The Killer Shrews (USA, 1959)

"If you have to be isolated for your work you sure picked a lonely little island."
Thorne Sherman (James Best)

Ah, the wonderful films that we all saw on our local creature feature show while growing up in the USA back when life was so simple. Some scared us poopless, others almost made us piss in our pants from the suspense, a select few left us indifferent, and once in a blue moon we found one really stupid. (Actually, the only creature feature film we remember seeing as a kid that we found stupid was The Creeping Terror [1964 / trailer / full film], but that's another story.)

How do those old movies hold up when viewed again as an adult? Some sort of hold up well enough (House on Haunted Hill [1959 / trailer / full movie]), others seem to have improved (White Zombie [1932 / trailer / full movie] and, to tell the truth, The Creeping Terror), while others seem to be completely new films. The last is the case with The Killer Shrews: we know we saw it — every pre-pubescent with a heterosexual penis can see that Ingrid Goude was wet-dream material in her prime — but, damn! Ain't like we remembered anything when we finally caught it again last week, after way too many decades for us to want to admit here, but in all truth, we probably won't remember all that much about the movie — other than Goude, maybe — in a month or two, either...

Written by former TV scribe Jay Simms (who wrote better low budget films, such as Panic in Year Zero! [1962 / trailer] and The Creation of the Humanoids [1962 / trailer]), The Killer Shrews was part of the two-fold directorial debut of the successful visual effects artist Ray Kellogg who, over the course of his career, for example, did the visual effects on a total of ten Marilyn Monroe movies (not to mention such great stuff like The Girl Can't Help It [1956 / trailer], The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951 / trailer] and Pickup on South Street [1953 / trailer]). The other film Kellog directed at the same time as this flick here was the teen trash classic The Giant Gila Monster (1959 / trailer / full film), a movie that scared the poop out of us when we were six but we now imagine is probably just as tacky as The Killer Shrews. (It's on our re-watch list, so who knows, maybe we'll review it eventually).

The Killer Shrews was a regional production from Texas, the state that thinks it is its own country (and should be, if you ask us). As such, we are not sure if the predictability of who dies is due to the era of the movie or the location of its origin, but rest assured the order of death is easy to predict: first the minorities — there is one Afro American, Rook Griswald (Judge Henry Dupree), and one Mexican, Mario (Alfredo DeSoto), so guess who goes first — and then the fat person, and then the remaining asshole. Well, shit: it is a "horror" movie, so somebody gotta die... and also, if you get down to it, the predictable order of death really hasn't changed any today in one sense: you a minority, you gonna die.

For a regional production, The Killer Shrews — alongside The Giant Gila Monster, with which it was distributed as a double feature — was a highly successful movie: it not only got national distribution, but even made it overseas, helped in part we are sure by the presence of Miss Sweden 1956, Ingrid Goude as the movie's singular hot tamale, Ann Craigis. Goude never had much of a career, though she does hold her own well enough in a film that suffers less from bad acting than from static direction and a slow-developing, talk-heavy script. Still, she probably did the right thing by retiring two years later to marry what would be the first of three rich men over the subsequent course of eleven years. (A smart person, after all, knows which side of the bread is buttered.)

The Killer Shrews is of course infamous for its use of wigged dogs with fake fangs as stand-ins for the mutated and insatiably hungry killer shrews. Yes, they are a joke, but most reviews fail to mention that they are used relatively sparingly and, while perhaps unconvincing as giant shrews, nevertheless convey more threat than, say, the intentionally bad-CGI shrews of the intentionally crappy sequel Return of the Killer Shrews (trailer) made 53 years later in 2012. But then, the crappy CGI of the sequel is just an extension of the whole wink-wink-we-know-we're-bad self-conscious attitude of the no-longer-so-contemporary post-post-modern bad film aesthetic, whereas in the original the "shrews" are just cheap and bad.

