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Thursday, September 30, 2010

Tony Curtis dies at age 85!

On September 29th 2010, one of Hollywood's last living legends Tony Curtis died at his Las Vegas home from a cardiac arrest at age 85. Tony Curtis shaped himself from a 1950s movie heartthrob into a respected actor, showing a determined streak that served him well in such films as "Sweet Smell of Success," "The Defiant Ones" and the mega hit "Some Like It Hot" with Marilyn Monroe. Curtis began in acting with frivolous movies that exploited his handsome physique and appealing personality, but then steadily moved to more substantial roles, starting in 1957 in the harrowing show business tale "Sweet Smell of Success." In 1958, "The Defiant Ones" brought him an Academy Award nomination as best actor for his portrayal of a white racist who escaped from prison handcuffed to a black man, Sidney Poitier. The following year, he donned women's clothing and sparred with Marilyn Monroe in one of the most acclaimed film comedies ever, Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot." His first wife was actress Janet Leigh of "Psycho" fame; actress Jamie Lee Curtis is their daughter. "My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages," Jamie Lee Curtis said in a statement today. "He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world." Curtis struggled against drug and alcohol abuse as starring roles became fewer, but then bounced back in film and television as a character actor. His brash optimism returned, and he allowed his once-shiny black hair to turn silver. Again he came back after even those opportunities began to wane, reinventing himself as a writer and painter whose canvasses sold for as much as $20,000. "I'm not ready to settle down like an elderly Jewish gentleman, sitting on a bench and leaning on a cane," he said at 60. "I've got a helluva lot of living to do." And that he did. (A.P.)
For fans of Marisa Mell, he will be mainly remembered as the "other" Casanova in the movie "Casanova & C°" from 1977 with a bunch of Eurocult actresses like Marisa Berenson, Sylva Koscina, Andrea Ferreol, Britt Ekland and... Marisa Mell as the Dutchess of Cornaro. The movie is an erotic comedy film with many... many titles: Casanova & Company (Italy), Casanova - sänkykamarivaras (Finland), Enas trellos, poly trellos Kazanovas (Greece), Hilfe, ich bin eine männliche Jungfrau (West Germany), Sex on the Run (USA) (reissue title), Some Like It Cool (USA), The Amorous Mis-Adventures of Casanova (USA) (video title), The Rise and Rise of Casanova (UK), and Treize femmes pour Casanova (France)). The plot revolves around the adventures of Giacomo Casanova with various women, and a visit to the Republic of Venice by an Ottoman delegation, including a Sultana and her retinue. To me he will always be remembered as the partner of Roger Moore in the British series "The Persuaders" from the early 70's.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Equus

On March 28 1964, the "Strudel"-western "Der Letzte Ritt nach Santa Cruz" had it's German premiere. The movie was a German take on making an "American" western in Europe. The outside scenes were shot on Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands in Spain, substituting for Mexico. The movie, directed by actor-writer-director Rolf Olsen, had as main cast Edmund Purdom, Klaus Kinski, Mario Adorf, Marianne Koch (who would become in the same year world famous alongside Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's opus "A Fistful of Dollars"), and Marisa Mell as Juanita. The story is a standard revenge story, so nothing special, but what makes this movie remarkable in her career is the fact that Marisa Mell rides a horse in several scenes, what she has never done again in any of her future movies.Not many people know that Marisa Mell was, not only classical theatre trained in Vienna's prestitious Max Reinhardt Seminar, but was also a quite good horse rider. So privately she often went horse riding whenever she got the opportunity, especially in the 60's.This is a rare picture of Marisa Mell horse riding during the production of the French movie "Objectif 500 millions" published in a Spanish newspaper on March 23rd 1966, a few days before the French premiere of the movie.

