Friday 25 March, 2011Cougar as sex kitten

We know her now as a dame--a brash, ballsy, handsome woman who fashioned a romantic legend on screen and in the beds of her leading men. Now 77, Joan Collins is her own Dynasty.

Flash back to the 1950s, however, and you might be startled just how dazzling she was in her youth. The raven-haired gal was a ravishing dish, a sultry vixen who set Hollywood ablaze. Yet she had actual training and talent.

Compare the young Collins to today's hottie wannabes, from Lindsay Lohan to Paris Hilton, and she wipes the floor with these silly bimbos. Put her in a black-trimmed blue bustier -- as you see on the front of her DVD box set -- and Collins suggests a naughtiness that must have scandalized the 1950s.

As a newcomer from Britain, Collins possessed, in the words of writer-producer Charles Brackett, just the right kind of "sex vitality" for the erotic role of the real-life temptress Evelyn Nesbit in his film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955).

Collins got the role over Marilyn Monroe, who had been named to play Nesbit, whose playboy husband, Harry Thaw, murdered her former lover, famed architect Stanford White in a fit of jealousy. Nesbit consulted on the film, tutoring Collins.

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, co-starring Ray Milland and Farley Granger and directed by Richard Fleischer, is one of five movies in an intriguing new box set, the Joan Collins Collection, part of Fox Home Entertainment's Cinema Classics Collection. Each film is in colour, restored and shown in its original widescreen format. Each has a commentary by film historian Aubrey Solomon plus other modest extras, including vintage photo galleries.

THE OTHER TITLES:

- Sea Wife (1957): Collins plays a nun who sheds her habit, but not her inhibitions, when stranded on a lifeboat with Richard Burton and two other men after a Japanese submarine torpedoes their British ship in World War II. Before second unit director Bob McNaught took over, original director Roberto Rossellini chose Collins for the role after seeing "a face of innocence" behind the sexpot image. The film turned into an excellent action drama.

- Stopover Tokyo (1957): Find out what happens to a Mr. Moto story when he is eliminated and replaced with a young American, Robert Wagner. He then teams with Joan Collins in Richard Breen's espionage thriller. Personally, I'd rather have Peter Lorre reprising the real Moto.

- Rally 'Round the Flat, Boys! (1958): Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, in their first movie together as a married couple, join Joan Collins and Jack Carson in Leo McCarey's effervescent sex farce.

- Seven Thieves (1960): Now more womanly than ingenue, Collins shows her wider range in the 1960s, including in Henry Hathaway's Monte Carlo crime caper. Collins co-stars with Edward G. Robinson, Rod Steiger and Eli Wallach.