Like so many films, The Killer Shrews involves a small group of people at an isolated location facing a deadly threat. Here, a group of seven is stuck on a remote island due to an approaching storm and face the deadly threat of a scientific experiment that, meant for the good of mankind, has gone wrong. (Rather unlike what the opening narration implies when it talks of a deadly threat coming southwards from Alaska.) Yes, once again, science has gone too far without thinking, and yes, once again Mother Nature is out for revenge, despite the altruistic nature of the experiments.

As the Yiddish-accented Dr. Milo Craigis (Baruch Lumet, Sidney Lumet's father, who can be seen somewhere in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask [1972 / trailer]) explains at one point, "If we were half as big as we are now, we could live twice as long on our natural resources." Thus, he and his colleague Dr. Radford Baines (Gordon McLendon), in their search to make us smaller, do the logical thing of making the tiny shrew giant. (For more info on the life of shrews, we recommend that you watch the short Our Wonderful Nature, our Short Film of the Month for July, 2011.) Worse, their alcoholic asshole handyman Jerry Farrell (Ken Curtis, a former vocalist in the Tommy Dorsey Band and busy western actor), who's all sweet on the Doc's Swedish-accented daughter Ann (Goude), forgot to lock the cage door one night and now the island is overrun with "hundreds" half-starved giant shrews — and they smell human for dinner.

The rug-covered dogs are of course a detriment to the movie, but less so than the cheaply made set of the house interior where easily over two thirds of the film occurs. Looking as cheap and fake as it is, the characters have little to do much of the time they are in it, so all they do is smoke, drink, change their outfits (OK, only Ann does that) and talk, talk, talk — and then talk some more. Although some talk is perhaps needed to set up the situation and introduce the characters, in The Killer Shrews the talk is both interminable and often totally unnecessary, an obvious attempt to simply pad the running time. Thus, roughly the first two-thirds of the film are rather sleep-inducing.

Once the shrews finally show up, however, things do get better, and if you can convince yourself to see killer shrews on screen instead of rug-covered dogs, the movie even actually becomes somewhat interesting and, at times, mildly suspenseful both due to the threat of the hungry creatures and the inter-dynamics between the trapped people, particularly between alky Jerry and he-man skipper Thorne Sherman (James Best of One Way Street [1950 / trailer], Ray Harryhausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms [1953 / trailer], Forbidden Planet (1956 / trailer], Shock Corridor [1963 / trailer] and  Rolling Thunder [1977 / trailer]), who obviously gives Ann an itch somewhere that Jerry doesn't.

Aside from rug-covered dogs, a talky script and cheap interiors, The Killer Shrews also suffers from some pretty bland direction. Occasionally — indiscriminately, if you get down to it — director Ray Kellogg seems to decide he's gonna experiment or something and then he does something totally outrageous like a tiny dolly shot, but for the most part the movie is retains a static camera and middle-of-the-frame blocking of scenes. A dull and uninteresting directorial style that in no way adds tension but often, as during the big escape scene, negates any and all suspense by tipping the events into the laughably incompetent.

In light of all the above, one really must give the various actors credit: despite their mismatching accents they really aren't that bad, and not only deliver their lines competently but even manage, somehow, to give their stock characters a lot more personality and individuality than might be expected in a movie like this one. (In this regard, perhaps scriptwriter Simms also deserves some credit, as he is the one who wrote such personality-revealing scenes as when a furious Skipper Thorne almost — but then doesn't — toss alky Jerry over the fence to the killer shrews.)

That The Killer Shrews is justifiable Mystery Science Theater 3000 material is without doubt, but it is still a far cry from being totally crappy on the level of, for example, Teenage Zombies, a film made the same year. Luckily, even where it is crappy, The Killer Shrews — unlike Teenage Zombies — is at least more fun crappy than crap crappy. Still, due to the excessive dry spots, in the end The Killer Shrews fails to become a classic psychotronic movie but, instead, remains a relatively unmemorable cinematic experience. Watchable, but hardly essential.

Full movie:

Short Movie: The Pervert (USA, circa 2011)

"A boy succumbs to the evils of perversion."