As told the movie was shot on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria. So whenever Marisa Mell had some free time during the production of the movie, she went horse riding alongside the shores of the island. During one of those rides she encountered a car driving along the sea road. The horse startled by the roar of the engine. Marisa Mell was not able to keep the horse under control and she was thrown to the ground. A young man left the car and hurried to help her get up again when he noticed that she was bleeding out of her nose very badly. So the best thing he could do was take her to the nearby hospital on the island to check on her situation. Thankfully nothing was broken so Marisa Mell could leave the hospital the same day. After the ordeal Marisa Mell and the young man kept in touch and became even friends. One year later, Marisa Mell had the now famous auto accident and was hospitalised for several months. The young man heard of this ordeal and went to visit her with a large bouquet of flowers telling her that he would take care of her whatever the cost. According to the information at hand during her recovery they became lovers for a short while.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Whose orchid is it anyway???

Today I went shopping in my home town because the weather was very nice and I needed some new stuff for the autumn and winter that is coming upon us very soon. Driving into town with my car during a saturday afternoon is not a very good idea but I had to do at the same time some errants so I needed the trunk of my car. The road into the city center is normaly a 10 minutes drive but today it took me more that 45 minutes to reach my destination. It was a lot of stop and go and bumper to bumper. What do you do while waiting in line to enter a city? Listen to the radio, text some messages to friends, thinking about meaningless things, looking at the many tourists that are still in big numbers in town hurrying along the boardwalks like grasshoppers in a corn field... Then I needed to stop the car again at a traffic light that was close to my end target. Finally. This traffic light is situated near a very big perfume store from a very well known chain of perfume stores. While looking at the big displays in the windows I saw a lot of advertising for perfumes from all the major brands like YSL, Boss, Gucci... and also the photo above with a beautiful lady in perfect make-up. She had grand eyes, very lush red lips and her right eye was decorated with a blood red orchid. "What an original concept", I thought to tell a message! I had never seen that ad before. The traffic light went to green and I entered city center. The strange thing was that during an entire day of shopping the picture above kept popping up in my mind. Who was that women and what was the name of the perfume she was advertising? But there was also another thing that was bothering me but I was not able to put my finger on it! What was it about that picture that struck me and made me uneasy?
Back home I found the picture on the internet. The women was Italian actress Monica Bellucci advertising the perfume "Hypnotic Poison" and lipstick "Rouge Dior" by Dior.
And then it hit me why I was so intrigued by this picture. The image of a women's eye in a blood red orchid I had seen before although not very often but the image was struck into my subconscious as a poster for a Marisa Mell giallo movie called "Sette Orchidee Macchiate di Rosso" or in French "Le Tueur à l'Orchidee" directed by Umberto Lenzi in 1972 with Antonio Sabato and Uschi Glass.
What coincidence I thought that after more than almost 40 years the same image was used for an ad campaign to promote the newest perfume of fashion house Dior. The only thing missing in the Dior campaign was a tear of blood dropping from the eye but that was maybe to much even for Dior. A little more research learned that the man responsable for this image was make-up master for Dior for more than 30 year called "Tyen". He started his job at Dior as a make-up artist and then in later years became their fashion photographer and stylist for their ads. And as you can see on the picture below he puts more on women's faces than just orchids.
I wonder if he is a giallo fan or even an Eurocult fan? It could be possible while living in Paris, France that he came across the poster of "Le Tueur à l'Orchidee" and that the image has struck him one way or the other. So when one day the new ad campaign for the Dior perfume was needed this image of an eye surrounded by orchid petals came back to him. Who knows? Nevertheless it makes for a strong image and a beautiful campaign.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Eurocult Looney Tunes!

Marisa Mell was one of the most beautiful actresses of her time! During her reign in the Eurocult scene a lot of photo's where taken from her. This one is from March 1964 when she attended in Argentina the Buenos Aires "Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata" . Already early on Marisa Mell had a lot of success with her films in the Spanish speaking countries appealing to a lot of latino men. So Spanish language newspapers started to cover the movies she made often accompanied with a review of that movie. Because the internet and desk top publishing are still decades away the editors of the newspapers asked often cartoonists to make a little drawing of the content of the movie so to liven up the review a little bit. This week's entry shows some cartoons of that time as being published during the 60's and 70's. You will notice the cartoons are not very flattering to the beauty of Marisa Mell.

