SCREAMING MIMI - "The Ballet Of Desire" (1958)

Tonight's Saturday Night Special is an odd movie from 1958 titled "Screaming Mimi."

You can hardly make it out, but the object behind the title is a small sculpture you could hold in your hand called the "Screaming Mimi."

Miss Sweden 1950, Anita Ekberg is Virginia Wilson, aka Yolanda Lange, and she's taking an outdoor shower after swimming in the Pacific Ocean!

She hears her dog whimpering and........

.......The next thing she sees is some madman coming her way!

The man had escaped from the Highland Sanitarium, and viciously attacks her with a knife. Her step brother shoots the fool right in the nick of time, but Virginia is damaged goods after the event, and ends up in the same hospital that the guy escaped from!

Her VERY caring healthcare provider is Doctor Greenwood, who is played by Harry Townes! Out of Harry's amazing 185 mostly television credits are two episodes of "The Twilight Zone," "The Four Of Us Are Dying," and "Shadow Play."

Time passes and Virginia seems to be doing a lot better when her and Dr. Greenwood disappear, and she starts working as an exotic dancer. I think they are supposed to have moved to L.A. but I'm pretty sure this is North Beach in San Francisco!

Her name is now just Yolanda, and the place she's working in is called "El Madhouse" and is run by Joann 'Gypsy' Masters, who is played by real life striptease artist turned actress, Gypsy Rose Lee.

Vibes player Red Norvo and his trio are the house band!

In 1938 Red Norvo had two number one hit songs, "Please Be Kind," and "Says My Heart."

At "El Madhouse" the bartender sings, and ..........

.......The waiters dance!

And Yolanda does her thing. She's not a stripper, just a dancer!

It's really kind of hard to believe this actually was passed off as entertainment back in 1958!

Yolanda is out walking around with her Great Dane called Devil when she is attacked and stabbed in the stomach!

Some time earlier, another girl named Lola Lake had been stabbed to death, and the funny little "Screaming Mimi" statue was found at the crime scene!

Phillip Carey plays Sweeney, an investigative reporter who has an interest in Yolanda on more than one level. Seeing the photo of Lola Lake makes him try and track down the "Screaming Mimi," because when he visited Yolanda's dressing room, she also had one of the little sculptures!

In 1959-1960, Phillip Carey played the lead in 26 episodes of the TV show "Phillip Marlowe," and from 1965 to 1967 he was Capt. Edward A. Parmalee in 56 episodes of "Laredo."

Pretty risque for 1958, Linda Cherney is Gypsy's best friend Ketti. I don't remember her ever speaking, but they cut to her a multitude of times, just to show you that Gypsy wasn't interested in men!

Linda only had one other role besides this one where she played an uncredited car hop!

After taking a few days off, Whoa! Big News! Yolanda Returns!! Yippee!!

But her act didn't change any!

They all missed her so much they had a party and made her a "Welcome Back" cake!

In the end, Virginia/Yolanda gets a free ride back to the nut house, where she never should have got out of to begin with!

The book was written by Fredric Brown in 1949, and was also made into another movie in 1970 that was Dario Argento's Directorial debut,  "L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo" or "The Bird With The Crystal Plumage!"

LOONEY TUNES / Bugs Bunny In "Hyde And Hare" - 1955

Welp, we end another month here at The Dungeon. Today's post is a cartoon directed by Friz Freleng, another genius making awesome cartoons for Warner Bros.

Love this one starring our favorite guy, Bugs Bunny, in a little horror tale from 1955. So, sit back and enjoy the laffs, you know, as much as you can in this nutso America we call home.

Dr. Jekyll takes Bugs to his place where our little pal will be well fed and taken care of...

Bugs checks out the home while the doctor goes into the lab to get some carrots. But, the doc sees his special formula just sitting there, and cannot fight the urge to drink it. He apologizes to the audience, then slams it down!

Bugs sees a piano and sits down to play a tune. He pretends to be Liberace, he makes a face and says.. I wish my brother George were here.

In the meantime, the doctor has changed into Mr. Hyde. He walks up behind Bugs, and without even turning around, the little guy senses danger!

And, this is what he sees when he does turn around!! YOW!!

The maniac chases Bugs (who's calling for the doctor's assistance) around the house, until, it changes back into the doctor.

Bugs takes the doc's hand to find what he thinks in a mentally disturbed patient... After a walk down the hall, well, you know what happens next.

The doctor is back so him and Bugs go into the storage room. Bugs nails up some boards and hands the doctor a rifle in case the creep shows up! You can see where this plan goes, to Hell.

Bugs and the doctor hide in a closet. It's amazing what such a simple image can convey!