This month's short is from some dude named Adam Rosenberg. We first stumbled upon this little cute little gem some time ago while perusing that eternally entertaining black hole of ephemera, the Internet Archives, where it resides in the rubric Prelinger Archive Mashups. (Like the Short Film of the Month of April 2011, Helping Johnny Remember, The Pervert reuses material from the Prelinger Archives.) Since that day some months ago we have found The Pervert elsewhere, and as it has always given us a little giggle whenever we saw it, we figured it is time to share the short but giggle-inducing film with the readers of A Wasted Life. ("What readers?" one might ask, but that is a different story...) 

To quote imdb, "Adam Rosenberg is a director and actor, known for Manny (2009)" — and, indeed, though we never placed a name to the short, we caught Manny (full short) — image below — long before The Pervert, but forgot it relatively quickly 'cause though it is a highly disturbing short, it is simply a bit too Jan Švankmajer for us to fully go gaga over. 

In any event, we could find little info on The Pervert, and only slightly more on Rosenberg. So, while we were unable to find out when exactly the short was made, we were able to find out that Adam Rosenberg is partial to "backflips, potty humor, and General Tso's chicken". Rosenberg calls himself "an award-winning filmmaker and video editor"; according to his CV, which you can find online at his website, he is a Magne Cum Laude BFA graduate (3.9 GPA!) of the Virginia Commonwealth University Dept of Kinetic Imaging, 2011 and, going by his short film Adam Rosenberg: A Self Portrait, he wears ugly underwear. His CV doesn't say whether or not his is single, but if so, The Pervert would indicate that he is probably one for the ladies. As for what he looks like: he plays the doomed lad in his short film seen at the top of the page here.

The Pervert initially plays with the structure of the good ol' educational film before zooming off to... well, a great magazine collection, mildly nightmarish humor and an abrupt end featuring a cowboy. For The Pervert, Rosenberg appropriates a few minutes from one of the great pieces of anti-sex and anti-porn US propaganda, Perversion for Profit  (1965), which can be found in its full jaw-dropping idiocy and embarrassing length all over the web. As Wikipedia succinctly puts it, the propaganda "documentary" is "a vehement diatribe against pornography, the film argues that sexually explicit materials corrupt young viewers and readers, leading to acts of violence and 'perverted' attitudes regarding sex — including inclination toward homosexuality."

The "documentary" was a product of Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), which, to quote Whitney Strub at Temple of Schlock, was "the pre-eminent anti-smut organization of the 1960s, nestled snugly between earlier Catholic pressure groups and later Christian Right ones. […] Founded by Cincinnati lawyer Charles Keating in the late 1950s, CDL amassed a rapid national following and exerted a powerful influence by the late Sixties, reaching its peak when President Richard Nixon appointed Keating to the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Later Keating let CDL languish as he shifted his interests toward junk bonds in the 1980s, contributing to our current era of disaster capitalism during the Savings & Loan catastrophes of the Reagan era. Apparently sexual decency meant more to him than the financial sort." Perversion for Profit, one of the most popular downloads at the Internet Archives, is extremely popular for mash-ups. 

The host of Perversion for Profit, and thus the introductory host of Adam Rosenberg's The Pervert, is the 6'2" former Los Angeles-based  news reporter and talk show host George Putnam (14 July 1914 – 12 September 2008). A conservative Democrat (and good argument of the shortcomings of a two-party system), Putnam did go on record in the 80s that he no longer thought "the homosexual" a pervert but rather born that way, but in Perversion for Profit — and the sequences in The Pervert — he palpably conveys the feeling that the whole of the US should best wear a chastity belt and blinders. You can visit his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6372 Hollywood Blvd or, if you keep your eyes open, catch his brief appearance (always as a reporter) in the movies Fourteen Hours (1951 / trailer), I Want to Live! (1958 / trailer), Helter Skelter (1976 / trailer) and — gag — Independence Day (1996 / trailer).

 The short:

Nero veneziano / Damned in Venice (Italy, 1978)

A fan-made tribute to Damned in Venice:

Hard to believe that such a dull film can be so enthralling...

