Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow

It takes a special talent for a film actor to distinguish oneself favorably in grade-zero movies, where acting talent can be irrelevant in light of the material the actor has to work with.  Screen Syndicate's Roberta Stars in The Big Doll House album, which I recently reviewed on this blog, certainly made the case for exploitation actress Roberta Collins, as have several bloggers far more knowledgeable about the exploitation movie genre than myself.   But I can make the case for Roberta Collins as well, though from an entirely different angle . . . based on a musical she appeared in that had this much in common with movies of hers like, say, Unholy Rollers - not a great movie, but the blonde has your attention.  

One of the most interesting bands of the 1970s operating at nearly the same level as Collins was Bloodstone, the funk-soul-rock band from Kansas City that astonished listeners with their self-titled 1972 debut album (see review here) and gained a modicum of fame with their hit single "Natural High" the following year, 1973 (the same year Collins appeared in Wonder Women, probably one of the better-known movies of her career, if only because Nancy Kwan starred in it and it may very well have inspired the TV series "Charlie's Angels").  Just as Collins appealed mostly to the drive-in circuit with her el cheapo action films, Bloodstone were mostly confined to the rhythm and blues charts; mainstream success had not quite come for either Bloodstone or Collins in the early seventies. In 1975, Collins was fated to cross paths with the members of the best black band of the seventies not named War in what is considered the weirdest and most incoherent pop movie of its time.  But it's not the worst, thanks to Bloodstone's music, and thanks also to Collins' own part in it.

No, that's not Jean Harlow above in a rare color picture from the premiere of Dinner at Eight.  That's Roberta Collins in the role that should have been the springboard to an A-list movie career.

Train Ride to Hollywood was Bloodstone's effort to make the 1970s-soul equivalent to the Beatles' Help! or A Hard Day's Night.  The plot involved the group's principal singer, Harry Williams, having a dream of being on a train with his bandmates and eight actors and movie characters from the 1930s and 1940s.  Roberta Collins proved to be a perfect choice to play Jean Harlow, and not just because both women were known for their platinum-blonde hair.  Collins, by 1975 as much an object of male desire as Harlow had been forty years earlier, understood the late Hollywood icon and what made her tick, what drove her, and how her beauty and her ability to play off it made her a legend.  Collins parlayed that understanding into the one performance in Train Ride to Hollywood not from Bloodstone's members that's as memorable as the music.

Collins establishes herself firmly in her first scene, portraying Harlow as classically beautiful and as seemingly unapproachable as Harlow herself always appeared to be.  Collins defines Harlow as a woman who's capable of taking care of herself with her prickly reaction to an attempt by Dracula -  played by Jay Robinson - to seduce her: "You make me so nervous when you do that!"  But her placid features and her defensive posture belie a fragility and a sweetness that no one would associate with an actress like Collins, famous for an on-screen bad-ass attitude and for lines like "Get it up or I'll cut it off!" But while Harlow herself could and did play femme-fatale characters like Collins did, she also made a name for herself in screwball comedies and what are now called "dramedies."  

Anyway, at this point in the movie, you're not really watching Roberta Collins.  She isn't just imitating Jean Harlow; she's become Jean Harlow.  Roberta has merely lent herself to Harlow's spirit for this movie.   

While no actor, Bloodstone singer Harry Williams actually does a great comedic turn here, acting as if he's seen a ghost - and it's not the cursed ghost of a Transylvanian count.  That really is Jean Harlow - alive again, 38 years after her tragic death of renal failure, appearing in this movie.  The incredulous look on Williams' face suggests a similarity to Bob Dylan's Mr. Jones - something is happening here, but he doesn't know what it is.

Collins had an advantage, of course. Off-screen, Harlow was in fact, by all accounts, a lovely and sensitive person, but it must be stressed that many people who knew Collins off-screen found to be to similarly gentle and sweet, particularly directors and fellow actors who worked with her.  It was a side that the audiences for her work in exploitation flicks were not likely to experience.  Was this lovely blonde in Train Ride to Hollywood the same woman who was a hard-ass neo-Nazi driver in a Carmageddon road rally in Death Race 2000, playing in drive-ins the same year Bloodstone's love letter to Old Hollywood premiered?   How do you explain her ability to play both a real woman men loved and a fictional character men feared?  Acting, my dear!

Collins parodies Harlow's glamour as much as she embraces it, trying to look desirable and unapproachable while wielding a cigarette holder, yet still showing a light touch of humanity in this scene in which she asks a waiter in the dining car for a light . . . 

. . . and takes the opportunity to flirt with the fine fellow.

Collins, as part of a crowded supporting cast behind Bloodstone, only got six sentences of lines throughout the entire movie, but she was just as effective in conveying Harlow and her mannerisms with her expressions, such as expressing fear when she learns of a murderer on the train . . .

. . . repulsion at the method of the murder . . .

. . . or a vague contentment while striking a classic Old Hollywood pose in a rich-widow's robe.

