Miss Diana Dors: Singer, actress, and professional sexpot.

One of my favorites.

The photo shoot with this silver swimsuit must have lasted for days, considering how many pics are floating around.

There is something very Ed Woodian about this one.

Yes, I was late again! And for my last entry on Diana Dors week, too. Today’s allegedly good reason is because I am in a tizzy, as some newbie film blogger is stealing my shtick! They’re becoming quite popular, too, because I am a genius, and even pale imitations of me glow like a uranium suitcase in the hands of a modern day Pandora. (Impressed? Of course you are. Excuse me while I practice the Queen’s wave…)

Speaking of being popular, as Bryce recently pointed out to me, I have hit and passed the 200 mark for Google Followers. Thank you all. I do appreciate it and I love every one of you, even if I get into tizzies and can only express myself in hipster sarcasm. Have a good weekend everyone.

“The Unholy Wife” proves that Diana Dors could, in a pinch, act. It also proves she needed a strong director and a good story, both of which are sadly lacking in TUW.

The poster tagline — “HALF-ANGEL, HALF-DEVIL, she made him HALF-A-MAN!” — is pretty much a lie. You see nothing of Phyllis (Dors) to indicate she’s an angel at all. However, what makes her a “devil” is nothing more than her rejection of a checklist of stereotypical female traits. She doesn’t really like kids, she won’t care for her elderly nutball mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi), she doesn’t like being married to a man who apparently had his whatsit shot off in the war (Rod Steiger)… and it’s that issue with his whatsit that makes him “half a man”, not his wife Phyllis.

Oh, and she murders someone. This was all kinds of confusing, but allow me to try to explain: The film opens with Phyllis just randomly shooting a gun to scare her mother in law. She pretends there was an intruder in what I assume was part of a cunning plan. Mom-in-law Emma calls the cops. They arrive coincidentally along with Phyllis’ brother-in-law, a priest. The cops are satisfied with Phyllis’ story, priest goes home, Emma goes back to bed, then Phyllis’ boyfriend on the side shows up. They kiss and argue and kiss and he sneaks out, but Phyllis’ young son sees them.

Now, the part that confuses me is that some time passes before Phyllis’ plan goes into action, and I’m not sure if she was wickedly cunning or if she just shot the wrong guy. A businessman wants to buy her husband Paul’s vineyard, but he won’t sell. His neighbor and best friend Gino wants to sell his vineyard, and Paul gets into a huge fight with him about it.

But first, backstory! Paul and Gino were war buddies in the Big City for a conference or something when they met two slightly gold digging dames in a bar, Phyllis and Gwen. Paul hooked up with Phyllis, Gino with Gwen, and they eventually marry. Gino and Gwen are a nice couple, while Paul and Phyllis … wait, I just realized their names start with the same letter. Uuuuuugggghhhhh. That’s worse than color-coding the outfits of people in a movie so you “subconsciously” know that they’ll eventually end up together. All right, okay, fine, moving along: Paul and Phyllis don’t get along. He’s nice and sweet to her but she’s a dragon woman who doesn’t love his home and his family like she’s obligated to. Also, he likes her little son from a previous marriage/dalliance/something, but she just wants to be fabulous and has no time for kids.

Back in the present day, Gino and Paul make up after the fistfight. Gino heads to Paul’s house for a talk or a drink or something. When he comes in, Phyllis shoots him, I guess because she thought he was Paul. It’s hard to tell because her face registers no expression. Paul takes the blame for the murder, saying it was an accident.

Phyllis very helpfully gets confused on the stand to try to get Paul “accidentally” convicted. Meanwhile, she’s banging her boyfriend on the side in the wine cellar, which is underground and red and EVIL! OH HAY, DID I MENTION THIS WAS THE UNHOLY WIFE, BECAUSE THIS WINE CELLAR WHERE SHE’S MEETING WITH HER LOVER LOOKS A LOT LIKE HELL. IT’S KIND OF A METAPHOR OR SOMETHING.

Director John Farrow is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Paul loves children, his mother, apple pie and baseball; his brother is a priest; he lost his wang in the war. HE’S HOLY, I TELLS YA! HOLY! I’m waving a small American flag right now!

I was so disappointed in this. Farrow directed “Where Danger Lives” and “The Big Clock,” so you know he knows what noir is supposed to be. He even directed one of my favorite Saint films, “The Saint Strikes Back.” Unfortunately, TUW was just sloppy and poorly thought out and trite. The print TCM showed was rotten, too, impossibly dark with something very suspicious going on with the blues and the reds.