 

Aka Die Wiege des Teufels and Venetian Black, Damned in Venice is the second movie we've seen from 1972 that presents one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Venice, in a less than glamorous or even attractive light. Like Also Lado's giallo The Child (1972), which shares an actor with this film (José Quaglio, here as the duplicitous Father Stefani), this leisurely paced, dank and moody horror film shows Venice as a grey city in decline, rich in atmosphere but decaying and oppressive, almost empty of people — a far cry from today, when even in the rainy off season, which is when we like to go, the city is still so full of tourists that every restaurant still feels no reason to cook a decent meal as all tables will always be filled anyways. Now, like then, the perfect location for the Son of Satan to come onto the world...

In the last of his directorial efforts, Ugo Liberatore, who has always been more active as a screenwriter (among others, he co-wrote The Mill of the Stone Women [1960 / trailer] and The Hellbenders [1967 / trailer]), presents a narratively flawed and somewhat diffuse and almost alienating if ultimately interesting and memorable horror story that most of the few who have ever seen tend to dismiss as an Italo take on Rosemray's Baby (1968 / trailer). To simply dismiss Damned in Venice as such does disservice to this overlooked and mostly forgotten movie, for it is related to Rosemary's Baby only in as much as that it, too, is about the Son of Satan being born unto this earth; other than that, and perhaps the concept of a mother's overriding love for her child, Liberatore's movie owes little to everyone's favorite Polanski flick — and shows a lot more naked nubile flesh, to boot, not to mention blood and gucky stuff.

Mark has a vision:

The plot involves the two orphans, the blind Mark (former Italo child "star" Renato Cestiè, also seen in Torso [1973 / trailer] and A Bay of Blood [1971 / trailer]) and his bitchy, semi-frigid virgin older sister Christine (former German nubile Rena Niehaus of Arabella l'angelo nero [1989 / What is eurotrash?] and Wilde Früchte [1977 / trailer]), who live with their less-than-loving Granny (Bettine Milne of House of Clocks [1989 / trailer]). Mark is plagued by frightful visions of a mysterious man and woman, and when one such vision inadvertently results in the incineration of Granny, the disharmonious siblings go to live with their sickly Aunt and Uncle Martin (Tom Felleghy of Black Emanuelle in Afrika [1978 / soundtrack], Seven Dead in the Cat's Eye [1973] and much, much more) in their squalid, run down and shuttered canal-front hotel. (A hotel in Venice that can't get guests? A canal-front hotel that fails? My, Venice was different in the 70s.) Before long, Christine is running a "hotel" populated by numerous attentive nubile who accept cash and, soon after, the man in Mark's visions, Dan (Yorgo Voyagis of Nosferatu in Venedig [1988 / trailer], Die Washing Machine [1993 / trailer], Delicatessen [1991 / trailer] and City of Lost Children [1995 / trailer]), shows up and Christine, who insists she is still a virgin, suddenly has a bun in the oven...

Heavy on symbolism, Damned in Venice is not as weird as it is strange, and is as equally discombobulating as it is dramaturgically confused and slow. Thus, it is also a hard film to recommend, particular to anyone who has a distaste for leisurely pacing and arty pretensions. One of our favorite arty spleens of the director is his use of the beautiful actress Olga Karlatos, who played Prince's mom in Purple Rain (1984 / the crappy song) and is familiar to most (if anyone) for the wood-impaled eye scene of Zombie (1979 / trailer)  — though she can also be seen in such semi-classics as Murder Rock (1984 / German trailer), Once Upon A Time In America (1984 / trailer) and Keoma (1976 / trailer) — in four different small roles of varying importance (as the woman in Mark's visions, his Aunt Madeleine, Vicky's mother, and the Midwife on the ferry), thus symbolizing just how fully evil is pulling the strings.*

That Mark, his blindness and helplessness a literal symbol for the fruitlessness and hopelessness of his attempts to prevent fate, doesn't notice is perhaps understandable, but that no one else does — or perhaps chooses not to — is almost funny. Are we all so blind to evil? In the end, everyone in Damned in Venice, whether good, evil or simply indifferent, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, is, like Mark, doomed to be a pawn of Satan. (Yep, if there is one lesson to be learned from this movie, it is "Trust no one"... or, maybe, "Evil always prevails" — two things currently emphasized and confirmed and personified by the NSA.)

