Sexual Icons Of My Youth: Kristoffer Tabori

Back in the far off 1970s, Kristoffer Tabori was a person I saw on TV a lot. He guest starred on tons of TV dramas and mini-series, and showed up in an occasional movie.   I didn't know much about him at the time, but I really liked him, even though he was so much older than me. It was his eyes mostly.  He had great eyes.  Sometime when I was in high school I was flipping through a catalog of films that where available to rent on 16mm for film societies, school activities, children's parties, etc.  I came upon an illustrated page devoted to Making It, the 1971 film that marked 19-year-old Tabori' s first starring role. The pictures in that catalog were like catnip to me.  I wanted to see that movie so very badly!

Today, after approximately 38 years of waiting, I finally saw Making It. As it turns out, the whole movie is on YouTube.  Is it good movie, you may ask.  Well... no.  Frankly it is a bizarre movie, just all over the place, with a tonal shift in the last act that will give you whiplash. "Is it a drama? Is it a comedy? Is it a... oh shit, did that really just happen?"  But where else can you see Bob Balaban,  already in his mid-twenties, but looking much older, playing a high school student?  What other movie features actor  Dick Van Patton and his real life sister Joyce Van Patton playing an engaged couple who share a hot grope and on-the-mouth kiss?  And how often does a film take the time to offer a long debate on the merits of Catcher In The Rye between two characters who have obviously never read Salinger? Despite all this, Kristoffer Tabori is just amazingly, scorchingly hot in Making It; just as hot as I always imagined he would be. 

Kristoffer Tabori, if you were wondering, is still working, mostly as a voice actor, which is a shame, because I'm sure, at 62 years of age, that he still has great eyes.

Around The Web

• Musician and model Sean Semmens has died at the age of 21. Very sad.
• Cool Ass Cinema reviews bad classic Laserblast.
• Darren Criss as Hedwig? Yes please!
• Vulture reports on the re-release of 1998 flop 54. Miraculously, we will finally get to see it the way it was meant to be seen: without sucking.
• Dinesh D'Sousa, still a jerk
• Michael J. Willet bumps it with a trumpet (not literally) in his new music video, and The Stars Come Out To Play has pictures.

Olly!

Your Auntie Vera first called your attention to the curly-haired, baby-faced, whippet-thin bit of gap-toothed British adorableness known as Olly Alexander way back in 2009.  Remember him? Probably not, if you are American, because even though he has never stopped working, almost none of his work, mostly small independent movies, has made it across the Atlantic.  His one big Hollywood movie was the mega-bomb Jack Black vehicle Gulliver's Travels.  He has worked on the stage, and done TV- notably the seventh series of Skins, and a story arc as a vampire in Showtime's Penny Dreadful.  He also is the lead singer of the band Years and Years, who are responsible for this song that I truly love.

I bring this up now because the trailer for his new film God Help The Girl, a musical, was released last week, and although I don't think there's a snowball's chance in Hell that it will be anything like "a hit" by the standards of commercial cinema, it seems that it will be released in America, and from the looks of things it could be downright adorable. At 24 years of age, Olly is still just as lovely as always, and it seems that French hotness Pierre Boulanger,  star of the 2003 film Monsieur Ibrahim (Remember that? I sure do.) is in it too. God Help The Girl is set for a September release, and will probably be available for viewing here in Iowa sometime in 2018.  Looking forward to it. 

Odds And Ends

Just some things that have been on my mind lately:

There aren't many TV shows that I like well enough to watch on commercial TV,  but one of them is The Fosters on ABC Family.  There are lots of reasons to like this show, not the least of which is that Jake T. Austin takes his shirt off a lot.  Like, a lot. 

Jake: Don't worry he's legal.

The other show I never want to miss is So You Think You Can Dance, because a) I love dancing, and b) I love dancers. Live shows start this week, and I haven't yet settled on a favorite, but if Ricky Ubeda doesn't make the finals I will be very surprised.  If you ask me, So You Think You Can Dance would be even better if they eliminated the competition aspect of the show and just let these amazing dancers dance for two hours, but no one asked me.

Ricky Ubeda, age 18

Because I am twelve years old at heart,  I have been reading a series of  books by Jennifer A. Nielsen called The Ascendance Trilogy (The False Prince, The Runaway King, and The Shadow Throne). This is a "boy's own adventure" with everything you could hope for: love, death, court intrigue, hidden identities, lots of fighting, and a very likable and relatable lead character. And yes, it is intended for children.  So sue me, I loved it. Incidentally, a film version of The False Prince is currently in the works, and I can hardly wait to see how Hollywood screws it up.

