Tommy Sands is 67. He was one of those would-be Elvises who didn't quite make it, but I still remember seeing him in Sing, Boy, Sing, way back in the late 1950s. He had a couple of hit songs, including the title song from the movie, but his career never went anywhere.
And then there's Tuesday Weld, 62 today. The first time I ever saw her was in Rally Round the Flag, Boys, a movie I still remember with affection. She played a character named Comfort Goodpasture, and Dwayne Hickman sang a song called "You are my Boojum" to her. One reason I remember the movie is that a friend of mine named John Black and I went to see it after we had our senior pictures made for the high school yearbook. That was a long time ago, for sure. John went on to a hugely successful career in the import business, and Tuesday went on to star with Hickman in the Dobie Gillis TV series. Both the movie and the series were based on books by the now-forgotten Max Shulman. Not forgotten by me, of course. I read all his books I could find and thought they were hilarious. Later in her career, Weld starred in a movie that I liked a lot, Heartbreak Hotel. I don't think anybody else liked it, however.
3 comments:
Thalia Menninger. How could you forget her?
It wasn't the first time I saw Tuesday, but two years before Rally - as a rather pudgy 12 or 13 year old - she was in the really bad ALan Freed movie Rock, Rock, Rock, which at least had some great songs.
Thalia Menninger indeed--so beautiful, so cunning, so sexily mercurial--a femme fatale in process.
But nobody's pointed out that Weld actually had a major cult career appearing in oddball movies such as Pretty Poison, Love Love A Duck, Thief, Wild in The Country (an Elvis movie directed by Don Siegel and scripted by Clifford Oddets!), Who'll Stop The Rain and I Walk The Line. She also appeared in such A-list successes as The Cincinatti Kid, Soldier in The Rain, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Once Upon a Time In America.
Her beauty caused a lot of critics to dismiss her but she was one hell of a good actress as well as one of the most fetchingly odd personas to ever grace the screen. --Ed Gorman
Stella Stevens! Hubba-hubba!
I love The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and the others aren't bad, either.
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