In regards to acting, it is always a bit difficult to make judgment on an Italo film simply because the dubbing is always a minus (and dubbed this film is indeed, with its cast of Italians, Germans and Greeks), but in general everyone succeeds even where the makeup does not. One does often wonder, however, why the filmmakers didn't give blind Mark blind eyes like, say, those of Emily (Cinzia Monreale) in The Beyond (1981 / trailer). To the detriment of the movie, not only do his eyes simply look like eyes that can see, but more than once (or twice or thrice) his eyes obviously see when they shouldn't; had he been given blind contacts, the overall impression of both his blindness and his later regaining of sight would've been emphasized by this small detail.

Damned in Venice is overflowing with "scary" or "gross" or "decadent" events that don't really tie together but combine to create an oddly dreamy, almost narcotic mood in a Venice that, but for a singular fire scene aboard a water taxi, is unnaturally empty... but unnatural is the overall impression of this oddly distant supernatural thriller about the possible arrival of Satan's son — though for much of the movie one is never really sure if it isn't just that Mark is just delusional.

Overlooked and unknown, the film might not be everyone's cup of tea, but fans of oddly aloof and inconclusive horror films liberally sugared with scenes that are as half-normal or abnormal as they are played fully normal (Giogio's fuck scene while Mark is there, a well full of rats and snakes, all conversations with Father  Stefani [José Quaglio of — aside from The Child (1972) — Malastrana (1971 / trailer), L'occhio dietro la parete (1977 / soundtrack) and Gualtiero Jacopetti's Mondo Candido (1975 / Italian trailer)] that are played out in his private chambers) should find the film well worth watching. And even those who find the film a bore will probably still spit their beer at the movie's one major shock moment.

The threat-laden soundtrack by Pino Donaggio:

* We liked the Last Supper, too, but felt it wasn't really sleazy enough...

 

R.I.P.: Alexandra Bastedo

Alexandra Bastedo

 (9 March 1946 – 12 January 2014)

 
The mostly forgotten (outside of the Commonwealth) 60s sex symbol Alexandra Bastedo, a "devoted animal rights activist" and vegetarian, died the other day of cancer. We here at A Wasted Life rather liked her exotic eyes and her prime 60s figure and her filmogaphy, which we take a look at below...

13 Frightened Girls
(1963 / dir. William Castle)

(Aka The Candy Web) Alexandra Bastedo made her film debut in this quaint and dated lesser outing from the great William Castle. In a typical Castle publicity stunt, the famed producer/director searched the world for young female talent — "Teenage Diplomats" — to play the given female schoolgirl character representing real nationality (and, in turn, be the girl driving the bus in a certain scene for the print released in their individual country as well as introduce the trailer meant for their homeland). The England (Bastedo's country), Sweden, France, and German versions of this sequence are presented as bonus material on the 13 Frightened Girls DVD in the William Castle Film Collection box set from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. In the end, not all were really from the country they represented (Judy Pace, for example, also making her film debut here was an American, not a Liberian), but most — like Alexandra Bastedo, as the English "Alex" — used their real names in the movie. The title is a direct play upon Castle's earlier (and better) horror film, 13 Ghosts (1960 / trailer), but is also not fully true: the move features 15 not-so-frightened girls.

TV Guide hates the movie: "This idiotic spy film aimed at juveniles features Kathy Dunn as the daughter of an American diplomat on a holiday in London. She stumbles onto a political murder and informs Murray Hamilton (of Seconds [1966 / trailer] and Hysterical [1983 / trailer]), a CIA man she has a schoolgirl-crush on. Through her father's connections, Dunn has access to many foreign embassies and becomes known in the espionage world as 'Kitten', a hunted agent. Hamilton finds this out and goes to the Swiss boarding school she attends to save her from disaster. [...] His [Castle's] direction is usually bad, and the screaming gaggle of girls he 'discovered' get on one's nerves after a bit."

