rifles (1969)

Film: 100 Rifles (1969)

Stars: Jim Brown, Burt Reynolds, Raquel Welch, Fernando Lamas, Dan O'Herlihy

Director: Tom Gries

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the wake of One Million Years BC, Raquel Welch was a major star, but not in the way the actress wanted to be.  Welch desired to be taken seriously as a performer, but she kept being typecast in roles that traded on her crazy physique & beauty.  She turned down the role of Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls (a part that eventually went to Sharon Tate), but still had success with Bandolero! and Bedazzled.  One of the pictures during this phase of Welch's career was 100 Rifles, a movie that weirdly didn't make a lot of money, so you might be wondering in a month where I only get four "Saturday's" with a star that endured as long as Welch did (she regularly made movies into the late-1970's, and we'll get to two of her films from that decade as we close out the month), why I'd pick such a film.  I'm going to get to that below, but first let's ground ourselves in the movie at-hand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on Lyedecker (Brown), a law officer trying to track down Yaqui Joe (Reynolds), a half-white/half-Native American bank robber who has run off with a large sum of money.  Before he can return Joe to justice, both men are trapped by a Mexican General named Verdugo (Lamas).  It is revealed that the bank money is gone, and that Joe used the money to buy 100 rifles for his people, the Yaqui, to stage an uprising against the general.  They are rescued by Sarita (Welch), a Mexican rebellion leader who is trying to enact revenge against the general, who killed her father.  Slowly, Sarita & Lyedecker begin to fall in love (eventually having sex), but in their rebellion against the general, Sarita dies, leaving Lyedecker bereft.  As a result of his new friendship with Joe, though, he lets him stay in Mexico (to take on the leadership role that Sarita had played), and returns to Arizona alone.

100 Rifles is not good.  The film was considered somewhat revolutionary at the time because of the romance between Welch and African-American actor Jim Brown onscreen.  While we had seen at this point interracial relationships in movies (including The World of Susie Wong, which we discussed in October), few had included sex scenes as explicit as Brown's with Welch.  But that's really the only hallmark of this movie that makes it standout.  The film itself is dull-Burt Reynolds is not always a great actor, but he's always entertaining in a movie, and here his natural star power is muted by a heavy-handed script & a repetitive plot.

The movie is most famous to modern audiences, if it's known at all, for a scene where Raquel Welch showers, in a white tee-shirt, and literally stops a train.  It's played for somewhat comic effect (that Welch's measurements are so jaw-dropping they'll literally stop a locomotive in its tracks), but it's an indication of what Welch was up against at the time.  Welch was asked to do a nude scene, but refused, and she was right-Raquel Welch in a wet tee-shirt is more than sufficient to get the point across here.  But it also was one of the reasons that Welch got a reputation from this film for being "difficult," standing up for herself in not wanting to have her body further exploited.  Welch had tense relationships with both of her male leads, and came off of this film, which flopped at the box office, with a diva-reputation, which in many ways would lead to her downfall in the late 1970's.  Like I said, we'll get to that in the remaining two weeks of this season, but I picked 100 Rifles because so much of Welch's reputation among the public-at-large is as a gorgeous prima donna, but at least with 100 Rifles, her behavior was justified; she didn't need to continue to have her body exploited by male directors to underline the story they were asking her to bring to life.

One Million Years BC (1966)

Film: One Million Years BC (1966)
Stars: Raquel Welch, John Richardson, Percy Herbert, Robert Brown
Director: Don Chaffey
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 Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

If you know anything about Raquel Welch, the first thing that comes to mind is her in a deer skin bikini.  Welch's career, as we wind down this series about classic film sex symbols, is fascinating to look at because she didn't have the sort of look that would popularize the careers of Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe (glamorous figures in impossible makeup & ball gowns), instead favoring sportier looks that accentuated her physique in a more obvious way, her career was similar to the sex symbol trope (one that traded on her physicality rather than her acting ability)...but by the 1960's that trajectory had become stale, as we'll find out as Welch's career continues.  But it wasn't dead, and Welch proved that here, by donning the "first bikini" in One Million Years BC, which coupled with Fantastic Voyage from 1966, graduated her into being a household name.

(Spoilers Ahead) A remake of the 1940 film One Million BC, One Million Years BC is a strange film.  For starters, while it's not silent, it's not in English either.  The characters all speak in a made-up language, and are humans living in a time where dinosaurs (not to mention giant turtles & lizards) roam the earth.  There are two tribes, one that Tumak (Richardson) is a member of, and then is exiled from, and then after wandering, he meets the other, where Loana (Welch) is their apparent leader.  The two fall in love, but this causes rifts with both tribes, and they continually fight, sometimes alongside each other against dinosaurs, and most frequently against each other, seemingly to the death until a giant volcano erupts, killing half of each tribe (though sparing Tumak & Loana).  In the end, realizing they are against an impossible challenge in general with such tough terrain, they set out as one tribe, united in their quest for survival.

