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Last week I discovered, much to my shock and personal awe, that I had never seen Dario Argento's film Inferno. I told you about it, shame-faced. Then I went and bought the film on blu-ray, and the blu-ray came with two other films of Dario's... and I realized I had never seen another one. 1971's The Cat o' Nine Tails, a fairly straightforward (as far as Argento movies go) giallo - it was only Dario's second film, so he hadn't quite found himself yet. Anyway I'll have more to say on Cat later today (it's got a killer death scene we're gonna feature for our "Ways Not To Die" series) but for now let's ogle Cat's star, American actor James Franciscus.
You might know him as the lead in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the second in that original series of films - we've previously taken note of him here on the blog ourselves for that movie. But he was kind of terrific in The Cat o' Nine Tails - charming, and stuff. And there's a fabulous scene set in a gay bar (remember this was 1971!) where he gets hit on and he barely bats an eye.
That's not unique for an Argento movie - on the recently released big fancy edition of his first movie The Bird With the Crystal Plumage one of the docs talks about Argento's career-long interest and openness to queer themes in his work. I digress!
We're here to ogle James Franciscus. Some fun facts about him - he graduated magna cum laude from Yale, he started a celebrity tennis league in the 1970s, and he had four daughters with the daughter of director William A. Wellman. Blah blah that's plenty. Hit the jump for dozens more pictures...
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