 

The Dissolve, however, is kinder: "Forget the horror-movie title, which was changed in some places to the more tonally apt The Candy Web. 13 Frightened Girls is like a Disney version of a spy picture, completely devoid of anything objectionable, aside from some outdated notions of gender roles. It's colorful, with some of the chipper overtones of juvenile fiction, and some of the despondent undertones of the Cold War era. [...] Mostly, it’s sturdy. What gets forgotten in all the reminiscences about Castle's shillery is that the man was a competent, crafty director, not some hapless hack. Without his gimmicks, Castle's films probably would've been mostly forgotten, because they aren't that good. But they're good enough that fans can give thanks that those gimmicks existed, because they've kept his work alive in B-philes' hearts and minds."

 

Judy Pace, who plays the Libyan student, was actually from the US and grew up to be the "personification of black beauty" in the 60s and 70s and is found in such great films as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970 / trailer) and Frogs (1972 / trailer)...

The Liquidator
(1965/66, dir. Jack Cardiff)

Alexandra Bastedo's (uncredited) part is so tiny in this spy caper — she appears somewhere as a radio operator — that we include the movie here only because it was directed by Jack Cardiff (who later directed The Freakmakers [1973]) and features both a great credit sequence and groovy title track.

 

 Title Sequence and Track of The Liquidator (1965):

The Liquidator was based on the first (published in 1964) of a series of eight pulp novels written by the British pulp author John Gardner, whom should not be confused with the serious American author John Gardner who wrote Grendel. MGM hoped to develop a franchise from the espionage spoof, but eventually vetoed the idea. DVD Talk says The Liquidator is "an upscale production that can boast a good leading man in Rod Taylor and a creative director [...]. Saying that The Liquidator has dated isn't enough, as its problem is a tonal friction that gripes many a SuperSpy® contender. The comedy wants to be slapstick-broad and tongue-in-cheek cynical at the same time. It wants to sell sex, yet is too tame to present any real sexual content. Finally, the audience will be way ahead of most of the plot developments, especially the story's main 'twists'. Just the same, Taylor and Cardiff put on a lively show."

 

An opinion shared, for the most part, by The Mystery File, which says that "Thanks to the cast and a script that closely follows Gardner's novel, this spy spoof works both as a send-up of Bond and as damn good spy film on its own." They explain the plot as follows: "Rod Taylor is well cast as Boysie, a handsome amoral bungler, coward, and general screw-up, who is mistaken by Colonel Mostyn (Trevor Howard of The Third Man [1949 / trailer]) of MI6 for a cold-blooded killer when they meet during the fall of Nazi-held Paris. Twenty years later Mostyn is second in command of MI6, and a series of defections and had headlines [sic] has convinced his boss (Hyde-White of The Cat and the Canary [1979]) that what the service needs is an executioner, a liquidator who will rid them of embarrassment before it gets that far. Mostyn remembers Boysie, whom he finds burying his partner (they owned a pub together) whose wife he has been having an affair with. Mostyn jumps to conclusions, and before he can protest, Boysie finds himself the private executioner for the British Secret Service. And it isn't a bad life. He has a lush apartment, a nice stipend, a sexy sports car, a parade of beautiful girls, and there is always the sardonic Mostyn's secretary Jill St. John (of The Concrete Jungle [1982 / trailer]) — if only there wasn’t that silly rule about inter-service romance. Then the first problem arises. They actually want Boysie to kill someone..."

 

Lalo Schifrin — Bikini Waltz:

Doctor in Clover
(1966, dir. Ralph Thomas)

Alexandra Bastedo's has another (uncredited) part as "Nurse at Party" in this, the sixth in a series of British comedies that began with Doctor in the House (1954 / clip) and ended with Doctor in Trouble (1970 / trailer) but continued long after as various TV series in Britain. Like the Carry On series, the Doctor series in all its forms is proof positive of England's refined nature and cultural importance.