Diana was pretty good for the most part, especially the courtroom scenes and the final scene with the mother-in-law in her sick bed. Solid character actors Marie Windsor and Joe de Santis were excellent. But Arthur Franz, the guy who played the priest? Don’t talk to me about Arthur Franz. And I’m a little miffed at Beulah, too, to be honest.

P.S. I’m exaggerating about Paul’s pole. He confesses toward the end of the film that the Army doctors said he might not be able to have kids again, which I’m sure means injury, not complete loss of, the unit in question.

Note: This post deals with disturbing themes and sexual content. The pics are safe for work, but the overall post may not be safe for work, for your brain, or for your spirit. You’ve been warned.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Deep End” is messed up. Oh I know that sounds weak, that I should be calling it “disturbing” or “dark,” but that gives the film an air of propriety that I don’t think even Jerzy Skolimowski intended.

I caught “Deep End” a few minutes into it the first time it was on TCM and watched for Diana Dors, who I had already missed — her part is early in the film. I had no idea of its history or cult status, mainly because I don’t focus much on films from roughly the late 1960s to the early 1980s. There are exceptions, of course, but the more mainstream films in that time span don’t do anything for me, they so often seem to be edgy for edginess’ sake and lack soul. When I saw “Deep End” the first time, without having seen the beginning, I was mostly convinced that this was another example of lackluster shock film making of the era, but I wanted to see the whole film to be sure. So I caught it again the second time it was on TCM, and I confess my first impression was more cynical than it should have been.

Now, I think Skolimowski fully intended his characters in “Deep End” to be so selfish and confused that they appeared soulless. The film, however, seems to be exploring what happens when an excitable teen boy is mistreated and lost in the swinging, sexually free London of the early 1970s. Seeing the beginning, you see the roots of what young Mike has had to go through.

However, there is this undercurrent of women being out of control, of needing to be put in their place, that pisses me the fuck off. The main male characters are teenage Mike, as well as the swimming instructor and Susan’s fiance. The swimming instructor is a cad who gropes his teen girl students. The fiance is bland. And that’s it, that’s the extent of their offensiveness. But Mike is the hero, and at the end of the film after he’s played a ton of passive aggressive mind games with Susan while helping her to find the lost diamond from her engagement ring, it escalates to where she uses sex to get the diamond back. When she tries to walk off after getting the diamond, Mike kills her. She floats dead in the pool, her blood forming slo-mo ribbons around them, as he has sex with her corpse. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Keep in mind that Susan is portrayed as deserving this, because she’s been an “immature tart”, a jackass to Mike by saying mean things, she’s a cocktease, and she may even be a whore who dances nude! It’s true! So clearly she deserves to die.

And Diana Dors, sadly, is part of this anti-woman theme. She plays a 40-something woman, a little overweight, her platinum dye job going south, her cheap department-store clothes unflattering.

Mike works at a public bathhouse with Susan, and it is understood that they will each take some clients who come in for some kind of non-penetrative sexual release. Mike is 15 years old, I believe, or perhaps 16; he has quit school to go to work because his family needs the money. His first female client-in-quotation-marks is played by Diana Dors, and she, to put a fine point on it, sexually abuses him.

She gets off on shoving an unwilling Mike around, pulling his hair, and forcing his head against her breasts while she shouts some double entendre football talk. It’s probably supposed to be funny; however, it’s the beginning of the abuse Mike takes which ultimately leads him to murder.

“Deep End” tries to be both cult film and mainstream accessible, so it succeeds at neither. It’s got all the hallmark pseudo-indie quirks of dark comedy films of the era, up to and including Cat Stevens, and I can’t take it seriously. When there is an actual attempt at comedy, such as during the porn movie scene, the film is good. It’s very good. When the forced wackiness and choreographed zaniness starts, it falls apart.

I know everyone loves “Deep End”, more even than they love “Zabriskie Point”, which is why I’m turning off comments. Between the theme of this movie and my mostly-negative reaction, the last thing I need is to get into arguments online. I mean no offense by this, it is entirely a time management technique.

However, I would like to point you all to an excellent reflection on the film here at Britmovie by D.R. Shimon. It’s positive, it’s insightful, and it’s well worth the read.