When Time Ran Out...

From time to time in The Underworld, I'll refer to a little club (which exists solely in my head) made up of actors and actresses who served time in a 1970s disaster movie (I also include 1980, since those were usually filmed in '79.)  This was a period in which audiences couldn't get enough of watching stars in peril!  These people, whether I like, love or loathe them, have a special distinction in my heart due to their participation in a genre I have been obsessed with my whole life.  This past year, we lost a fair number of folks who had membership in this club and so, because of my affection for them and for my love of "In Memorium" tributes, I'm going to do a brief (and belated) recap of them as we send them off to that big burning high-rise or disabled plane in the sky!

Chief among those we lost last year, in this or any other category, is Ernest Borgnine.  An Oscar-winner for 1955's Marty, that was only one of many, many compelling and fascinating roles that he played in his sixty-year career.  From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Catered Affair (1956) spring to mind, but still only scratch the surface.  Seen below in my favorite shot of him from The Poseidon Adventure (1972), in which he gave a brawny, blustery performance, as well as the far less successful 1980 film When Time Ran Out..., he also starred in the 1977 Irwin Allen TV-movie Fire!  He was ninety-five when renal failure claimed him.

Gary Collins started his film career in 1962 with the Charlton Heston comedy The Pigeon Who Took Rome, later segueing to TV on The Sixth Sense and as the host of Hour Magazine as well as The Miss America Pageant.  (He's something of a hero in my house for having taken part in some disastrously wretched production numbers during the 1985 pageant, the one in which Vanessa Williams was declared the winner!)  In 1970, he played the calm, professional flight engineer in Airport, surveying the damage caused by a mad bomber and (amusingly) informing pilot Dean Martin of some of the passengers "puking."  Married for forty-five years to former Miss America-turned-actress Mary Ann Mobley, he died of natural causes at the age of seventy-four.

Charles Durning's screen career (apart from one 1953 TV appearance) began in earnest in the early '60s.  He emerged as a powerful character actor, adept at both comedy and drama (and even musicals!)  He was twice Oscar-nominated, for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), losing to Louis Gossett Jr in An Officer and a Gentleman, and To Be or Not to Be (1983), losing that time to Jack Nicholson in Terms of Endearment.  He also scored four Golden Globe nominations, winning the final time for the 1990 miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts.  In 1975, he played the captain of the ill-fated dirigible The Hindenburg.  He died of natural causes at the age of eighty-nine, but was still working steadily and will have two films released this year!

Alex Karras made his mark on the football field as a defensive lineman with the Detroit Lions before turning to acting in the late '60s.  He had a role in the blockbuster Mel Brooks western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974) and later became a familiar face on TV as the father of Webster (1983 - 1989.)  His wife and costar on Webster was Susan Clark (a disaster club member in her own right for her work in Airport 1975.)  In 1980's When Time Ran Out..., Karras played an oil rigger and part-time cockfighting aficionado who is confronted with a tidal wave caused by the eruption of a nearby volcano.  He died of kidney failure at age seventy-seven and, sadly, had been suffering from dementia, possibly caused by all those head injuries he incurred on the football field.

Jack Klugman became a household name thanks to his role on The Odd Couple (1970 - 1975) with Tony Randall and later Quincy, M.E. (1976 - 1983.)  he'd been working on TV and in movies since the early '50s, however, having costarred in 12 Angry Men (1957) and I Could Go On Singing (1963) with Judy Garland.  Nominated ten times for the Emmy, he won once for a guest role on The Defenders in 1964 and twice for The Odd Couple.  He also won a Golden Globe for The Odd Couple, losing a previous nomination to Carroll O'Connor for All in the Family.  In 1976, Klugman played a gambler, deep in debt to a loan shark, who has everything riding on a championship football game in Two Minute Warning.  However, a crazed sniper ensures that the outcome of the game will never be known and that more than a few lives are lost in the bargain.  Klugman died of prostate cancer at age ninety.

Sylvia Kristel may be a surprising person to find in the club, not to mention being dead in the first place!  Many of us think of her as the young, sexually liberated star of all those softcore Emmanuelle movies of the 1970s and beyond.  The Dutch actress, who also starred in a sultry 1981 version of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover with Nicholas Clay, was taken from us far too early at only age sixty from cancer.  In 1979, Kristel was the slit-skirted chief stewardess of The Concorde: Airport '79, opposite pilots Alain Delon and George Kennedy.

This completes the members of the disaster club as far as I am aware.  However, there are a couple of honorable mentions, folks that took part in a 1970s disaster movie made for television.  Here we bid farewell to James Farentino, who starred in 1974's The Elevator (I'm not making this up!) about a disparate group of folks trapped in a broken elevator 32 stories up within a high rise.  His costars (apart from Don Stroud who's seen with him here) include disaster stalwarts such as Roddy McDowall, Carol Lynley, Arlene Golonka and Miss Myrna Loy!  At age seventy-three, Farentino died of complications from a broken hip.