 

The year it came out, Doctor in Clover was one of the 15 best British box office draws; in its land of origin, it was shorn a full four minutes to get the then applicable A-rating ("children must be accompanied by adults"). TV Guide kindly describes the movie as "a dreary, depressing, unfunny comedy." The plot? Let's look at Brit Movie Co for that: "More comical situations at Saint Swithins Hospital, Leslie Phillips (of The Gamma People [1956 / trailer]) is on call in place as Dr Gaston Grimsdyke, who is more interested in the nurses than the patients. Grimsdyke loses his job as medical officer at a women's prison, so he enrolls in a refresher course with his old medical tutor Sir Lancelot Spratt (James Robertson Justice) — who is determined to make a successful physician out of him. There are some complications involving a rejuvenation serum, which is accidentally injected into the irascible Sir Lancelot, causing him to wreak havoc at a party." As the trailer informs us, the movie introduces another mostly forgotten 60s sexpot, "a beautiful young sexstacular French star in her first British film, Elisabeth Ercy".

 

Elizabeth Ercy, seen above from the movie, was born in Dresden, Germany on 20 July, 1944; she went on to star in that great, depressing horror film The Sorcerers (1967), directed by Michael Reeves, the man behind Witchfinder General (1968). Unlike that of Alexandra Bastedo, Ercy's career ended soon thereafter.

 Trailer to The Sorcerers (1967):

That Riviera Touch
(1966, dir. Cliff Owen)

Alexandra Bastedo's career takes a step forward: she receives on-screen credit as the "Girl at roulette table" — but the real cheesecake factor of the movie was the Canadian-born Suzanne Lloyd (born on November 11, 1934 in Toronto) as the deceitful Claudette, who retired at the "young age of 40".

That Riviera Touch was a vehicle for the English comedy due (Eric) Morecambe and (Ernie) Wise, whose partnership lasted from 1941 until Morecambe died in 1984. Primarily a TV phenomena and unknown outside of the land of fish and chips, they made three of movies together in the 60s, of which this is the second; like Doctor in Clover above, it was one of the top 15 British box office hits of 1966. Brit Movie Co calls the movie "a routine comedy" and complains that "despite many colourful shots of the Côte d’Azur and a riotous closing sequence involving a helicopter and water skis the duo are unable to sustain feature length narratives and ultimately the film is lacking in laughs."

 

Film 4 explains the plot to "this, the second and best of their so-so big-screen outings": "Eric and Ernie star as traffic wardens who, thanks to a muddle up with British royalty, find themselves holidaying in the south of France. There, they become involved with Le Pirate (Paul Stassino of Die Screaming Marianne [1971 / trailer]), a Gallic thief who intends to use the hapless pair to smuggle his goods overseas. Of course, it's not long before pandemonium reigns as our comic heroes cross swords with all sorts of villains and almost come to blows over the comely thiefette Claudette (Lloyd).

Opening Credits — Bastedo's Name Is There:

The Scales of Justice: The Haunted Man
 (1966, dir. Stanley Willis)

As the website Radio Sounds Familiar explains: "The Scales of Justice [was not a TV series but] was a run of thirteen British cinema 'B' films made between 1962 and 1967 at Merton Park Studios in London by Anglo-Amalgamated. They were based on real criminal cases and each film was introduced by the famous crime writer Edgar Lustgarten. The titles [above] feature the symbolic scales held by the statue of Justice, which is located on top of the dome of The Old Bailey. In the opening narration she is described as having '...in her right hand, the Sword of Retribution, and in her left — The Scales of Justice'." Only later did they actually end up on TV.

The plot of The Haunted Man: "Actor Bill Kenton (James Ellis, who plays "Psycho Ward Guard No. 1" in Re-Animator [1985]), injured trying to prevent a raid on a shop, returns to his career, to find that he cannot remember his lines. Forced to leave the theatre, he becomes a man obsessed with finding the thief." Alexandra Bastedo, who can be seen cuddling with Keith Barron (of Nothing But The Night [1973]) in the background of the screenshot above, plays "Laura". All thirteen instalment are now available on DVD.