Finally, Dr. Jekyll decides to pour the formula down the drain because of the mayhem it causes. But, the bottle's empty! He asks Bugs if he drank it, and our little bunny gets all insulted and tells the doctor that he's outta there!..

Bugs goes back to his home in the park. When he arrives, the regulars there see him and head for the hills! Including the birds...

Bugs is baffled!.. What's wrong with those people?! Haven't they ever seen a rabbit before?!!.. Hope you enjoyed this post, check in again tomorrow when we hear back from Eegah!!..

I want to thank our pals that left comments on how much we love our pets ~ So, Thank You ~

THE BIG COMBO - "First Is First And Second Is Nobody" (1955)

This week's Wildcat Wednesday feature from 1955 is titled "The Big Combo."

"The Big Combo" has an outstanding cast and is big fun to watch!

Writer Philip Yordan has some interesting credits for films like "The Fiend Who Walked The West," and "Dead Girls Don't Tango," but what's even more interesting are the credits he has for films like "Invasion Of The Triffids," and "The Naked Jungle," where he was just the front man for two writers, Bernard Gordon and Ben Maddow, who had been blacklisted in the 50's.

"The Big Combo" starts off with blonde bombshell Jean Wallace as Susan Lowell being pursued by these two thugs, Fante and Mingo!

Fante on the left is Lee Van Cleef, and Mingo on the right is Earl Holliman, two of my favourite character actors!

The lighting and cinematography are excellent throughout the whole film!

This looks like it could be a black and white version of an Edward Hopper painting!

Cornel Wilde is Police Detective Leonard Diamond, and his boss glaring at him is Robert Middleton as Captain Peterson. Diamond is spending too much time and money on one man, a Mr. Black, who is a slimy but slippery hoodlum they just can't get anything on, and the Captain is getting tired of trying to explain it to the people he has to answer to.

Richard (The Godfather) Conte is the notorious Mr. Brown. To show you what a ruthless bastard he is, there's this scene where he's chewing out a boxer who just lost a match. Mr. Brown slaps the kid, and when the kid doesn't hit him back, he calls him a loser, and tells him to get lost!

Richard Conte was also in "The Twilight Zone" episode titled "Perchance To Dream."

Susan is Mr. Brown's girl, but she's not happy in the role, so while out eating with Fante and Mingo, she becomes faint, and passes out while dancing!

It turns out she had taken some pills!

Now how hard would it be to have this role when nine years earlier Jean Wallace had tried to commit suicide in the same manner? When that didn't work, three years later, she tried stabbing herself in the abdomen. Despite all that unhappiness, Jean lived until 1990 when she died at the age of 66.

The third huge name in this production is Brian (Quatermass) Donlevy, there in the middle, as one of Mr. Black's stooges Joe McClure!

Diamond doesn't have a lot of extra time on his hands, but when he does, he likes to spend it with his showgirl girlfriend Rita, who was played by heavenly Helene (Jungle Moon Men, Beast From 10,000 Leagues) Stanton! The funny thing is that in real life Cornel Wilde was actually married to the other female in this story, Jean Wallace! Cornel Wilde spent a good deal of the rest of his life directing and promoting movies with Jean in them including a movie about an out of control virus in 1970 called "No Blade Of Grass."

Mr. Black and his boys rough Diamond up, and pour 47% alcohol hair tonic down his throat to make him seem drunk, and dump him off at the Captain's doorstep!

Dungeon hero John (Attack Of The Puppet People) Hoyt has a small role as an antiques dealer with a shady past, who only has what he has because he knows a secret about what happened to Mr. Black's ex-partner!

It doesn't pay to be a cutthroat henchman working for Mr. Black. He's got Fante and Mingo hiding out, and he brings them a big box that he says is money, but after he leaves, they open it, and it is sticks of dynamite instead!

Helen Walker is the missing Mrs. Brown. Her own story is more tragic than this movie. On New Year's Eve in 1946, she picked up three WWII veterans hitchhiking. She ended up in a horrible accident that flipped the car and killed one of the soldiers and injured the other two. She also broke her pelvis. The two survivors claimed she was drunk, and she had to go to trial, but even though acquitted, it seriously damaged her career. Now, this is just really weird, just like Jean Wallace, Helen was in a movie in 1949 called "Impact," and there was a scene of a fatal automobile accident that was caused by her character. In 1960, Helen's house burned down, and in 1968, she succumbed to cancer at the age of only 47.

Mr. Brown finally gets what's coming to him!

And Diamond and Susan, well, who knows where their life goes from here!

It seems like Cornel Wilde really was Sir Lancelot to Jean Wallace, so I thought that it was very fitting that after they made the Wilde directed movie "Lancelot And Guinevere" together, they came out with this Dell comic book in 1963!