Released in the U.S. as It Takes a Thief, this U.K. film has Jayne Mansfield as Billie, who acts demure by day but leads a gang of robbers at night. One of their old members, Maxton, went to jail and they think he knows where the big score they made got hidden. They take his son, despite the ending which lets everyone know that the money had been found three years ago.
The cast includes Anthony Quayle (The Guns of Navarone), Peter Reynolds (Devil Girl from Mars) and Robert Brown (who was M in the Bond films from Octopussy to Licence to Kill).
Director John Gilling has a pretty good resume of films in his history, like The Flesh and the Fiends, The Plague of the Zombies and The Mummy’s Shroud. This isn’t the best interesting movie you’ll see, but as always, Mansfield rises above the material.
With a $90,000 budget, a noir sensibility and no small amount of grit, some have seen this film as the last b-movie made by Columbia Pictures. It’s all about professional burglar Nat Harbin (character actor Dan Duryea) trying to justify his life and how it keeps involving his adoptive daughter Gladden (Jane Mansfield).
Directed by Paul Wendko, whose career was mostly in TV (Secrets, Good Against Evil, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, The Death of Richie, Haunts of the Very Rich, The Brotherhood of the Bell) with some films (three Gidget movies and The Mephisto Waltz, strange bedfellows if there ever were) mixed in.
Mansfield was cast after producer Louis W. Kellman saw the crew lose their minds over her during the making of Pete Kelly’s Blues. She cast into a world here where everyone has their own angle, even their mark, a fake spirtualist.
This was remade as The Burglars with Omar Sharrif and Dyan Cannon in 1971.
Frank Tashlin wrote, produced and directed this film, taking only the title and the character of Rita Marlowe from the successful Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He also made the smart move of hiring Jayne Mansfield to reprise her role as Rita. It’s an anarchic movie for a big studio film, taking shots at television, popular fan culture, Hollywood hype and advertising.
Much like The Girl Can’t Help It, the movie begins with its lead — Tony Randall — talking about the movie we’re about to see, pretty much talking down on much of it. He plays the 20th Century Fox theme, saying it was in his contract to do so, before forgetting the name of the movie that he is in.
That’s followed by a series of fake TV commercials that obviously fall short of their promises. This opening is different for today. I can only imagine how strange it seemed in 1957.
Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall) is trying to move up at the La Salle agency. He gets a brainstorm to save the agency’s biggest account, Stay-Put Lipstick, by getting sex bomb Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) to be the spokeswoman.
She only has one clause. In order to do the job, he has to pretend to be her man, all to make her TV Tarzan boytoy (Mansfield’s real-life husband, Mickey Hargitay, jealous. Now the tabloids know Rock Hunter as the Lover Boy. Rita has no idea who she really loves, but we all do — it’s the man who discovered her, George Schmidlap (Groucho Marx!).
To take the love triangle — it has way more sides than that — Hunter already has a girlfriend, Jenny Wells (Betty Drake, the third wife of Cary Grant). And oh yeah — Hunter’s secretary Violet wants to teach Rita a lesson about using her sex for power (which is ironic, as she’s played by Joan Blondell, who constantly ran afoul of the Hayes Code in her youth).
Plus, a young Barabara Eden is in here, as is Dubois, PA native Ann McCrea (Midge from The Donna Reed Show). And look for Majel Barrett (Nurse Chappell from Star Trek) in one of the TV ads in the beginning.
This movie is a delight. I loved The Girl Can’t Help It and this feels like the natural evolution of Tashlin’s themes from that movie.
Raoul Walsh had an interesting career, going from acting as John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to directing High Sierra, They Died With Their Boots On and The Naked and the Dead. Here, he travels to Spain — and Pinewood Studios — to shoot a comedy western with Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield.
Originally intended to be a movie with Clifton Webb and Marilyn Monroe, this ended up being part of a three-movie deal 20th Century Fox made to film three movies in England. The studio was pushing Mansfield to take over for the temperamental Marilyn Monroe, but she upset execs by getting pregnant with her second child and missed days of work.
There’s a decent supporting cast — Willaim Campbell (Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte), Robert Morley (Theater of Blood) and Bruce Cabot (King Kong) — and some great CinemaScope visuals. It’s a trifle about More playing a British man who ends up becoming a sheriff and Mansfield as a tough saloon owner.
Mansfield sings a few songs here, but that’s really the voice of Connie Francis.
Also known as Hercules vs. the Hydra, this Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia-directed peblum starts with Hercules’ (Mickey Hargitay) empire being invaded by the villainous Licos (Massimo Serato, Don’t Look Now, The Humanoid) and his bride killed by the army of Ecalia. Hercules goes wild and is only stopped when the king is murdered by an unseen hand and his daughter Queen Deianira (Jayne Mansfield!)
The rest of the film involves Hercules pining for the queen, who is already married, Licos trying to get with her and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, turns all of her lovers into trees and makes herself look exactly like Deianira to try and get with our hero. Oh yeah — there are also battles with a hydra and a bigfoot looking beast.
Filmed on location in Italy during the height of the sword and sandal era, Mansfield was offered the film while she was shooting The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw in Spain. She agreed as long as Hargitay got the lead. She was four months pregnant while making this movie.
