Summertime – the living is easy and so are the movies. Time to hit the drive-ins of yesteryear. Take a device out onto the porch or collapse in the cool basement after a day in the sun. This summer, let’s look at films that go great with those long, hot days – and nights!

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The Candy Snatchers (1973)

Starring Tiffany Bolling, Susan Sennett and Phyllis Major

A young girl in a school uniform is walking home on Wyton Dr. in the Holmby Hills section of West Los Angeles. Three people in a van grab the girl, Candy (Sennett), and throw her in the back, blindfolding her and tying her up. Jessie (Bolling) and her two running mates, Alan (Brad David) and Eddy (Vince Martorano) have got a hole dug on the property of an old house up on Mulholland and into this hole they throw Candy. They bury her in a box with a pipe through which Candy can breathe; the three have seen this done on television. Unbeknownst to the three kidnappers, a little boy who lives down the hill from this house has seen the deed done. He tries to tell his father what he has seen but he can’t get through to his dad as the boy is an autistic mute.

The kidnappers make the call to Candy’s father, local jeweler Avery Phillips (Ben Piazza, later the guy in The Blues Brothers that complains the boys are “smelling”), demanding ransom. But Candy’s dad seems not to respond like a father should in a case like this. Avery does not run to tell his wife what has happened but instead he fuels her already robust drinking habit and runs off to see his mistress, Lisa (Major). While they wait for Avery to bring a ransom in jewels, the three amateur criminals begin to fall out. Alan is a sicko who wants to rape Candy and cut her up, Eddy is sympathetic and protects Candy while making an aggressive move on Jessie who looks pretty while trying to keep her merry band together and their plan on course.

When the kidnappers finally get face-to-face with Avery, he seems positively pleased to see them; “I’ve been waiting for you for ten years”, he says. When he proves less than willing to pay up for his daughter, the “Candy snatchers” are faced with an interesting conundrum.

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From little acorns… I love when this happens and Sinatra and Tony Rome – two of my favourite cats – are still giving to me. I have long loved Frank’s film about the Miami private eye who lives on a boat and there’s a little, wee girl with a little wee part in that film and Tiffany Bolling (not so wee, actually) dated Sinatra briefly. Writing my review of Tony Rome, I looked her up and found that she had forged something of an interesting career in mostly less-than-A movies.

I spoke about Ms. Bolling briefly when discussing Tony Rome but she bears revisiting. She was 20 years old and Sinatra was good to her. But she apparently knew better, “didn’t treat him very nicely” and ended the relationship. Later, she would regret the move wondering if maybe a connection to the Chairman may have resulted in her being offered better roles. But she got off to a good start. The New People was a TV series created by Aaron Spelling that premiered in the fall of 1969 with a pilot episode written by Rod Serling. A group of teenagers are returning from a goodwill trip to Southeast Asia when their plane crashes on a deserted island. Interestingly, the remote location had been chosen for an above-ground nuclear test that never took place. This left the buildings and supplies intact for the teenagers to make use of and they were faced with being a self-sufficient new society. The show had promise and even had a unique 45-minute run time but it only lasted one season.

And then, Playboy. Hef’s rag featured Tiffany in 1972 but apparently didn’t pay her and the pictorial helped cast the die for her. She ended up typecast in blonde bombshell roles in drive-in movies like Bonnie’s Kids (1972), the excellent Wicked, Wicked (1973) and the bonkers Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) with William Shatner. She later found faith in Christ and lamented the films she had made taking particular aim at The Candy Snatchers. She has said it was particularly demoralizing after she had been in The New People and was looked up to; “I had a lot of young people who really respected me, and really revered me as something of a hero, and then I came out with this stupid CANDY SNATCHERS movie…”. It’s a sad commentary and an acute example of Hollywood shoe-horning attractive ladies into a pigeonhole. Tiffany Bolling stands out for me, though. She was substantial and had a certain presence.

