Captain Milkshake

Sometimes in my media rummaging, I find something so odd, I just have to post it with little to no comment. The poster for this forgotten 1970 movie makes it look very hippie-cute-sexy-psychedelic, but apparently it's a bit of a downer (Marine fighting in Vietnam goes home on leave and gets involved in a drug deal). Great title, though. C'mon, Marvel/Disney, come up with the next great superhero.

Muscle Movie Madness

I have looked for quite a while for a book on the sword-and-sandal muscle hero movies of the 60s known as "peplum" (a Greek word for "tunic," the kind of costume most of the movie's characters wear). Heroes Never Die: The Italian Peplum Phenomenon by Barry Atkinson is a massive survey of the peplum genre. Wikipedia defines these films as "historical or mythological epics set in antiquity" and they usually feature a muscular bare-chested hero and evil kings and queens. This volume is clearly a labor of love, and I do appreciate having this as a reference work. But there are some problems here. Atkinson throws his net wide, including almost any Italian-made movie with a hero that is set in the past. This allows him to write about pirate films, Robin Hood films, and even a movie about the life of Christ--I'm imagining a muscular Jesus in a tunic kicking merchants' asses at the temple.

Lots of the films covered seem to belong to a different swashbuckler genre (cappa e spada) and many of them seem out of place here. Atkinson uses some strange criteria; straight-faced, he seems to claim that any movie featuring a hero who yells, "Follow me!" to a crowd probably belongs to the genre. He is also offensively dismissive of the gay audience, claiming that despite the near-universal presence of heaving male chests, oily nipples, and sweaty gyrations of the male body under torture, there is nothing homoerotic about these films, only in the mind of the viewer. Nevertheless, this is the only survey out there, as far as I know, so I'll keep it on my reference shelf until something else comes along.

Cactus in the snow

Cactus in the Snow was playing in Columbus in May of 1972 but seems to have vanished. The only viewer comments on IMDb are from people who saw it in the 70s. With Richard Thomas as a soldier trying to lose his virginity before being shipped off to Vietnam, it sounds fairly predictable; like the ad says, a kind of PG-rated Summer of '42.
  

A missing Song

My current Columbus newspaper project involves the early 70s, and this ad from Feb. 18, 1972 is proof that Disney's notorious Song of the South had a legitimate theatrical release in my lifetime. I think it had another reissue in the 80s but Disney has pulled it from release, and it's never had a legal home video release in the United States.

It's considered by many to racist, and indeed the context for the story (a white kid is told folk stories about the trickster figure Br'er Rabbit by the African-American plantation worker Uncle Remus) does conjure up a"happy slave" atmosphere, even though technically this is set after the Civil War. I've seen a bootleg DVD print, and it's not quite as cringe-worthy as many would claim, though it's also not really a timeless classic, either. James Baskett gives a good performance as Uncle Remus in his only real starring role in a movie, and Hattie McDaniel is fine as usual.

A classier succubus

Below is an ad for Succubus that is much classier than the one I posted yesterday. That one was from a downtown theater, the RKO Palace, that had basically become a grindhouse, showing horror movies, blaxploitation movies, and soft X movies (the arty kind, not out-and-out porn). This ad, from New York City, presents Succubus as a foreign art film, which is what it is. I don't know if this kind of presentation would have sold the movie in Columbus.

S*cc*b*s

Succubus (1969). I remember this ad vividly from when I was 13. The ad suggests you call the theater to learn "the full meaning" of the title. Instead of calling the theater, I asked my mom what the word meant. She looked it up and said, "Well, I guess it means a female demon, dear!" (There was a little more to it than that, I would discover later.) I was glad to finally see this movie last night on Amazon Prime. It would certainly only be rated R today. Sexy and surreal, but not porn. In fact, the sexiest bit is in the first five minutes. It's kind of downhill from there. [Ad published September 19, 1969]

Farewell Bullitt?

In 1969, 50 years ago, Bullitt was still drawing crowds in Columbus, Ohio. This ad came from a Feb 21st paper and, despite the threat to close in just a week, I believe it stayed on well into March. Ah, those days when movies ran for months in theaters, largely because they would only be at one or two locations, not spread out in many multiplexes like today.

I didn't see this movie until a couple of years ago. Coming so late to the game, I must admit I didn't see much in it, except for the super-duper car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Otherwise, it seemed like a routine tough-cop thriller.