 Trailer to Nothing but the Night:

 Casino Royale
(1967, dir. Val Guest, Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Richard Talmadge and possible others)

 

Alexandra Bastedo appears somewhere in this, one of the most legendary cinematic fuck-ups in the world, as "Meg". We saw the film many a year ago, long before we even registered that was a "Alexandra Bastedo", and had we even known of her we surely wouldn't have seen her amongst the plethora of much more famous names that flit, explode, crawl, dies, walk, run, whatever across the screen. If we remember correctly, the only thing we really like about the movie was (spoiler) that everyone dies...
The BBC is right when they saw "the film itself may defy description" and "the lurid sets and costumes amount to two hours of Technicolor madness". Is the film good? No. Is it jaw-dropping and entertaining? Yes — in a mostly train wreck sort of way. A flop with the critics, it was a popular hit and made a profit despite the movies explosive budget (which went from 6 to 12 million dollars while filming). It works much better now due to the nostalgia factor than it did when it came out and tried, so desperately, to be (to quote La Cinema Dreams) "like Barbarella (1968 / trailer), Myra Breckinridge (1970 / trailer), and The Magic Christian (1969 / trailer) [...] a 'head film' from the start. A head film being a movie that either courted young, college-age audiences by attempting to cinematically replicate the psychedelic drug experience, or one that was best appreciated in an altered mind state."

As TCM explains the plot: "The original James Bond (007) retired following his star-crossed love affair with Mata Hari [...]. But as the international crime organization known as SMERSH threatens world domination, he agrees to come out of retirement. After his longtime superior McTarry ('M') is killed, Bond goes to Scotland to console McTarry's widow, Lady Fiona, unaware that the woman he encounters is actually a SMERSH agent. Bond's charms are such, however, that Lady Fiona gives up her life of espionage and retires to a convent when Bond declines her offer of love. To outwit his enemy, Bond decides there should be more than one 007 agent. He enlists the services of Vesper Lynd, the world's richest and most seductive spy; Evelyn Tremble, the inventor of a foolproof gambling system; Cooper, a strong-arm agent trained to resist women; and Bond's own daughter, Mata Bond [...]."

 Casino Royale Theme Song:

The Champions
(TV series, 1968-1969)

While this British "cult" TV series "filled with intelligent, intriguing characters, exotic settings and fabulous cars (DVD Verdict)" is not whence we know Alexandra Bastedo, it would seem it is whence most do, as virtually every obit we read was apt to say something along the lines as what Wikipedia does: Alexandra Bastedo is "best known for her role as secret agent Sharron Macready in the 1968 British espionage/science fiction adventure series The Champions." Indeed, Boot Hill quotes the actress as have said: "Apart from becoming a household name in England, Scotland and Wales, I became an international star, particularly in Spain and South America where they called me La Bastedo." We here at A Wasted Life, however, are not familiar with the 30-episode series, which supposedly also ran in the US on NBC in 1968, a time when our tastes were still more oriented towards shows such as Batman (1966-1968) or The Monkees (1966-1968).

Classic Film and TV Café explains the basic set up around which the series was constructed: "Three secret agents, being pursued by bad guys, crash land their plane in the Himalayas. All but dead, they are found by an elderly man who takes them to an ancient city occupied by a secret civilization (shades of Shangri-La). Not only are our heroes healed, but they are 'made better.' They gradually learn that they have been given superhuman powers: they can communicate telepathetically, their senses are heightened, and they possess great strength. They can also 'sense' when danger in imminent or when one of them is in trouble." They fought international threats for 30 episodes before succumbing to the deadliest of all TV enemies: low viewer ratings.
Other than Bastedo as the semi-superwoman Sharron Macready, The Champions also featured the fellow super-people Craig Stirling (Stuart Damon) and Richard Barrett (William Gaunt) and their non-super boss Tremayne (Anthony Nicholls of Night of the Eagle [1962 / trailer] and The Omen [1976 / trailer]).

At one point (2007), Variety announced that Guillermo del Toro would be doing a film version of the movie, but it would seem that nothing ever came of it. 

Go here for Part II
Go here for Part III