DIAMOND WALKERS (1965)
X
X

TRAIN D'ENFER (1965)

X

X

CHE NOTTE, RAGAZZI (1966)

X

X

DANGER: DIABOLIK! (1968)

X X

SENZA VIA D'USCITA (1970)

X

X

LES BELLES AUX BOIS DORMANTES (1970)

X

X

MARTA (1971)

X X

AMICO, STAMMI LONTANO ALMENO UN PALMO (1972)

X


X

LA ENCADENADA (1975)
X

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Tell Me On A Sunday!


Marisa Mell in Rome with her beloved Afghan hound Rocco not looking very happy that she was discovered by paparazzi in her pregnant state and rather dull outfit.
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The year is 1977. Marisa Mell is 38 years old and living partly in Rome and partly in Madrid. She is still working in the Eurocult movie business, mostly doing Italo-Spanish movies, but her reputation as a man hungry women and her age is slowly affecting her career. Although her beauty was still untouched at that time, her soul was not. She once said "Every man wanted me, but no man wanted to keep me." And that was the harsh reality of her life untill the very end. Like almost every women she also longed to have a faithfull husband and some children to come home too when a days job on the movie set was over or when coming back from an engagement abroad. She had high hopes to reach that goal with two men in her life: Pier Luigi Torri from Italy and Espartaco Santoni from Spain. But both men disappointed her heavyly. Torri became a fugitive and went several years behind bars in London (UK) after the "Number One" Nightclub fiasco with drugs and an organized crime involvement; Espartaco Santoni declared several times in the yellow press that Marisa Mell was the women of his life and that they without any doubt would get married in the near future. Fact was that after a two year relationship, after Marisa Mell was single again when Pier Luigi Torri fled Italy, that he also left Marisa Mell in 1975 for another starlet/model named Carmen Cervera. ("Who is that???", you might ask! Well, look her up on Wiki and you'll see that her life is much more interesting than even Alexis's life on the soap "Dynasty" as a gold digger! She reached fame and extreme fortune in the end when she married and than became widow of the extremely wealthy high society Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza.) So once again she was single and on drift. Although Marisa Mell was regarded by the yellow press as a strong modern women in reality she was very insecure and longed to have a strong man in her life that she could depend on. Several months after her seperation from Espartaco Santoni rumour started to spread among the Italian-Spanish incrowd that Marisa Mell was pregnant. Problem was that she was not a socialite at that moment so confirmation was very hard to get untill one sunday morning in the autumn of 1977 when paparazzi found Marisa Mell walking with her beloved Afghan hound Rocco and a young man in a park in Rome. The paparazzi did not let escape this golden opportunity and took several photo's of her clearly showing her belly as a pregnant women. There was no doubt about that. Marisa Mell was pregnant again. This was not the first time. At the end of the 60's, in 1969, when she was with Pier Luigi Torri, Marisa Mell got pregnant but during the Cannes Film Festival she lost her baby due to a miscarriage, she always claimed. Other people claim that she had an abortion. Taking pictures of Marisa Mell in her blessed state was not enough for the paparazzi. They wanted to know who the father was of the child. During that conversation with the press Marisa Mell refused to tell it. The journalists recognized the man she was with as actor Gianni Macchia, but was he the father or was it another lover in her past? Several months before this meeting in the park, Marisa Mell had a relationship with a pianist called Maurizio Libardo. Problem was that he was 20 years old, or 18 years younger than Marisa Mell. Could he be the father of the baby? In the yellow press at that time, speculation went wild. The magazine "Lecturas" headlined: " Marisa Mell espera su primer hijo a los 38 años". Untill this day nothing, to my knowledge, is known about the father of the child. It becomes even more mysterious. How did the pregnancy end? Fact is that Marisa Mell did not give officially birth to a child during her life. Did she had another miscarriage or did she deliver the baby but gave it up for adoption or was the baby during the course of pregnancy still born? A lot of questions with no answers for the moment! Maybe to be continued!

Marisa Mell with Italian actor Gianni Macchia in an staged embrace.

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What is also strange is the fact that Marisa Mell is smoking while pregnant hence the ever present cigarette in her right hand.