The movie is, and I cannot stress this enough, impossibly stupid.  Forgetting for a second that humans & dinosaurs never cohabited, the dinosaur species frequently never cohabited, and lived millions of years apart (if they weren't fictional).  Even suspending that belief, it's hard not to laugh at the movie now, its random nods to modern conveniences frequently getting in the way of reality (Welch somehow has access to mousse & mascara in addition to sculpting an impractical bikini for the movie).  It definitely gets to the other side of "it's so bad it's good" without ever being uproariously in that arena, so I'm going with 2-stars, but this is not a film where your brain will be doing heavy-lifting.

Welch's performance here is hard to judge, as it's so focused on her physically.  She gets to play emotions, but they're so basic as to feel washed out in terms of any nuance.  To a modern lens, the film is kind of uncomfortable to watch.  You could try to add in an "action warrior" lens if you wanted, but she spends most of the film trying to appeal to a man, and her performance is grounded entirely on exploiting her body for the camera, with near constant shots of her cleavage & midriff.  This film made her a star, but I hope it isn't an indication of what we're in store for for the rest of the month, as this could get uncomfortable watch directors commodify her like this.

Saturdays with the Stars: Raquel Welch

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Ann-Margret, a red-headed glamour girl who became "the kitten with a whip" in the 1960's in the post-Marilyn era of sex in Hollywood.  This month we enter our final installment of our look at the sex symbols of the 1930's-70's.  We could have kept going, but at this point in Hollywood it feels like there's a divergence, with sex symbols either enjoying just 1-2 pictures of success (someone like a Bo Derek or Megan Fox) or instead enjoying success in a different medium like television (Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson), modeling (Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford), or pop music (Madonna, Britney Spears).  So to close out our series we're going to look at one of the final, iconic sex symbols of the 1960's and 70's, a woman whose bikini-clad look was so legendary that she was incorporated alongside Rita Hayworth & Marilyn Monroe in The Shawshank Redemption.  This month, our star is Raquel Welch.

Born Jo Raquel Tejada, she was the daughter of a prominent Bolivian family on her father's side (her cousin Lidia Gueller Tejada was the President of Bolivia in the early-1980's), and on her mother's side she descended from a well-to-do Chicago family.  Like many aspiring actresses, she went through a cavalcade of "cliched" jobs early in her career, from weather forecaster to model to waitress, until she eventually moved to Los Angeles and got small parts in movies, most notably Roustabout opposite Elvis Presley.  A chance appearance in Life magazine caught the attention of super-producer Saul David, who signed her to a contract, where she soon was the lead in Fantastic Voyage, a major earner in 1966, and one that translated her from anonymous girl in a photo spread to a household name.

Welch's career is about as prototypical as you can get for a sex symbol in our series, which has oftentimes been about how women whose faces (and other attributes) we'd recognize in a heartbeat star in films that we'd struggle to name.  Welch made a number of movies in the 1960's & 70's, very much a leading lady and signature star of the era, but none of them are particularly well-remembered.  Her most known image is in "the first bikini" in One Million Years BC, but this isn't really a film that has captured a spot in cinephile culture-it's only known for that one shot of Welch in a bikini.  Despite starring with actors of note during the era like Frank Sinatra, Burt Reynolds, Richard Burton, & Jimmy Stewart, she never really appeared in a movie of note, not even one like Gilda or Some Like It Hot like some of her predecessor "sex symbols/actresses."  About the closest she ever came was 1974's The Three Musketeers, where she actually won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical (beating the likes of Diahann Carroll & Helen Hayes), but this never turned into a new chapter as a more seriously-considered actress, and Welch by the end of the decade had started to earn more fame for her on-set feuds with actors like Mae West & Jim Brown than for her film roles.

Welch's career came to a screeching halt in 1982, when MGM fired her from the set of Cannery Row, and she sued the studio for breach of contract.  The court case went on for years, during which time Welch didn't work in film, and in fact she made no pictures throughout the entire 1980's, though she did get a Golden Globe nomination for the TV movie Right to Die.  Welch won that suit, taking $10 million with her, but her film career never recovered, and she became more known for her seemingly ageless beauty than for her acting roles (which tended to spoof her public persona as a gorgeous diva).  This month, we will once again try to unmask the cinematic output of the actress underneath the sex symbol packaging, and will take an examination into the film career of Raquel Welch.