Larry Hagman will forever be immortalized as the star of two very different television series.  He was the befuddled, exasperated astronaut Major Tony Nelson opposite Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie (1965 - 1970) and then the cunning, slick oil magnate J.R. Ewing on Dallas (1978 - 1991.)  In between those, he starred in the 1974 TV-movie Hurricane as the husband of Jessica Walter, both trapped at sea in their pleasure boat during the title event.  He also had a small role as a doctor in the 1976 big-screen disaster spoof The Big Bus. Hagman was eighty-one when he died of complications for the treatment of throat cancer.

Finally, Deborah Raffin, the star of one of our recently profiled howlers Once is Not Enough (1975) passed away all too soon last year of leukemia.  She was only fifty-nine.  In 1978, she starred in the telefim Ski Lift to Death along with Don Johnson, Charles Frank, Howard Duff and Veronica Hamel.  The story concerned a disabled lift that threatened to plunge a variety of skiers to their deaths at any given moment.  We salute these departed performers who faced a wide variety of disasters (and, in some cases, sharp-tongued critics!) during their acting careers.

Ernest Borgnine 1917 - 2012

Goodbye, beloved Ernie! Passed away at ninety-five and still sharp as a tack right up to the end. 

Making the best of what God gave him, which was, on the surface, as ordinary and conventional as could be, but in Hollywood, practically an anathema to what was required (at least from a leading man!)

An intimidating tough guy in From Here to Eternity (1953.)

Marty (1955), of course, was the jewel in his crown...

...which led to the Oscar on his mantel.

Then, after years of colorful character parts, many times in drama...

...he made the world laugh in McHale's Navy (1962 - 1966.)

Nothing was too absurd.

His career pitted him with many of the industry's top names (with Rock Hudson in Ice Station Zebra in 1968.)

Some of them before they were even anyone yet (this is future fellow Oscar-winner Kim Basinger with him in 1978's The Ghost of Flight 401.)

And there were many low points in his sixty-year film career, too, like 1975's The Devil's Rain (in which he still gave his all!)

Back on TV with Airwolf (1984 - 1986) with Jan-Michael Vincent.

Married five times (to Ethel Merman for an infamous six weeks!)

It was to Tova in 1973 that really stuck (he left her a widow the other day after close to forty years of marriage.)

Of course, in The Underworld he is hailed for his work in The Poseidon Adventure (1972.)

Bombastic to be sure, but not without humor and pathos when necessary.

We adored you Ernie and salute your unbelievable body of work, only a smidge of which is touched upon here!

Wanna Come for a Stroll?

After that neverending previous post about three 1950s and '60s actors, I needed something a tad less work intensive to give my brain and my fingers a much-needed rest! A while back, one of my faithful readers commented upon his affection for someone I must say I knew little-to-nothing about. Always one interested in learning about new hunks, I navigated my way to the man to see what he was all about. I wasn't disappointed and I hope you won't be either!

Edson Stroll was born on January 6th, 1929 in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating high school, he entered the U.S. Navy, developing what would later become a lifelong love of the water and also laying the groundwork for what would be his most lasting on-screen legacy.


Following his stint in the navy, Stroll studied at the American Theater Wing in New York City, honing his singing and acting talents. He worked at the New York Shakespeare Festival for three seasons and won roles in a variety of Broadway musical national tours. (He was one of the cast members of the ill-fated 1956 musicalization of Lost Horizon called Shangri-La in 1956.) Already in shape from the navy, he continued to body-build, though in a lean way (body-sculpt, we'll call it!) which still allowed him to perform as a dancer in musicals.

In 1958, he made his television debut as a guest on the series How to Marry a Millionaire, a show inspired by the 1953 hit movie only now starring Barbara Eden. The following year, he landed a bit role as a no-good cowboy in the Audie Murphy-Sandra Dee western The Wild and the Innocent. In 1960, he managed to obtain roles on several shows including Tombstone Territory and Sea Hunt (in the familiar trappings of the water.) Perhaps the most memorable of these was The Twilight Zone, in which a disfigured woman is awaiting the removal of her bandages, with surprising results!

That same year, he played one of many U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Germany in the Elvis Presley vehicle G. I. Blues. In 1961, he had a small role in Marines, Let's Go. Then his career began to take off in earnest, though it couldn't have been in a more bizarre fashion! He was chosen to play the handsome male lead in a patently strange telling of a famous fairy tale. The name of the movie? Snow White and the Three Stooges! (Note that some of the promotional cards - presumably someplace in which the Three Stooges were lesser known - the film is called Snow White and the Three Clowns!)

