Pretty Maids All in a Row *** (1971, Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas) – Classic Movie Review 8495

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry produced and wrote the screenplay for director Roger Vadim’s weird but watchable 1971 black comedy-thriller Pretty Maids All in a Row, offering a strange-brew mélange of laughs, sex and violence.

Rock Hudson is riskily cast as Tiger McDrew, a married California high school counsellor/ football coach who seduces and kills girls in his office when they threaten to expose him, and gets his colleague Miss Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson) to seduce the virginal lad Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson) too. Telly Savalas plays the California State Police Captain Sam Surcher, who finds himself investigating the series of teenage girl murders at Oceanfront High School.

It may not quite work, but nobody could complain that it is dull or plays safe, and at least the steaminess of sex-mad youth is convincingly captured. Roddenberry brought Vadim (who made the equally sexually changed Barbarella three years earlier) over from France to direct. Roddenberry’s screenplay is based on the novel by Francis Pollini.

James Doohan (1920–2005), who plays Follo, is Scotty in Roddenberry’s Star Trek. It also features Roddy McDowall as Proffer, Keenan Wynn as Poldaski, William Campbell as Grady, Susan Tolsky as Miss Craymire, Barbara Leigh as Jean, Gretchen Burrell [Gretchen Carpenter] as Marjorie, Aimée Eccles, JoAnna Cameron, Margaret Markov, June Fairchild, Joy Bang, Brenda Sykes, Diane Sherry, Phillip Brown, Mark Malmborg, Kyle Johnson and Warren Seabury.

It is scored by Lalo Schifrin, whose theme song Chilly Winds (lyrics by Mike Curb) is performed by The Osmonds.

Pretty Maids All in a Row is directed by Roger Vadim, runs 94 minutes, is made and released by MGM, is written by Gene Roddenberry, based on the novel by Francis Pollini, is shot by Charles Rosher Jr, is produced by Gene Roddenberry, is scored by Lalo Schifrin and is designed by George W Davis and E Preston Ames.

Quentin Tarantino has nominated this as one of his Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time.

Angie Dickinson recalled about John David Carson: ‘All I remember was that he was a very quiet man, to an extreme.’ He died of lymphoma on 27 October 2009 in Las Vegas, aged 57. He was the son of Westerns actor Kit Carson.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8495

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