If you liked The Ascendance Trilogy,  there's an similar, but even better series by Megan Whalen Turner, known as The Queens Thief.  Four books so far, starting with The Thief.  Mrs. Turner takes her sweet time between books, so even though it has been four years since the last in the series, A Conspiracy of Kings, was published, we shouldn't expect book number four for a few more years. Totally worth the wait, though. 

Two of my very favorite Korean actors currently have dramas airing. They are Lee Seun Gi in You Are All Surrounded, and Lee Jong Suk in Doctor Stranger. Thank you Drama Fever. 

 

Lee Jong Suk: Here's where I make a joke about "beside manner."

Lee Seun Gi: Need I say more?

Summertime, and all I want to eat is corn-on-the-cob, watermelon, and just about any kind of meat, grilled. 

This will do, but that's not nearly enough watermelon.

What's your all time favorite summer jam?  I'd like to make a case for Rock The Boat by The Hues Corporation, which topped the Billboard chart 40 years ago this week.

Speaking of Disco, I've noticed that You Can't Stop The Music, the classic bad movie starring The Village People, is on Netflix.  It really is craptastic.  


I have to make a plea for my personal favorite super-bad disco move, and that's Roller Boogie starring Linda Blair and Jim Bray in (strangely) his one and only film role.

What's next for Jim Bray?  I don't know, but it isn't more movies.

Jim Bray may have been the male lead of Roller Boogie, but it was a shirtless scene involving Stoney Jackson that really seared itself into my brain. In the parlance of the time, he was foxy. 

Roller Boogie, the entire movie, is on YouTube (for now) if you are interested,  but don't say I didn't warn you. 


I saw the trailer for The Maze Runner,  and was surprised by how much I really want to see it, and not just because it's full of hot guys, including Dylan O'Brien, whose bath water I would gladly drink.

Postponed from February, but don't let that bother you.

On the other hand, the trailer for The Giver kind of pissed me off, Even though Brenton Thwaites is quite a honey. 

Brenton Thwaites, a 24-year-old teenager, but foxy!

Finally, I haven't been to a movie since The Fault In Our Stars came out a few weeks ago.  What's out there right now that won't make me want to pluck my eyeballs out?  Anything? And don't say The Transformers, because I've been burned before.

The Doomed Boys

I got to thinking about this the other day when I was watching the hit movie about cancer-ridden teenagers in love, The Fault In Our Stars, with Ansel Elgort as an aggressively adorable one-legged eighteen-year-old virgin.  I love doomed boys.

I think I can pinpoint pretty accurately when it happened. It was sometime in the very early 1970's and we were at Bernie and Papa's house.  Bernie was a lady that used to be my babysitter, and Papa was her husband. We weren't there to be sat upon; it was a social call. The adults were having their adult conversation,  and the kids, my two brothers and I, were watching TV. A movie was on:  A High Wind in Jamaica (1964),  starring Anthony Quinn and James Coburn. 

The movie is about a bunch of kids who get mixed up with a bunch of pirates, and although it sounds like the kind of thing that children might enjoy watching, it wasn't really a kids movie.  I watched it though.  At that point in my life I was already movie crazy and would have watched just about anything.  At some point in the movie something happened that really got my attention.  The children are holed up in the upper floor of a brothel while the pirates enjoy a night on the town.  There is cockfight happening on the town square.  The oldest of the boys, a blond moppet played by Martin Amis, son of author Kingsley Amis and  later to become a renowned literary figure in his own right, leans out of the second floor window to get a better look.  He falls.  He dies.

For the rest of the evening,  and in a way, for the rest of my life, all I could think about was that dead boy. Wasn't his demise tragic?  Wasn't he the most beautiful boy of all the boys who ever lived? Why did he have to die?  Life is so unfair!

Flash forward a few years. The CBS Friday Night Movie is a film called The Christmas Tree (1969) and stars William Holden as a very rich man whose son (Brooks Fuller) is dying of nuclear-accident-related leukemia.  Spoiler alert!  The movie ends with a dead boy lying at the foot of a Christmas tree with his pet wolves (yes, wolves) baying over his lifeless body.  The critics were not kind to The Christmas Tree, but I loved it. Of course I loved it, because it is about a doomed boy, and I was obsessed with doomed boys. By then I was, at most, twelve years old.

What is it about doomed boys?  What is behind the romance of it? Of course you don't want a character you like to die, but isn't the sadness exquisite?  Don't you just love the feel of tears coursing down your own cheeks?  And didn't you, just once in a while, place yourself in the doomed boy's shoes?  What if that were you, bravely facing terminal illness? Everyone who ever treated you badly would be sorry!

