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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Last week's movie was the 1960 hokefest, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, starring Mickey Rooney and Mamie Van Doren, and produced and directed by one of the movies' greatest sleaze-merchants, Albert Zugsmith. (That's not Mickey in last week's picture clue-- it's Martin "Marty" Milner.) Between 1958 and 1961, Zuggy produced nine of the best drive-in titillations ever made, ten if you count Orson Welles' Touch of Evil**. Stuff like High School Confidential, with Uncle Fester as a dope dealer, and College Confidential, with Steve Allen as a professor charged with showing dirty movies to his students. Even in Zugsmith's ouevre, though, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve stands out as weirder than the rest.

Imagine Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus crossed smuttily with The Wizard of Oz, except the songs are beyond awful, like Paul Anka's version of the title tune (he plays Pinkie Parker, and steers his car with his feet so he can play guitar while he sings). After you meet all the characters in their modern incarnations (including Mel Torme and Tuesday Weld), they return in the unbelievably bad color dream sequence that the film is infamous for. Mamie and Milner become Adam and Eve, while Mickey becomes The Devil himself, giving him the chance to wear both red underwear and a shiny snake costume.

Watching Martin Milner pretend to frolic as he names God's critters reminded me again of what a complete non-actor he was. (He was so bad he managed to bring Mr. Roberts to a screeching halt when he appeared.) Mamie was almost as bad, but she was never in these movies for her acting. As for Rooney, the entire fifties was a period of high intensity and low career moments, and his dual performance here is reminiscent of Jerry Lewis' more crazed telethon years.

There isn't a copy to be had of this dirty little gem, or most of Zugsmith's other titles of this period. They never get played on any of the cable movie services, either. So heartiest of congratulations to those astute winners who still recognized it from last week's clue: Wayne Palmer, E. Yarber, Bill Hearne, Hank Parmer, and Joe Rosenberg.

**Welles claimed that Zugsmith wasn't interested in doing Touch of Evil until he heard about the part where Janet Leigh gets shot-up and gang-banged.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 27, 2005 10:37 PM

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