Word: raquel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Baron von Sepper, a World War I Austrian flying ace and an enthusiastic fascist, Burton feels a lugubrious vocation to dispatch a series of wives-Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon and several other international cupcakes. "They were all monsters," he explains. "They only looked human when they were dead." His eighth frau is an American, Joey Heatherton, who comes on like a refugee from a Tijuana specialty act. With good, home-grown American intuition, Joey discovers that the baron's problems are rooted in impotence and a rather baroque affection for his departed mother. The baron rewards this...
This leaves us free to contemplate Raquel Welch as she skates about and gamely impersonates a certain K.C. (for Kansas City) Carr. Miss Welch, it soon becomes apparent, is not well cast. Although she attempts a measure of characterization by jawing some gum, she never succeeds at being tough enough. Whizzing around the rink, pursued and periodically clobbered by banshee competitors on every side, she looks like a drum majorette who has just lost her football team...
...plot, which is barely discernible, concerns the physical and emotional bruising inflicted and endured by the denizens of the roller rink. Raquel, refusing to throw a match, wins the competition but loses the man she loves (Kevin McCarthy). Raquel's rival on the track is played by Helena Kallianitoes, the manic hitchhiker in Five Easy Pieces, who turns in a performance so alive with currents of frustration and alcoholic lesbian hostility that it should never have been wasted on a penny-dreadful movie like this...
Most of the comedy stays at this slapdash level. Raquel Welch, looking as ever like a performer hired to entertain visiting conventioneers, plays a policewoman assigned to bag a rapist who is prowling the parks. There is a dizzying number of other subplots, most of which revolve clumsily around the 87th's efforts to bring to justice a sinister saboteur (Yul Brynner) who threatens to extinguish the mayor...
Miss Welch seems obsessed with becoming Mae West. Perhaps it's just that she never recovered from Myra Breckinridge, but Raquel tosses out lines like "There aren't any hard women, only soft men" that are the sort that Miss West used to dispense. She, however, had a shrewd sense of self-parody. Raquel doesn't get the joke...