Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: In Memoriam

Racquel Welch had the kind of power behind her game that when men of my dad’s age would talk about her, they’d get excited or look to see if their wives were listening. Just that name was enough for them all to communally make happy noises and look skyward, as if to thank whatever is waiting for us up there for making something so wonderful.

She died February 15 of this year and I’ve been watching more of her movies.

I always wrote her off as someone getting by on her looks yet I have enjoyed so many of these films.

Written by Ed McBain (who is really Evan Hunter and changed his name from Salvatore Albert Lombino; he wrote the scripts for The Birds, Walk Proud and Strangers When We Meet and had movies made of his novels, including Blackboard Jungle, Mister Buddwing from his book Buddwing, Last Summer, Every Little Crook and Nanny and Lonely Heart from his book Lady, Lady I Did It.

Fuzz comes from one of his 87th Precinct books. Directed by Richard A. Colla and written by the author, it stars Burt Reynolds as Detective Steve Carella. He’s investigating why teenagers are setting unhoused people on fire and nearly dies from one of them doing exactly that to him. There’s also a killer threatening to murder city leaders which has Detectives Kling (Tom Skeritt) and Brown (Jack Weston) looking for whoever grabs the money the caller asked for. They fail twice at this and a commissioner and the deputy mayor are both rubbed out.

Detective Eileen McHenry (Welch) is new to the precinct and set up by Carella and Meyer when she’s looking for a rapist. She’s not in the mood to find their antics funny and that night, when walking through the park, she’s stalked. The detective turns the tables on the rapist and beats him unmerciful and solves the case.

The caller ends up being someone called The Deaf Man (Yul Brynner), so called because, yes, he ahs a hearing aid. He’s one of those unstoppable villains, even getting set on fire by the kids from the beginning and somehow surviving at the credits.

Welch got paid $100,000 for this and was supposed to be in her bra and panties in one scene. It’s not in the movie but it is on the poster, which was painted by Richard Amsel which also has Reynolds in his famous nude pose from Cosmo.

This was a hard movie to find for some time, as a series of copycat crimes — strangely in Boston where the movie is set, even if the 87th Precinct books are in New York City — that had teens setting houseless people on fire. The movie was pulled from airing for most of the 70s.

There are even more movies made of the author’s works than those I listed earlier. The 87th Precinct novels were adapted as the movies Cop Hater, The Mugger, The Pusher, Kurosawa’s High and Love (King’s Ransom is the book it’s based on), Sans mobile apparent, Claude Charbrol’s Blood Relatives and Killer’s Wedge. There was also a TV series in 1961, the TV movie Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct: Lightning and two sequels, Ice and Heatwave. And two of the Columbo TV movies, No Time to Die and Undercover were based on So Long as You Both Shall Live and Jigsaw.

Fuzz is very 1972 in the good and bad ways. But hey, Reynolds says it best.

“It was kind of fuzzy. It was made by one of those hot shot TV directors. I liked working with Jack Weston; it began our relationship. I did like working again with Raquel. And I liked the writer whose book the film was based on, Ed McBain, The 87th Precinct. I’d like to direct one of his books.”

You should read that in Norm Macdonald’s voice.