Though she only had roughly two minutes of cumulative screen time in Train Ride to Hollywood, Roberta Collins struck me as someone I could have happily watched for two hours. Just not in women-in-prison movies like The Big Doll House or Women in Cages.  Or in Death Race 2000, which, as a YouTube review of this movie that I've seen indicates, is one of the most unintentionally silly films ever.  And those movies are all much shorter than two hours anyway. 

How did Collins distinguish herself in an ensemble supporting cast that included impressionist comedian Guy Marks playing Humphrey Bogart and television actress Phyllis Davis playing Scarlett O'Hara?  Mainly because of this: Other actors in the supporting cast, with the possible exception of Marks (famous in his day for his Bogart impression, which many people found so uncanny they thought Marks had become Bogart in the moment), didn't portray Hollywood icons of the thirties and forties so much as they mimicked them.  W.C. Fields was played by a professional W.C. Fields impersonator, though his take on the famous comedian was probably better received than Rod Steiger's in the 1976 trash bio flick W.C. Fields and Me.  Meanwhile, Davis as Scarlett and Robinson as Dracula played famous non-comedic movie characters for laughs; they weren't there to convince anyone that they were Vivien Leigh or Bela Lugosi, respectively.  Collins played Harlow as straight as possible in Train Ride to Hollywood, and she played her as an actress that could play roles and flaunt glamour like no one other than Harlow could.  She was the only cast member who got to the essence of the movie icon she was playing.  If Harry Williams were to tell me that he met Jean Harlow in 1975, I'd believe him. 

Collins' spoof of Harlow's glamour image in Train Ride to Hollywood is enjoyable enough, but she plays her final scene with dramatic tension.  She lies awake in a sleeper-car bunk, unable to fall asleep or even relax and aware that a murderer is loose on the train, while her bunkmate, Scarlett O'Hara, is sound asleep. She gets out of her sleeper bed with some trepidation, and, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, she walks down the aisle of the sleeper car . . ..

The last image of Harlow in the movie is her body slumped against a door, having just been strangled to death.

God damn, what a bringdown!

Though it's certainly a more dramatic way to go than Matilda the Hun, Collins' character in Death Race 2000, did - being tricked into driving through a fake tunnel only to drive off a cliff.  Also, in Train Ride to Hollywood, Harlow, unlike Matilda the Hun, doesn't have to suffer the indignity of perishing with Fred Grandy at her side.

Train Ride to Hollywood suffered from problems over distribution, thus receiving only token theatrical release (I saw it on HBO when I was a kid - it actually got a G rating), and, as I will explain in a separate post devoted to the soundtrack album, it turned out to be the farthest thing from the movies the Beatles did in their earlier days.  But long before an indie band from southern Illinois paid tribute to her in song, the movie afforded Collins the chance to not only show off her acting chops to a wider audience but to provide support for Bloodstone in their quest to redefine rock and roll on their terms as a black band in 1975, when rock and roll supposedly meant Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or Kiss's "Rock and Roll All Nite."  When Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow, possibly the most famous movie star to come from Kansas City, dances to a Chuck Berry beat in Bloodstone's song "Rock 'n' Roll Choo Choo" even as Bloodstone - purveyors of the Kansas City R&B sound - exhort Harlow to continue to move to the music ("Go, go, Jeannie, go!"), only for Harlow to push three of Bloodstone's members aside with a swing of the hip worthy of Elvis Presley, the result is one of the best moments of the movie. The convergence of Collins' bid for mainstream success with Bloodstone's reclamation of the roots of rock and roll is fascinating all by itself.  You can watch it right here. 

The casting of Collins (above, in 1997) as Harlow turned out to be sadly appropriate. Both women were cursed to fall short of reaching their full potential as actresses. Harlow died at 26 in 1937, when her best work as an actress was likely still ahead of her, while Collins never broke into mainstream cinema and ultimately retired from acting before her own untimely death in 2008 at 63.  The difference was that Harlow died a star while Collins died in obscurity.  But, like Harlow, she hasn't been forgotten.  Just as Collins resurrected Harlow in the movies for a new generation, movie fans who saw the talent in Collins within the cheesy roles in all of those B-films have brought her back to be respected, cherished, and loved - just as much as Harlow.  Both women survive as long as their work does.  As Mary Elizabeth Frye wrote in her poem "Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep" . . . "Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die."  

In Bloodstone's movie, Harlow is laid to rest in one of the most unorthodox funeral scenes ever committed to film.  Guy Marks, as Bogart, eulogizes her as "the platinum blonde who would live more in the imaginations of lonely men than in their own lives . . . a merchant of dreams . . . but underneath all the toughness that was real was a simple human being, a sweet soul . . ..  She wore loneliness like a feathered boa; she threw it over her shoulder with a lot of class."  Though the words are spoken over sepia images of the real Jean Harlow (and that is indeed the real Jean Harlow in the picture above), they can just as easily eulogize Roberta Collins today.