Our director is one Guerdon Saltonstall Trueblood, an American born in Costa Rica of a diplomat father descendent from a family that had been in America since 1682 and the daughter of aviator and US Army general Billy Mitchell who helped to create the US Air Force. Guerdon kept this consequential family pedigree alive by writing and directing B movies! His first credited screenplay was for Robert Taylor’s final film, Hot Line, a French/Spanish co-production from 1967 released by American-International. After our film, he would work primarily on television writing films like The Savage Bees (1976) that starred my man Michael Parks and Gretchen Corbett though he would return to features with 1983’s Jaws 3-D with Dennis Quaid. Trueblood died in 2021 making it to 87.

Susan Sennett makes the first of her three feature film appearances in The Candy Snatchers playing the Candy who gets snatched. She was not long for Hollywood though she showed up in Roger Corman’s classic Big Bad Mama a year later and was one of two of Ozzie’s Girls starring with the Nelsons on the short-lived follow-up to The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet that also featured Brenda Sykes. Most significantly, Sennett was married to Graham Nash from 1978 until 2016 and she is the mother of his three sons. Sennett died of cancer in 2020.

Now, Phyllis Major. This stunner was born in Tampa and became a successful model in Europe. One night in 1975, she was at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and two guys were fighting over her. One was an out-of-work actor and one was a singer of some note; Jackson Browne. Little Jackson got pummeled – but went home with Phyllis and the two were married before the year was out. But the new Mrs. Browne – mother of the couple’s son, Ethan, not yet three – must’ve been battling some demons because on March 25, 1976 she was found dead in her Hollywood Hills home of an apparent drug overdose. Jackson Browne was gutted and his next album, The Pretender, released later that year, was marked by his loss.

The Candy Snatchers is similar to Model Shop – except our movie you can stand to watch. Both movies share a wonderful visual journey through the Los Angeles of the past with The Candy Snatchers featuring many streets and businesses in Laurel Canyon and the old house up on the hill where Candy is buried is way up on Mulholland Drive affording a nice view.

Inspiration for The Candy Snatchers came from the real-life kidnapping of Barbara Mackle who was held for three days in a fibreglass-reinforced box outfitted with a lamp, water laced with sedatives and two pipes for air. Our film borrows from this event, too, in that it is a coldly amoral tale that is in part a study in deviance. And its not just the sadistic villains who are without scruples. This film would not have worked without the father-is-the-stepfather angle. The fact that the kidnappers have played into the hands of the stepfather nicely is a fantastic plot point that makes this film stand out and one that also comments on the depravity of the more affluent; Phillips is a philanderer who hates his wife and wants his stepdaughter’s money even if it means her death. The little boy is played by Trueblood’s own son and his parents are depicted in a similarly derogatory light leaving no one redeemed – except maybe Eddy who proves sympathetic in the end.

The ambiguous ending is outrageous and this is a fun movie; a B picture, sure, but one that exhibits a little pop and a certain measure of ingenuity in storytelling and execution.

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The Roommates (1973)

Starring Laurie Rose, Roberta Collins, Marki Bey and Pat Woodell

These four smokin’ hot chicks have got it together. And they are in control; they may want men but they certainly don’t need them and they are not going to be taken advantage of. They are all co-eds together but the school year is just about over and so they make plans to head up to Lake Arrowhead to spend the summer together. Once up in the resort town, things are going well; water skiing during the day and parties at night. But after one party, pretty Alice (played by a personal favourite, cutey Connie Strickland [Black Samson]) is rousted by a drunken biker and then brutally hacked to pieces. This puts a definite damper on the proceedings. Now, everyone in town must be wary of the killer that may or may not be at large while each of the girls deals with their situations and dealings with the opposite sex with varying degrees of success.

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Arthur Marks (1927-2019) is a director of some note. He directed many episodes of a favourite show of mine, Perry Mason, before moving into films and just about all of them are notable in this certain genre. He helmed Bonnie’s Kids with Tiffany Bolling, Bucktown, a film I talked about here and the exciting Friday Foster with Pam Grier. Arthur’s company, General Film Corporation, produced The Candy Snatchers. After his death, his movies were reassessed and found to be a cut above others of this ilk due to their focus on character and to his lucid handling of racial politics.

Gorgeous Laurie Rose is an epiphany for me. After our film she made a couple more like this but then she made an extreme left turn. She became Mésmera, a prolific belly dancer who actually appeared as such as early as 1981 in a first season episode of Hill Street Blues. She would eventually amass several more appearances as a belly dancer on TV and in low-budget films. Today, she maintains an active career as a dancer who offers instruction and has a troupe that is available for hire for your next party. Check out her website. I’m looking at her face to see if I can spot Laurie Rose and I think its great that she has moved into a successful career for which she has an obvious passion.