This lavishly colorful film (the most expensive ever made with the Stooges) tweaks the story of Snow White, having her fleeing the dastardly stepmother (played by a delicious Patricia Medina) and winding up in the cottage of the seven dwarves, only, the dwarves aren't there. They're on vacation! Instead, she finds houseguests Stroll and his sideshow-performing cohorts Larry, Curly-Joe and Moe!

Stroll doesn't even know he's a prince, promised to the title heroine from birth, but raised anonymously by the Stooges in a snafu following an assassination attempt. And who played Snow White? To make things even more bizarre, it was gold medal figure skating Olympian Carol Heiss! (Fans of skating might recall her more recently as a high-profile coach, Carol Heiss-Jenkins.) Thus, there are two elaborate and dazzlingly colorful skating sequences in the already oddball movie.

Stroll, though he could carry a tune, was nonetheless dubbed by Bill Lee, the same man who sang ghost vocals for so many actors, primarily Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music and John Kerr in South Pacific. The film was not a significant success, but has proven to hold up better than expected over the years thanks to a decent budget and solid craftsmanship throughout.

The Three Stooges obviously enjoyed having Stroll to work alongside because they cast him in their next film as well, the lower budget, black and white opus The Three Stooges in Orbit. This time, his part was less substantial and the yuk-yuk pratfalls of the Stooges were more in evidence than they had been in the more demure previous outing. These promotional photos (I'm including them both because they have very subtle differences despite looking the same) may not even be him (somehow if it is he, he looks different!), but they are practically all the evidence I could come up with of the movie.

He returned to The Twilight Zone for another installment in 1962, this one with no illusions regarding its purpose to show off his physique.  The episode concerned an elderly couple of the future who are considering the new procedure that allows them to shop for newer, younger, better bodies to inhabit.  Stroll is the one that the old man (Joseph Schildkraut) selects and it isn't hard to see why though, like most any episode of Zone, there is a twist at the end. He's seen here greeting the wife afer the procedure is complete.

Stroll was next cast as a regular member of McHale's Navy, a part that was right up his alley as a former sailor. The star of the show was Ernest Borgnine, with Joe Flynn and Tim Conway as the featured costars. Borgnine, despite being a busy, Oscar-winning movie actor, had agreed to star in the show when a delivery boy had no idea who he was. He correctly believed that the exposure would grant him a newer and larger audience of fans.

The rollicking, slapdash adventures of the crew (a PT-boat regiment stationed in the south Pacific during WWII) involved plenty of conflict between the roguish Borgnine, his flustered superior Flynn and the by-the-book (but dim) Conway, leaving the supporting cast often relegated to filling in the picture from the back and sides. Nonetheless, Stroll, a tall, handsome, sometimes barechested presence, won over quite a few hearts during his tenure on the series.  A slim, strong-jawed guy, he was similar in many ways to the vastly more popular Hugh O'Brian.


He was also a technical advisor on McHale's Navy, his real-life experiences in the service helping to answer questions about naval procedure and life on the base, etc...

There were 138 episodes filmed of the (always black and white) sitcom, which ran until 1966. So popular was it that during its run, two full-color feature films were produced in order to expand its appeal and cash in on the hot streak of its collection of characters. Stroll appeared in 1964's McHale's Navy as well as 1965's McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force.

After the series cancellation (hastened by the decision to move the location of the action from the south Pacific to Europe, where the crew was suddenly taking on the Germans rather than the Japanese), Stroll guest-starred on the final episode of the short-lived sitcom It's About Time. He played Brak, one of several cavemen having to adjust to life in the 1960s.

At this point, Stroll exited show business in order to concentrate on a new career as a marine surveyor. He was also licensed by the U.S. Coast Guard to be a commercial vessel captain. He pursued this line of career for many years, eventually earning several other licenses and working as an expert witness in marine-oriented court cases.  Now can it really just be me who thinks that the knob of this ship's wheel is rather provocatively placed??

He made a (very) rare appearance in 1975 on the Saturday morning sci-fi show The Lost Saucer, which starred Jim Nabors and Ruth Buzzi. He was not, however, visible on-screen. Either he was the voice of the big computer on the lower right of this picture or else one of the covered-up aliens with numbers on their heads and bodies! It was 1982 before he was seen again, this time with a supporting role in the television bio-pic Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story, which starred Sondra Locke in the title role. From here, he proceeded to occasional TV appearances such as the obligatory Murder, She Wrote as well as small parts on Hotel, Dynasty, Simon & Simon and Dallas. He retired in 1991, but then returned in 2009 with a bit role in the Argentine-set film Bad Memories.

In addition to his nautical pursuits, he had also done a steady amount of voice-over work in both commercials and for voice-over training. Stroll died of cancer in 2011 at the age of eighty-two, leaving behind two beloved Yorkshire terriers, Eddie and Sugar Baby. Never married, he had resided for many years in Marina del Rey, California where he was a member of yacht clubs and associations. His connection to the water (not to mention his hunky physique!) makes him quite a suitable subject for observance here in The Underworld.