Wow, I usually get about thirty to forty visitors daily to this blog, but I see that I got more than three hundred in the last twenty-four hours, and I don't know why. The last time I got hundreds of hits was when I wrote about Rebecca Romijn playing a transsexual on tv's Ugly Betty. Well, I didn't even get a chance to post yesterday, so could it be that my last post on Sunday, citing the gorgeous Scilla Gabel from 1960s Euro horror and historical films, and providing a link to a few pictures at the website Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, got some film fans clicking here? I'm curious to know.

Scilla had a beautiful, haughty, but kind of melancholy face, which made her so good in a film like Mill of the Stone Women, wherein she played a mad sculptor's daughter wasting away from a bizarre blood disease. Her character's ailment, however, had no effect of the superb lift of her bountiful boobs...

The excellent Mondo Macabro DVD of Mill of the Stone Women provides a selection of sexy magazine photos that Scilla did in her heyday, and they're certainly saucy enough to make a guy go "Hey!" Scilla posed for Playboy back in 1963, at the height of her movie career.

Anyway, yesterday I was busy writing a new opening chapter for that novel I've been working on, as I wade into the water of the second draft. After 2500 speedily typed words, my eyes were bleary and my mouse-clicking wrist was weary, so I settled down for a dinner of sea-salted cashews and Bud Lite and slipped a disc into the player: you guessed it, a Scilla Gabel flick: The Son of Cleopatra, co-starring Mark Damon as "El Kabir," blue-eyed and hairy-chested illegitimate offspring of Julius Caesar and the Queen of the Nile. The movie was okay, but Scilla didn't play a nasty temptress but rather the good-hearted daughter of a cruel Roman despot. Still, her regal bearing as she rode a pony through the desert was enough to get my heart beating, as well as perking up another location in my anatomy.

When I get some extra cash and start going back to the stripclubs, I think I'd like to meet a dancer out of one of my sword-and-sandal daydreams. I knew a peeler like that once, she was half-Moroccan--maybe she was a descent of Hannibal and the Carthaginians?--and she really could have played an ancient princess herself. Haven't seen her in the clubs in a few years, but I still remember how she had the bearing and body of somebody like Sophonisba, princess of long-ago Numidia, especially a derriere that would have inspired the Roman poet Ovid to pen a few ditties; but she was generous enough to settle that royal rear on Sir Cranky for a dance or two...thank you, milady, wherever you are now!

Ah, life is duller now that I can't throw money away on strippers, but it forces me to burrow into my DVD collection to find video proxies to satiate my hunger for sexy dolls. And there's always a new one to drool over...like Scilla Gabel from the 1961 Steve Reeves vehicle The White Warrior...

The movie itself isn't very good, or at least the public domain video prints of it aren't, but Scilla is luscious to look at in the role of a busty Russian noblewoman...

She can also be found in Mill of the Stone Women and Romulus and the Sabines, both on DVD.

She was Sophia Loren's stand-in for awhile, but her resemblance to Loren was making it difficult for her to branch out on her own as an actress, so she had some facial surgery. I think she looks sexier than Sophia...

You can get The White Warrior on the Mill Creek Entertainment compilation of 50 sword-and-sandal movies called Warriors. I bought it online for over thirty dollars last Christmas, but I just saw it on sale at Borders for $14.99!! Oh well, I couldn't have waited seven months to get this essential collection of historical potboilers...

Meanwhile, on a more creative front, I finished re-reading my novel manuscript and it's not bad. I made notes about what has to be added or cut, and I can't wait to get back to work on it. I think it might even turn out pretty good.

Whew!!!!

Anyway, here's a link to a sexy picture of Scilla Gabel!

GlamourGirlsOfTheSilverScreen

When I was getting my coffee and bagel this morning, I was watching the tv screen hanging on the diner's wall. AMC was showing The Godfather from 1972, and the scene was the big sitdown between the heads of the crime families, wherein Marlon Brando as Don Corleone pledges that he will not start a mob war unless something--even a bolt of lightning--happens to kill his beloved son Michael.

Richard Conte, one of my favorite tough-guy actors from the gangster/film noir heyday of the 40s and 50s, plays Don Barzini in this sequence, a small but memorable role. At one point, Conte was even up for Brando's part. It would have been interesting to see a Conte interpretation; I think it would have produced a colder, harder Don Corleone than Brando's more poetic take. In any case, in the compact but important role as Don Barzini, Conte was the perfect presence of slick streetwise menace.

