Slaughter, a former Green Beret, avenges the killing of loved ones by the Mob, and in so doing is coerced by the Feds into traveling to Mexico to finish off surviving mobsters.
Slaughter served as a starring vehicle for the great football star, Jim Brown. Opposite Brown, Rip Torn played a baddie with the subtlety of Snidely Whiplash – which was fine, because he was Rip Fucking Torn, one ornery mofo.
As for Stella, she was once the Playmate of the Month, but that seemed to be her scarlet letter, because she always seemed to be capable of doing more than Hollywood gave her credit for. In a career that stretched more than 50 years, she never seemed to get a sustained opportunity to shine. Peckinpah gave her a lead in The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and she did just fine, but even after that, she just couldn’t seem to stay in “A” pictures.
Right around the same time she made this film, she was offered the role of Hot Lips Houlihan on the MASH TV series. She turned it down to keep pursuing movie stardom. At the time it must have seemed within her grasp. She was finally being cast in big-name films like Cable Hogue and The Poseidon Adventure, so it seemed that she was finally ready to break through, after toiling more than a decade in the film industry and posing for three Playboy pictorials. That break-through didn’t happen. Her post-1972 destiny was a long career of supporting roles in bad movies.
For example, here’s the 1993-1994 portion of her filmography, followed by each film’s IMDb rating:
Point of Seduction: Body Chemistry III, 3.9
Hard Drive, 4.3
Little Devils: The Birth, 3.4
South Beach, 3.9
Eye of the Stranger, 3.5
Meanwhile, MASH became one of the most popular and respected presentations in the history of entertainment. I hope Loretta Swit sent Stella a nice thank you card.
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She was gorgeous back in the day. She had a great performance in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” by Sam Peckinpah which is a seriously underrated film.
It’s a personal favorite. It was also Peckinpah’s favorite of his own films, despite (or because of) the fact that it is so different from his normal sensibility.
Some of his non-violent films prove that there is a lot more to him as a filmmaker. I think “Junior Bonner” with Steve McQueen and Ida Lupino is seriously overlooked.
She also held her own in The Poseidon Adventure against Hackman, Borgnine, and Shelley Winters.
Damn she would have made a great hot lips! Very sexy lady in her day
Very sexy woman with a great body. I don’t think Playboy hurt her career as much as her looks. Mainstream Hollywood would only want to cast her in mostly non-serious roles, everyone gets put into a stereotype. She’s a curvy blonde with big tits, they wouldn’t be planning on giving her any oscars no matter how much talent she had. The whole system is kind of breaking down today so that may finally be changing. Somewhat similar to the late 60s / early 70s when Peckinpah put in in the Cable Hogue movie. A film like that shows a woman can be beautiful, sexy and nude in a more serious role. She didn’t have to ugly herself up to prove anything.
Would Sydney Sweeney be the first hot blonde with big breasts and a face porn actress look to win an Oscar? The future will tell…
I think she was the most beautiful, sexist Playmate ever, even if you include Marilyn Monroe (was she technically a playmate?)
I don’t believe so, but others disagree. Hefner bought the pictorial some time after it was shot, and to the best of my recollection, it’s the only non-commissioned “Playmate” pictorial ever.
No, Marilyn was not a playmate, nor was she a centerfold, but she did appear nude in the very first issued.
Details here
Was Hefner planning to launch Playboy Magazine before he learned about the Marilyn pictorial? I wasn’t alive when the magazine launched, but I have my doubts that Playboy would have become the cultural force it became if it hadn’t launched with nude photos of the biggest female movie star in the world at a time when celebrities never posed nude.