Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi screening (http://sdvsf.org/) consisted of two films in a blessedly short-lived cycle from American International Pictures in the mid-1960’s featuring Vincent Price as mad scientist Dr. Goldfoot (his name an obvious pun on the James Bond villain Auric Goldfinger), Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966). These films — imdb.com lists an intervening Goldfoot movie, The Wild, Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot, but it was apparently only a TV promo short for Bikini Machine (though it included some musical numbers cut from the final version of Bikini Machine) rather than a separate film in the cycle. Dr. Goldfoot is a mad scientist who’s invented a machine that can stamp out endless copies of bikini-clad women (hence the title), whom he sends out to seduce rich men, get them to turn over their whole fortunes to his robot femmes fatales, and then get rid of them. Only when he sends his latest robot, #11 (Susan Hart), to seduce, marry, financially drain and abandon (or worse) executive and playboy Todd Armstrong (Dwayne Hickman), she mistakenly goes after penniless schlub Craig Gamble (Frankie Avalon) in a cafeteria after the woman he took there on a dinner date walks out on him for being so cheap. Dr. Goldfoot and his spectacularly incompetent assistant Igor (Jack Mullaney) watch them on a monitor screen and send an order to #11, who’s adopting the persona of a Southern belle named Diane (complete with cornball accent to establish “Southernicity”), to knock it off and go after the guy with money instead. She precedes to discomfit Craig by going all moral on him and walking out on him with some “Well, I never … !” dialogue. Craig is also the least competent secret agent of the Security Intelligence Command (SIC — and yes, there are a lot of stupid puns on that name), who’s on the job only because his uncle, D. J. Pevney (Fred Clark), is the head of SIC’s San Francisco office.
Craig is so smitten with “Diane” he
determines to find her and traces her to Goldfoot’s operation, which is hidden
in plain sight as a funeral parlor (well, where else would you expect a Vincent Price character to hide
out, especially in a movie that’s
intended to be a campy spoof?)
and consists of a lot of secret panels, corridors, dungeon cells and even the
pit and the pendulum from Price’s previous “serious” AIP vehicle of that name,
on which Price straps Hickman in a screamingly funny spoof of a scene he’d played
seriously just four years before. I hadn’t expected much from this movie, to
say the least, but I was pleasantly surprised when the first thing I heard on
the soundtrack was the unmistakable voice of Diana Ross chirping out the film’s
silly theme song: “Dr. Goldfoot and his bikini machine, Dr. Goldfoot, the
wildest thing that you’d ever seen, There once was a man with a machine, Dr.
Goldfoot and his bikini machine, Whenever he needed a girl on the scene, Dr.
Goldfoot and his bikini machine, He’d push a button and just like nothing a
girl would appear, A queen — my dear, The cutest girl in the whole wide world
and she’d behave, just like a slave. Wooo!” Yes, with their usually infallible
instinct for what would appeal to the teenage market they were aiming most of
their films at, AIP hired the Supremes to do the theme song, and while it’s
likely not one of the credits Ross is proudest of today (if you played it for
her now she’d probably be incredulous and say, “I did that?”)
she acquits herself perfectly well with it. There was another huge superstar,
this one from another era, who I’m almost certain was involved in this movie. I
began to like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine a lot better when I realized it contained some
excellently designed and screamingly funny slapstick-comedy sequences — and
then I remembered that when this film was made Buster Keaton still had a year
to live and had been working at AIP playing character bits and also designing
gags for the other performers in films like Sergeant Deadhead, another Frankie Avalon vehicle.
Though Keaton isn’t
credited, either on the film itself or on imdb.com, as I watched it I became
more and more convinced he was involved in the project and had worked out all
those brilliant physical gags — including a spectacular final chase scene in
San Francisco that’s the best thing in the movie and features all sorts of
Keaton self-borrowings, including the front of a San Francisco streetcar with a
crashed motorcycle on its nose. And Buster Keaton isn’t the only person
involved in this movie (assuming I’m right and he was indeed involved) with
connections to classic Hollywood: the director is Norman Taurog, who had made
Jackie Cooper’s star-making film Skippy in 1931, had directed Judy Garland (he was her choice to replace Busby
Berkeley on the 1943 film Girl Crazy)
and had also helmed some of the early-1950’s films of Dean Martin and Jerry
Lewis — and the cinematographer, Sam Leavitt, had also worked with Garland (he
had shot the 1954 A Star Is Born,
second of the four versions of this venerable tale). Keaton’s contributions
(assuming I’m right and the gags are indeed his work), along with the
good-natured campiness of Vincent Price’s performance (he knows we’re not going
to take “Dr. Goldfoot” seriously as a figure of evil, so he doesn’t try to be
anything more than a great actor dumbing himself down to play lowbrow comedy),
elevate Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine above the level of most of AIP’s output at the time
despite the silliness of the script by Elwood Ullman (a scribe with more
impressive credits than this!) and Robert Kaufman, based on an “original” story
by “James Hartford,” who was really AIP co-CEO, James H. Nicholson.
Vincent
Price said later it would have been more fun if they’d left in the songs — it
was originally intended as a mash-up of AIP’s horror and beach-party movie
cycles and it’s got plenty of references to previous films, including the Bond
series — and I also found myself wishing that the writers had got more genuine
wit into it, particularly in the sequence showing Todd Armstrong grimly signing
away his entire fortune to the robot bimbo in exchange for the remotest hint of sex between them. (Could she even have sex? A later — and considerably lamer — movie
involving a sexy robot, Galaxina,
said that that capability was available but it was an option that cost extra.)
But it’s still a funny movie and a nice piece of eye candy to fill 90 minutes
of your time. And while it references a lot of pre-existing movies it also
anticipates some — there are two scenes that seemed to me to be probing the
territory The Rocky Horror Picture Show explored a decade later: the scene in which, left on his own to create
robot #12, Igor screws up and ends up with a creation (Alberta Nelson) that is
physically female but comes out in a grey knitted pantsuit instead of the
regulation gold bikini and speaks with a gravelly male voice; and the one in
which Harvey Lembeck, one of the four guests from the “Beach Party” cycle who
did cameo appearances here (along with Annette Funicello, Deborah Walley and
Aron Kincaid, promoting their own next film, The Girl in the Glass
Bikini (released as The Girl in
the Invisible Bikini — though Annette
wasn’t in it and, in yet another of AIP’s attempts to combine a beach party
movie with comedy and horror, Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone were — and Buster Keaton was supposed to be, but his
death in February 1966 spared him that final blow), turns up sitting on his
motorcycle in a cell in Dr. Goldfoot’s dungeon. One almost expects him to ride
out and sing “Hot Patootie!”