And what about real life doomed boys, like River Phoenix,  or James Dean, or Heath Ledger?  They all did good things in their careers, but doesn't all that lost potential make them seem even more interesting?  Just think what they could have done had they lived!  I once asked a friend who was River Phoenix obsessed if he thought that River was hotter now that he was dead.  My friend was taken aback. "Of course not," he said. "That's weird."  Well, I thought it was a legitimate question.  River Phoenix will always be young, beautiful, capable of who knows what. He didn't give us a chance to be be disappointed in his choices, or disenchanted by his decline.  

Finally, let's look back to the '70s, and the king of doomed boys.  I refer to Robby Benson.  

In Death Be Not Proud he cheerfully and stoically endures a fatal brain tumor.  

In The Death of Richie he plays Richie, so you know right away how that's going to turn out. Richie is shot to death by his own Father, basically for being a hot mess.  

And in Ode to Billy Joe, he throws himself off the Tallahatchie Bridge because he had a drunken homosexual experience and can't live with the shame.  As one does.  

 
He didn't die in Ice Castles, but he did have a totally gratuitous scene in his underwear. How I adored him; a hot, skinny Jewish kid who took off his shirt a lot. I even liked him in movies where he lived.

The Past Is A Foreign Country: Sabu

These were my first impressions of Sabu:  1) When I was in the sixth grade I became obsessed with a book called The Best of Life,  a glossy coffee table book featuring photos from the then recently deceased Life Magazine.  One of the pictures I was most drawn to was of a dark-haired boy about to be trod upon by an incredibly fake-looking giant clawed foot.  The boy was Sabu, and the photo was a publicity still from Thief of Bagdad; in fact, it was this very picture:

and I just knew that I had to see that movie.  

2) The Cedar Rapids Public Library, where I spent as much time as possible as a tween, loaned out movies.  Not VHS tapes or DVDs, for these were still dreams of the future, but 8 millimeter silent films, which you could thread onto your home projector and shine upon a screen in your living room.  Above the shelf where these gems were stored was a poster picturing such personages as W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and inexplicably to me,  a very handsome dark-haired young man, shirtless and wearing a sarong. I could not stop looking at it. Although I didn't know it yet, It was Sabu in The Jungle Book.

3) I'm at a news stand leafing through a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine I loved as a twelve-year-old, but teenaged me believed it to be a bit too unsophisticated for someone of my refined taste.  I happen upon a photo of a very handsome, muscular, dark-haired, shirtless young man, trapped in a giant spider's web.  In fact it is this very photo (minus the watermarks): 

 

I immediately buy the magazine and take it home. For later. Nudge, nudge. By this point I know perfectly well that this is Sabu,  in Thief of Bagdad again, but I have never seen one of his movies. Sabu was sixteen years old in that photo, but by the time I saw it he had already been dead for fifteen years.

And then cable TV happened, and KAPOW! I finally got to see Sabu's movies, which I preferred to watch in a private place.

In case you didn't know, Sabu was the first actor from India to become an international film star,  starting at age thirteen,  in British films produced by Alexander Korda, who then brought him to America after the second world war broke in Europe . These are the best films of his career: Elephant Boy, The Drum (a.k.a. Drums), Thief of Bagdad, and The Jungle Book.  

 

Sabu then went under contract to Universal Pictures and made a series of campy,  escapist adventures with Jon Hall and Maria Montez, including Cobra Woman, and Arabian Knights.

He was really something;  young and beautiful, not what you'd call an great actor, but with a winning personality, real spark. And also this: he was almost always semi-naked. Don't imagine that I'm the only one who noticed the semi-naked thing.

In 1944,  at just twenty years old, he became a U.S. citizen, joined the United States Army Air Force and served with distinction, but by the time the WWII was over, the bloom was off the rose.  Aside from a supporting role in the classic Black Narcissus, it was all down hill from there. He was typecast as an "elephant boy," a role that no longer suited him.  He continued working in B movies, made a failed TV pilot, and opened a furniture store. He died at a the age of thirty-nine, having just completed his last movie,  a Disney film entitled A Tiger Walks.

Incidentally,  while searching for pictures for this post, I learned that there was a popular Argentinian singer/actor of the 1970s who called himself Sabu, although his real name was Héctor Jorge Ruiz.  He chose his stage name after seeing Thief of Bagdad, citing his resemblance to the late star. What do you think? Twinsies?