Roberta Collins shows up in these pictures; in fact, she shows up in most of the notable exploitation flicks of the 1970s. You can see her in The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, Sweet Kill, Three the Hard Way, Death Race 2000 and others. Later, she did appear in a movie from a major studio, Death Wish II, but I was sorry to see that she only appeared as “Woman at party”. Later in 1998, fully 12 years after her last credit, she said “I’d like to play a real woman who has many colors” which made me kind of sad. It put into relief the desires of at least some of these actresses – like Roberta and Tiffany Bolling – who wanted respectable careers with fine roles, wanted to be given a chance though one never came. Poor Roberta lost a son before dying herself on August 16, 2008 “from a reportedly accidental overdose of a cocktail of drugs and alcohol”.

Marki Bey is vibrant, engaging and well-cast as Carla. The year after our film, Bey was given the reins and starred in Sugar Hill but after a recurring role on Starsky & Hutch she was done with the scene. She has been married for over 50 years to actor Don Fenwick and today the two collect stamps and host murder-mystery cruises. Pat Woodell was the veteran of the cast. Though she started out with the intention of being a singer, she was the first to play Bobbie Jo Bradley on Petticoat Junction, a role she took on for two seasons until the spring of ’65 when she left to pursue a career in music. Only it didn’t really happen. She released but one 45; “What Good Would It Do” b/w “Somehow It Got to Be Tomorrow Today”, released on Colpix and produced by Stu Phillips. When that didn’t pan out, she went into drive-in movies, starting with The Big Doll House in ’71 and ending but two years later with our film in 1973; only five films in total. Pat seemingly enjoyed a long retirement until her early 50s when she sadly began a twenty-year battle with cancer that finally took her at 71 in 2015.

The Roommates is one of those movies, yes, but it always seemed to me to be a little different. And I think it is down to the girls. Charisma. I’m surprised to say that these four actresses in this particular film have charisma. They’re very watchable. Interestingly for a movie like this, they are all given lots to say and lots of opportunity to establish their characters. Look at the first ten minutes; the four girls are talking non-stop about who they are as people, what they want from life in general and not just men specifically. They are all gorgeous but they are also very confident and self-assured. They know they have to play ball with men and they even want to but on their own terms. They are not damsels in distress, little wallflowers who get taken advantage of, in fact they are ready; they are not afraid to say that intimacy is something they both want and like. They know what they’ve got and won’t give it away cheap. They are continuing their education and gainfully employed so they are no dummies and that is refreshing. They’ve got savvy. Carla, for example, is an anthropology major and no one’s gonna mess with her. At one point she says “I do what I want when I wanna do it. I’m free, black and independent and no man is gonna tie a can to my tail”. At another point a girl tells her guy “I am a woman and I wanna be treated like one and as a man you’re not making it”.

On top of all this is the even more surprising fact that these four can act. Well, I don’t know if they can or not but these roles they pull off very well. They handle the lines naturally and don’t seem to be reading lines at all. They are cool. And their sexually is a weapon – a shiny, silken desirable weapon that they use in their fight for equality, respect and the pursuit of relationships. Sometimes they are battered but they walk it off and get ready to fight another day.

Let’s not forget that The Roommates is also loaded with suspense and some grisly murders making it a prototype of sorts of the slasher film; the residents of a small resort town are terrorized by a crazed killer? We’d see that play out many times in many different ways in the years to come. But with four gorgeous girls partying and talking about relations between the sexes and with a setting like Lake Arrowhead, the charming town and cottages and the water skiing, this film has a real 60s teenage movie vibe. It is great fun and there is a sparkling Blu-ray print out there so pick yours up today.

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Sources

1. “Breakfast With Tiffany: An Interview with Tiffany Bolling (1991)” – Kris Gilpin (2009) TempleofSchlock.blogspot.com
2. The New People (1969) Pilot Episode – The Duke Mitchell Film Club (2021) YouTube.com
3. Femme Fatales – Internet Archive (2017) Archive.org