Look, any movie where Hercules saves Jayne Mansfield from a mad bull by wrestling it is going to win me over.
I liked Marc Meyers’ film My Friend Dahmer but you know, I was totally prepared, as a metalhead who is sick of movies worshipping the 80’s, to dislike this film. Yet there are enough twists and turns to keep this movie interesting and well above expectations. If you liked Satanic Panic, I’d say this movie would make a good partner feature for a double feature.
Alexis (Alexandra Daddario from the Baywatch remake), Val (Maddie Hasson, God Bless America) and Bev (Amy Forsyth from Channel Zero: No-End House) lure three metal-loving boys back home after a concert and things go to Hell. None of the guys — Mark (Keean Johnson, Alita: Battle Angel), Ivan (Austin Swift, Taylor’s brother) and Kovacs (Logan Miller, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) — know what’s coming.
I really don’t want to give away many of the twists that follow, but I really dug how the movie plays with religion and seems to have a pretty decent knowledge of metal. It was also interesting to see Johnny Knoxville play a very not Knoxville character.
You can get this movie on demand and on blu ray from Lionsgate Home Entertainment. You can also find it on Netflix.
Once, we took our dog Angelo to a dog show and saw several dogs that had been colored every shade of the rainbow as people judged which was the best. It was astounding. I’d never seen anything like it before and as soon as I got home, I did a deep dive into this strange world of dog grooming.
Now, director Rebecca Stern takes the viewer through an entire year in the life of several competitive creative dog groomers, all so that you get the reasons why they do exactly what they do.
From South Carolina to California, New York to Arkansas, this movie follows several contestants to large-scale dog grooming competitions. This movie asks the question, “What is art? And can it be spray painted and cut into the fur of dogs?”
Seriously, if you’ve never seen this kind of thing before, you need to see this movie. It’s really something else.
A shorter 60-minute version of the film debuted on HBO Max last year. Now for the first time since it’s 2019 SXSW premiere, the full-length feature film (88 minutes) will be available to the world on DVD and all major VOD platforms from Passion River Films.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this by its PR agency, which has no impact on our review.
Sabrina thought that she had problems when her play, The Tungsten Dagger, bombs. Then her boyfriend dumps her. And then, someone breaks into her house and it’s Elodie, the main character in the play she just put on that very night. She asks her creator for help, bringing Sabrina into the world that she thought was only in her imagination.
Here’s a cool fact about this movie — the exterior of Sabrina’s apartment is the same one used for the exterior of the hotel in the opening of Psycho.
Daniel Ziegler wrote, directed, produced and edited this movie, which feels incredibly personal. Its definitely something different than the movies that usually get sent to us for review, a mix of black and white film noir with color in the real world, an inverse Oz filled with magical daggers that grant wishes and shady dealings.
It’s closer to an art film than a genre movie — again, I always hold to the rule that what type of movie it is only depends on the theater playing it. Also, unlike so many modern films, the music and sound design truly fits and has a purpose. Well done.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime. Thanks to the filmmakers for sending it our way. Want to know more? Check out Black Box Films’ website and Facebook page.
Directed by George Sherman and Giuliano Carnimeo — I’ve been diving deep into his films, including They Call Me Hallelujah, They Call Him Cemetery, his Sartana movies and The Case of the Bloody Iris — Panic Button is an example of the movies that Jayne Mansfield had to hunt down after her 20th Century Fox contract ended.
French entertainer Maurice Chevalier and Mansfield play actors who are picked to be in a new production of Romeo and Juliet. Eleanor “Woman of a Thousand Faces” Parker and Mike “Mannix” Connors also show up.
This tale of mobsters getting involved with Shakespeare was never really successful anywhere that it played. In the U.S., it was on double bills. And hey — it has one total review on Letterboxd other than this one.
Richard E. Cunha didn’t make many movies, but he sure made some insane ones. There’s She Demons with TV Sheena Irish McCalla, fanged women and Nazis taking over an island long after the war. Giant from the Unknown, featuring a monster named Vargas the Giant and effects by Universal’s Jack Pierce. Missile to the Moon, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Girl In Room 13…none of these movies are normal.
He teams with German director Gustav Gavrin, cowboy director Ray Nazarro and Albert Zugsmith (Sappho Darling, Violated!, The Cult) for this movie. That’s because production problems — financing, location and personnel issues — caused filming to stop several times and personnel changed along the way.
What we end up with is a tale of three robbers who steal a million and end up turning on one another. Actually, it soon becomes two, with Lylle Corbett (Cameron Mitchell) killing Dolph and Darlene (Jayne Mansfield) having to deal with it.
They end up on an island where everyone wants their money and everyone is ready to kill for it. You kind of have to love a movie that offs nearly everyone in the cast, closing with Mansfield drowning herself to take the last of the money.
Mansfield called the film: “The best role of my career.” She was four months pregnant with her daughter Mariska Hargitay when she made this. Her voice is dubbed in this by Carolyn De Fonseca, who would one day do Jayne’s voice from beyond the grave for The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield.
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