As I waited for my breakfast order, I watched Conte carefully. A great movie is not just about its stars or story, but the little details that bring it to life. The next time you see the film, watch how Conte handles a cigarette as he talks back and forth with Brando. His casual manner of holding the cigarette, and the sudden little flick he gives it to "knock off" ashes, are as much about Don Barzini as the lines he has to say. Seeing it again this morning made me remember the first time I'd seen that gesture, in 1972 on the big screen, and it had never disappeared from my consciousness. A memorable, even showy bit of business, Conte's cigarette added yet one more beautiful strand to the tapestry of this great movie.

I started re-reading my novel manuscript again, the first draft of which I completed on July 9th. I'd first read it too soon after finishing it, and it didn't register, but now it seems better. Needs work, obviously, but so far I can see clearly what needs to be done. I read about a quarter of it this afternoon while eating two value-priced crispy chicken sandwiches at Wendy's.

I've written three unpublished novels before, but this is the one where I hope I am really going to master how to write these fuckers.

For example, for the last three weeks I've been trying to figure out how to have one of the nasty characters meet his untimely demise. Finally the solution came to me this morning as I was shaving--a simple solution, but one I could not see because I was thinking backwards. You see, no matter that I've read scores of novels in my life--hell, I've read scores of them in the last few years--I couldn't figure out this simple solution because I wasn't looking for it in the right place. The way to hasten this scumbag's earthly departure was not to come up with something external, but with something that drew on who he was, his habits and routines. For some reason, this elementary answer took three weeks to pop into my head. But that's okay; it felt good to solve the problem, and it felt good to solve it on my own. I don't know why I couldn't think of it beforehand, except that we all have blind spots when it comes to our creative endeavors; it's inevitable. We're not perfect.

I was going to read more of the manuscript tonight, but I feel both tired and as if my mind is racing a hundred miles a minute. I've been reading so much this week, as well as doing my freelance work, and yet I've had patches these last few days where I couldn't get anything done. It's been a real mixed bag of a week.

I read two noir novels in the last nine days--Gil Brewer's femme fatale special Little Tramp, and Harry Whittington's heist thriller The Devil Wears Wings, as well as Leonard Cottrell's 1960 biography, Hannibal, Enemy of Rome; not to mention a long article about the tragic career of 1950s Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton, plus my usual assortment of magazines and tabloids and the New York Times. No wonder my orbs are bleary and I'm ready to go out and get myself a cute Asian dancer on my lap and buy her drinks and get drunk with her and have ten lapdances. And if only I could throw around money, I would...

I think I can afford a bargain pasta dinner complete with a salad and a free glass of wine at a Greek diner, though.

I mentioned the other day that I've been reading a book about Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps and invaded Italy back in 218 B.C., presenting the first major military threat that the early Roman empire experienced. I sat in the coffee shop last night utterly absorbed, but had to take a break after awhile. The details of battles and long-ago political machinations must be digested gradually by my overstuffed brain.

One of the interesting aspects of the story is how a gorgeous Carthaginian princess named Sophonisba almost distracted one of Rome's allies to the point where the ultimate victory of Rome over Carthage could have been in doubt. Sophonisba, of whom I had never heard before, was an enchantress on the level of Cleopatra, and was a popular subject of European paintings and operas.

When I closed the book and went to pay my check, I looked at the young female cashier and thought, "She could be a Sophonisba." There was something very beautiful about her, even just standing there behind her register and giving me change. And then when I went out onto the street, I saw a pretty girl with a ponytail, clad in shorts and tank top and carrying a backpack. She was about 5'4", and she looked very athletic, especially as she strode forward with her short but extremely well-toned legs. As she walked ahead of me, I noticed that her shoulders were also quite toned and muscular, and she began to morph not into a Sophonisba like the other girl, but instead into a Roman legionnaire. She was probably about the typical height of a Roman two thousand years ago, and her backpack slung across her sturdy shoulders made her look quite masculine, and reminded me of the soldiers I had just been reading about.

I bet there are plenty girls today who, if they had the choice, would rather be a Roman soldier than a Carthaginian princess. Or a Carthaginian soldier instead of a Roman princess. I wonder if there were any women who disguised themselves as men and went to battle for Hannibal or for Rome? Another subject for future research...